Tell us your naughty stories • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#231

Post by catshirt » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:21 PM UTC

mattmaroon wrote: post #222

wallflower wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By glancing back, he is implying that the person behind him is something like a plain-clothes security officer (who should not be bribed)

I got that part, but why would you have to give bribes to African airport officials?

Right- I am confused by "avoided giving bribes" since typically bribes are something you go out of your way to provide.

I am guessing corrupt officials basically request money from you for no reason- and it's expected you give it to them (for no reason as well). Then, they just call it a "bribe". But I'm guessing... pardon my cultural ignorance.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#232

Post by octover » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:22 PM UTC

colinsidoti wrote: post #13

My high school had a work study program that was designed for students that weren't planning to attend college (IE: auto mechanic, electrician, cosmetologist). It allowed these students to get a job before they even graduated, and made their job search significantly easier. As a senior, I was the first student to take advantage of work study with the intention of going to college. It took many meetings with the princ…

I had something similar. We had two programs that you could leave school early for work stuff. They were work release which required being in certain related classes to the job, and internship. I was in to computers, taking the AP CS class, doing the school's website in another unofficial class, but not Novell networking which was the only computer work release class, so I couldn't get work release. However the internship teacher had been a PE teacher at my middle school, and I'd gone to him to ask about it, so when the counselor told us that I didn't qualify, he quickly offered to put me in the internship program.

Technically internships were supposed to be unpaid, but I didn't know that. I almost let the cat out of the bag that I was just going to work early at the end of the year presentation on my internship to other students, the teacher and a vice principle, but quickly recovered following my teacher's scramble to cover our asses.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#233

Post by moron4hire » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:28 PM UTC

I had a really hard time convincing a large, corporate client to setup such basic things like a version control system, a central bug tracking system, or any kind of project documentation repository. Oh, did I mention this was only three years ago? It's 2007 and you're not using version control? Anyway, one day, another consultant who sat next to me got laid off and the company's IT guys never came around to remove his computer. So, I moved the computer into the cabinet over my desk and used it as my "phantom dev server" or alternatively "The Travis" (after our laid-off compatriot). I even used it as a staging server for testing deployments. There was one time that a clueless cable-jockey came up looking for the machine, I told him someone had come for it months ago, and we never heard from him again.

Eventually, I developed a simple content management system on the product website because the company's policies were preventing us from making copy and FAQ changes as fast as we needed. Unfortunately, I couldn't get approval to do the project, even though I had a little bandwidth and it was something we really, really needed. I told my confidant in the company what I was doing and he ran interference for me for two days while I cranked the code out. We had to wait a month for another project to get finished to slip it in along-side an approved site deployment, but once it was in the wild, our lives became incredibly easier.

We almost let the cat out of the bag once when we made a change too quickly, though. Management wanted us to change some of the contact info on the site, and to change most of the branding of the site. Since I setup everything to be hosted out of the CMS, including stylesheets, no deployment was necessary. What should have taken two weeks (1 day to finish and then 9 days of bureaucratic shenanigans), took only one day. The plan was to wait the 9 days, then tell them about the change, and use the time to get caught up on support tickets and other "secret" programming going on (like a complete rewrite of the desktop product software, this time without VB6... in 2008). One of the execs dropped into our area for an update, and the stupid phone-support guy blabbed about "oh yeah, that's already done." I stabbed him in the leg with a pen, and "clarified" that the "work was complete and was now in the deployment pipeline." That wasn't the first or the last time that stupid goober's mouth almost got us in trouble.

I miss that job. It was hard to work in the stifling environment of an ossified corporate structure, but I had good friends I was working with, and despite our team being considered "black sheep" and "dangerous mavericks", everyone respected our productivity and we were always involved in all new policy decisions (basically, they were just upset to be told they were wrong). We skirted many lay-offs after that first round because of it.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#234

Post by zumbojo » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:32 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #63

Fast Food Hack: When I was in highschool, Burger King ran this "checkers" game, where you'd get a card with a little checkerboard on it, then scratch your way across it by picking squares until you either lost or won a prize. The one feature they advertised was that "Every card is a winner", meaning that if you picked the right path you were guaranteed to win something. A friend had a sister who worked at a Burger Ki…

I haven't been to BK in a while, but during grad school the back of every receipt asked you to call a number, complete a survey, write down a code, and redeem the receipt for a free Whopper. The code consisted of two letters corresponding to the month (the key to which was easily found online) and four digits (which I just randomized).

The kicker was that BK would give you the free Whopper...and a receipt for the free Whopper. And the cycle continues.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#235

Post by chegra » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:34 PM UTC

Mz wrote: post #141

Surfed the zero percent interest rate promos on credit cards: rolled debt onto a zero percent card (thus not really making a payment that month because you just moved the debt around) and had lower payments until the promo ran out. Repeat with new promo on a different card. One I'm proud of but might not be counted as a hack here (not exactly naughty, but good for blowing people's minds, so similarly satisfying to me…

You should write blog post about how not to lawyer up. I I think it is a definite hit.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#236

Post by jedbrown » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:35 PM UTC

earbitscom wrote: post #77

earbitscom wrote: post #73

At my very first internet job, in 1998 or so, I was hired as a temp. They said they wanted me to find websites that would be good publishers for their content network. They said to do so by searching AltaVista for sites, and then looking to see if they had a web counter, the kind that say "You are visitor number XXX". If the counter said over 100,000 they considered that a good sized publisher and someone else would…

Also...in High School typing class, I was a two-finger typer. Every morning we had to take a two sentence typing test to see if we had improved. Rather than learn to type like I was supposed to, I just memorized all of the two sentence phrases that made up the tests. Within a couple weeks of the class, it didn't matter which phrases popped up, I was two-finger typing over 80 words per minute.

When did you learn to type, or are you still paying for this "hack"?

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#237

Post by gruseom » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:37 PM UTC

amadiver wrote: post #71

davidst wrote: post #18

I rode a motorcycle across Russia and several of the former Soviet republics eight years ago. You can't help but learn many useful hacks along the way. Here's one: How to deal with the police. Their work is boring and it's not unusual for them to go long stretches of time without being paid. They see you coming up the road-- They're curious and you look interesting. They motion for you to pull over and unless you've…

What does '"Skolka kilometer Volgograd?" will do. When they answer, nod, smile, shake their hand and say, "Speciba."' mean? I'm having no luck with online translators.

The probable reason online translators failed is interesting: davidst used nonstandard, but phonetic, transliteration. "Skolka" is closer to how it sounds but the normal way of spelling it in English is "skolko". Similarly "speciba" instead of "spasibo". Either he got these out of a traveler's manual or learned how to say them and then spelled them the way they sound.

By the way, people's tendency to misspell things the way they sound is what allows philologists to figure out how proununciation worked in past centuries.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#238

Post by harold » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:37 PM UTC

I once had a client that paid with a bad check. To make matters worse, the check had arrived several weeks late. Rumor had it that his business was on shaky ground.

I knew something was up when the teller at my bank noticed the client's name and said they would have to verify the check (check was drawn on a different bank) And of course it was revealed there were non sufficient funds.

Bad check in hand, I went to his bank and tried to cash it, knowing they would not do so. Sure enough, the teller apologized and asked me to contact the client for resolution. Maybe it was her sympathetic tone that prompted me to ask, but she revealed the account was only $18 short of clearing. So I pulled $18 out of my pocket and asked her to deposit it on behalf of that account. She then cashed my check for $2,850.

The client called a few days later, very angry, because several of his checks to "more important" people had bounced instead. His business failed a few months later.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#239

Post by TamDenholm » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:49 PM UTC

tomedme wrote: post #27

wyclif wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of conferences, I have never asked for permission to go to them. I just do, and then submit expenses. In certain cases it's far easier to apologise later than ask for permission first.

Straight out of the 4HWW book, but something I now do a lot more - and so far so good!

Big fan of Tim Ferriss too but the saying is much older.

Its attributed to Grace Hopper, a Rear Admiral in the Navy and a programmer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Murray_Hopper http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#240

Post by wallflower » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:51 PM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #123

nhebb wrote: post #37

Studying for an engineering dynamics final, the old "when in doubt, pick C" saying popped into my head, so I decided make a frequency plot of answers for the 4 quizzes we had that term. The prof had B as the correct answer ~50% of the time. At the end of the 2 hour final I had only finished 13 of the 20 problems, so I quickly marked B for the 7 remaining. I got the 2nd highest grade in the class, bumping my grade fro…

My chemistry prof would tell of a student who needed to get just one question right on the multiple-choice final to pass the course. He walked in, picked 'C' for all questions, and walked out. No correct answers were 'C'.

Reminds me of the famous "What is courage?" test answer urban legend:

http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/oneword.asp