I saw this question being asked on here years ago with few but interesting answers. I'd imagine that a lot of you still have some pretty interesting stories to tell about some crafty workarounds.
Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
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Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#2Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#3https://blog.jgc.org/2011/02/hacking-toshiba-t4800ct-love-st...
Did something similar with a Windows help file that spawned a copy of File Manager. Very cool.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#4So I once made a script with python and selenium to make fake petitions to bring back Wendy's spicy chicken nuggets. It stopped around 9,000 when the script crashed after awhile... I think they did bring it back though so I feel like I was responsible.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#5I've worked on a single-machine computer vision system which used RabbitMQ to send messages around, including JPEG frames which were rather heavy, in contrast to other messages.
After we hit a certain number of frames/second, RabbitMQ became a bottleneck. My solution was to write the JPEG frame in the shared memory, then pass around shared memory ID, offset and frame length, instead of the whole frame. Only services that actually needed the frame would read it, others would just pass around a small JSON object. After that was implemented, the bottleneck disappeared.
I don't know if this qualifies as a "hack", but it certainly felt that way in the moment.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#6Almost 25 years ago i got an trial version of NuMega Soft-Ice for Win 95. And i was able to hack it using same Soft-Ice.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#7https://blog.jgc.org/2011/02/hacking-toshiba-t4800ct-love-st...
Did something similar with a Windows help file that spawned a copy of File Manager. Very cool.
There is famous bug in Windows XP activation.
Once machine boot and login started Windows want to be activated. There you press Win-U and on popup you can click web link to open default browser.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#8I worked for a healthcare startup that interfaced with a lot of large insurance companies. They had no API access for their patient information and would just give us credentials to ancient web portals instead.
I wrote my own browser automation scripts to create our own internal patient API. Ended up reducing claim billing errors by a ton and resulted in 6 figures a month in additional revenue.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#9I hexedited an old Devart DLL that refused to pick up our valid license with the Mono License Compiler to just... not check for a license. I had to find the exact right byte pattern manually then flip the flip 2 of them to a brfalse.0
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#10I worked for a healthcare startup that interfaced with a lot of large insurance companies. They had no API access for their patient information and would just give us credentials to ancient web portals instead. I wrote my own browser automation scripts to create our own internal patient API. Ended up reducing claim billing errors by a ton and resulted in 6 figures a month in additional revenue.
What impact did the 6 figures in additional revenue bring to you personally vs. the owners of your startup? How were you acknowledged or compensated for this feat?