Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

As I anticipated, it's hard to relate to somebody living in a profoundly corrupt society. My gripe with the university was not that it was exploiting postdocs or killing the environment; rather, that it failed to setup and enforce a system of rules where my extant academic ethics mattered.

The social contract includes not just what's written or implied, it's also what people do in practice, what is acceptable. If cheating is acceptable and required to get a tech job, then I can do that, in fact I can do it better than most. That says very little about my profound sense of ethics.

To counter your analogy: what if you are indicted of a crime you did not commit in North Korea? You surely accepted their rules when entering the country, but would you trust their judicial system to do the right thing? Would you bribe your way out if you were given the chance? Would you ask your country to put diplomatic pressure on your behalf, a clearly unethical advantage no Korean has? Would you consider escaping from prison if wrongfully convicted?

In a narrow definition of ethics as "whatever the current rules are" (typical, I would say, for somebody living their whole life in a state with strong rule of law), the only ethical behavior is to subject yourself to whatever abuse NK decides for you.

That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's true that law and ethics aren't always aligned, especially in authoritarian regimes. But basic things like integrity are essential for any human society.

Also, I'm not convinced that growing up in the former Soviet bloc necessarily means that honesty isn't the best policy. If everyone around you is corrupt, being the one dependable person around is a differentiator. Maybe I'm being naive, but it seems like that reputation could have some real world value to you.

By the way, it doesn't matter what your classmates are doing. Comparing myself to the average was horribly destructive to my college education. It turns out, everyone around me putting in average amounts of studying and getting average grades ended up getting average jobs with average pay! The one or two people in class that always aced everything, about whom I thought "well I don't have to be as good as them" - those were the ones who ended up having a real shot at grad school or dat $100k Facebook new-grad signing bonus. It's just like when you move from high school to college and suddenly you're not the smartest person in the universe anymore. Your cheating classmates are bozos - stomp them with harder work and keep moving up. Don't sink to their level.

Not the hardest and the exact technical details are a bit murky now, but super annoying nonetheless.

I had an external disk for extra data with an APFS volume as well as an NTFS partition for data when I was in Windows. Once I plugged it in under Windows, it must have nuked the partition table because of an 'unrecognized' partition or something, as I then rebooted back into macOS and noticed my APFS container wouldn't show up.

I opened disk utility and saw that it was marked as NTFS too. No my data! I contemplated what to do and realized that it may be just the partition table gone and my data may still be intact, since I haven't actually formatted the drive myself, or anything similar.

The problem was, this was an APFS container, not a simple partition and the tooling was not very good in the Sierra days. So I had to manually calculate the sector at which I then created a new APFS container, but without formatting and indeed my data was there.

That episode ended up reducing my already little time spent in Windows to practically nothing these days. (As primarily a Linux user, I don't spend much time in macOS either, but Windows is forbidden on real-hardware since that fiasco).

I was working at an IT agency as an ops guy. One Saturday morning our alerting went of for one of our customer's sites (a somewhat high profile public sector company). Turned out we were being DDOS-ed.

The hosting company was trying to mitigate, but the attack was "real traffic" so hard to just black hole. I dove into one of the Apache logs and was looking for some way to sift out the bad traffic and keep the real traffic.

Then I noticed a lot of Nintendo Wii user agent headers. That was suspicious. Who in hell is using this service 100 times per second from their Wii from Pakistan and Russia?

I wrote a quick regex that blocked all IP's from requests with Wii user agent headers. This took care of 99% of the DDOS traffic. After 2 hours the whole attack stopped.