In a consumer app, I would say Snapchat's early camera hack on Android takes the cake. To be brief, their app ran the Android native camera app in the background and took a screenshot of the resulting feed for the image, bypassing actual integration with Android's camera apps. Having worked on an Android smartphone from the ground up, I can understand their reluctance to commit dev time to having to support so many A…
Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
271–280 of 289 posts
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#272Years ago, I was playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a lot. As the game was quite hard, I died often and every death resulted in huge loading times. After hours of game play I found out that every load was showing the exact same animation and took about the same time to load. I browsed the game folder and found a video file with the exact same animation. Replaced it with a 1 second video file and guess what,…
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what was the fix? Boosting the height?
Longer poles. It started out on I think 18”. Pretty much enough to clear the edge of the roof of the main building. We ended up putting it on a ten foot three pole stand. That blew off during a hurricane the same year :)
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope -- I remap Caps Lock to control, and if I'm not careful I can wind up logged in with it stuck in caps mode, and no way to get lowercase characters without locking the screen, turning off all-caps mode, and logging in again. Luckily, this is hard to do :-)
I use AHK to remap CapsLock to double-click to reduce the strain on my mouse hand, but I can access the original CapsLock function via shift-CapsLock. Try it -- maybe that will help you.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#275Just recently I had to put together a web-based UI for editing vector graphics (clothing tags) and export them to pdf for printing. In order to avoid writing and maintaining two separate codebases, I re-used the client side code as my rendering code. So I ended up with a server serving the editor frontend, as well as api endpoints that would use puppeteer and headless chrome to make a request (to itself) to load the…
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#276I worked at a place that had a large, distributed terminal network running on something like OSF or DEC Unix. It was 2001 and the thing was on life support while PCs were being rolled out. I was helping to rack my new database servers, which was next to this big lab table/shelf combo with like 16 terminals on it. When pulling a cable I banged my head on the table, then this big book fell on my hand. About 10 minutes…
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this before, is it one of the BOFH stories?
close: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
most of the other game dev dirty trick on gamasutra are good value -- the "(s)elf-exploitation" one from Jonathan Garrett, Insomniac Games is particularly awfully clever:
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/194772/dirty_game_dev...
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#278A long time ago (early 1990's, IIRC), I came across a Novell Netware LAN in which none of the Mac OS clients could print to a then-very-costly laser printer shared on the network if a particular a Windows 3.0 client elsewhere the LAN was powered off. It turns out that when the costly printer was purchased, there wasn't a Mac OS driver available for it, so the people who installed the LAN created their own homemade pr…
That’s how most RIPs work.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#279Years ago, I was playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a lot. As the game was quite hard, I died often and every death resulted in huge loading times. After hours of game play I found out that every load was showing the exact same animation and took about the same time to load. I browsed the game folder and found a video file with the exact same animation. Replaced it with a 1 second video file and guess what,…