Tell us your naughty stories • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#301

Post by bhickey » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 10:06 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.

Typing was required in my high school. As I'd been touch typing QWERTY since I was 11 or so, this made me a bit grumpy. On my first day of class I opened the textbook to the last assignment and completed it in a few seconds.

My teacher was a good sport about it and demanded that the department transfer me into computer science. I spent the rest of the year ignoring some over-engineered OO fishtank.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#302

Post by borism » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 10:12 PM UTC

wallflower wrote: post #242

jasonkester wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wouldn't be looking at it from that angle. Probationary statuses are generally considered a bad thing in big companies, and are often used as a first step in building a case for termination. As a cog who's hoping to make a career in one of those big companies, you're expected to want to get off that bad status and back into "good worker" mode as quickly as possible. It had never occurred to anybody that they mig…

> Probationary statuses are generally considered a bad thing As someone who was almost put on a performance plan for coming to work late, you don't ever want to be put on a PP. Basically, my PP would have been documenting my arrival times for 30 days and if a fair number were out of a 5 minute tolerance range, the PP would be used as a next step for being fired. Basically, a PP is something you sign that is a contrac…

wow! what a fuss over nothing (arriving late). I hope I never work at such company (if it's in IT).

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#303

Post by moron4hire » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 10:15 PM UTC

hardik wrote: post #241

moron4hire wrote: post #233

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 h…

If it weren't for people like you so many big companies will simply cease to produce any output at all!

Yeah, well, I can't say it was any altruistic desire to help the company. Most of their fulltime employees saw us consultants as threats to their jobs, so they weren't very happy to have us around. I was more concerned with not getting blamed for missing deadlines and not letting my skills stagnate. That was the ultimate reason why I left, when it was decided that the software upgrade from VB6 to .NET 2.0 (by the time that decision was made, .NET 4 had just been released) was not going to happen. I knew I had things I wanted to accomplish, and they were standing in my way. Maybe if they had worked with me, it could have benefited them a little more, but I've since learned that companies can and will make such unproductive decisions and I need to keep my exuberant productivity for my own projects.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#304

Post by Groxx » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 10:19 PM UTC

catshirt wrote: post #231

mattmaroon wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could be to provide "motivation" to not search your bag for "contraband". A bribe to prevent artificially-created slow-downs.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#305

Post by katovatzschyn » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 10:22 PM UTC

Mz wrote: post #243

chegra wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

1) Get closure first, then divorce. Most people don't seem to do this. They do it the other way around and then do all kinds of stupid, emotionally driven, toxic things during the divorce which just amounts to shooting themselves in the foot. 2) Stay focused on your goal. It no longer matters if the other person "understands" you and all that touchy-feely nonsense. That stuff matters if you are staying together, not…

Thought of this:

http://www.oregonhumanities.org/magazine/section/writing/bri...

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#306

Post by bhickey » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 10:34 PM UTC

Toward the end of my senior year of college, the Dean of the College solicited nominations for senior orator.

This year was different than years past because the school's computer systems had recently been integrated with one another in a $26 million boondoggle (a story for another time). The office sent out a link to a webapp where each student could submit two nominations. The webapp was a form containing the first and last names of each student and (dramatic pause) it was keyed on student id. I phoned up a friend and confirmed his id number.

[Is disseminating a list of the student body a FERPA violation?]

The wheels in my head started turning a bit. The university obliges each student to carry health insurance. If you can't prove you have insurance, you have to eat the school's program. Opt-out was done through a web form where you entered your name, DOB, and student id number. I went back to that form, plugged in my info and BAM, it presented me with the old opt-out page pre-populated with all of the health insurance information I had previously submitted. With the aforementioned friend's permission, we verified that it worked on his account too. Ugh.

I walked to the IT Helpdesk and informed them of the problem and the page was promptly killed. It took them 21 days to fix.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#307

Post by viggity » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 11:07 PM UTC

aeontech wrote: post #260

iloveyouocean wrote: post #224

Free airport long-term parking hack. Upon returning from your trip, walk through the long-term parking gate and grab a new ticket from the machine. As you are leaving the lot, hand the attendant the new ticket. Tada, free parking.

Doesn't work at the airports where the ticket machine only gives tickets when there's weight of the car on the sensors beneath the roadway.

actually, they don't use weight, the sensors they use are inductive coils - so if you take a strong neodymium magnet and wave it above the coil it should hopefully trip it

http://www.wikihow.com/Trigger-Green-Traffic-Lights

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#308

Post by randomtask » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 11:11 PM UTC

middus wrote: post #226

randomtask wrote: post #61

I lived in Germany for a bit. While there I really wanted to learn to speak German properly, but when I first arrived my spoken German was pretty awful. Since many Germans speak English pretty well and could evidently tell from the way I was pronouncing things that I was an English speaker they would often switch to speaking English with me mid-conversation. This annoyed me because I'd gone to a lot of effort to move…

A friend of mine is from Ireland and went to a Scandinavian country. Same story there: people would switch to English as soon as they found out that she's from Ireland. Her trick: "Sorry, I come from the Gaeltacht. My first language is Gaeilge."

I was mistaken for being American a lot. I'm pretty sure it was the default nationality to guess when they couldn't place an accent. Good to hear it wasn't just happening to me though ;)

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#309

Post by nailer » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 11:26 PM UTC

metamemetics wrote: post #112

nollidge wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't roulette a losing game? Or did you have some optimal betting strategy?

Roulette can be beaten by a shoe computer. Basically you tap your foot each time the ball passes a certain number. The computer uses the time between taps to compute the velocity of the ball, which is used to predict where it will stop. Then you bet on a quadrant of the wheel by the predicted stop. This was first done by people from MIT I believe.

You'd no longer have the opportunity to place your bet by that time.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#310

Post by sesqu » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 11:27 PM UTC

jrp wrote: post #219

Eliezer wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you under the impression that a random key fits a random lock?

If I only need to get one question right it doesn't take many questions before (3/4)^n is smaller than the chance the professor, for whatever reason, avoided C.

I disagree. I'd put that probability at 0 after n=7.

In fact, according to the recent reddit thread, some test designers are encouraged to enforce equal proportions of each option. While stupid, it lowers the threshold to n=3 or so.