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Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery

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Re: Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery

#41

Post by thesethings »

abalashov wrote: post #32
thesethings wrote: post #20

* Cooking: Ramen can be used not just for soup, but for stir-fry. * Travel: Any supermarket is your fee-free ATM. (cashback) (US) * Travel: In the middle of your urban trek and have to pee? Hotel lobbies usually have clean, open bathrooms. (Specifically talking about the one you're NOT staying at, when you're wandering for 10 hours in a foreign city, and don't want to go all the way back to "base.") * Travel: Hotel l…

Supermarkets require a purchase to provide cash-back, do they not? That would seem to amount to some sort of fee, even if it's a lot smaller (e.g. a 50 cent pack of gum). EDIT: I suppose I am referring to precisely that aspect of them which would otherwise be "ATM-like" - namely, that the function is to dispense cash on demand, and that the fees in question would otherwise go solely toward paying for the privilege. C…

Right. But purchasing something at a store like this when I travel is in no way forced for me.

I find my friends and I go to grocery stores/drug stores even more often when we travel than at home. You have no stock of stuff like when at home/work. You're constantly grabbing a drink/a snack things to take back to "base." You often have no refrigeration, so that means more, smaller trips to the store, too.

Re: Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery

#42

Post by kyro »

vital101 wrote: post #33

The remote for my car has a very weak signal strength, so sometimes when I forget where I park I place the remote underneath my chin and press up. My head (skull + fluid) acts as an antenna and voila! There's my car! You might look like a fool doing it, but I promise it works!

Your skull works more as a satellite. :P

And yeah, definitely does work.

Re: Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery

#43

Post by Shooter »

fogus wrote: post #11

I once worked at a car wash were most of the employees were out on work release. Anyway, the days were long and boring so I took the time to devise a way to get free sodas out of the vending machine. I was not interested in stealing soda, as I hated it, but only in figuring out how to do so. I eventually did so. I was so proud of myself that I decided to show one of the guys that I got along with pretty well. When I…

I once went to a conference that was held on an Arizona college campus during summer session. The school kept having soda and vending machines disappear periodically. It turned out that guys from the local tribe were taking the entire machines back to the reservation in their trucks, using them until they were empty, and then lugging them back to be refilled. I'm not sure what method they were using to get the soda out without paying, but they finally caught some of the guys using video cameras. I think it was all done more for the excitement than the soda...and also maybe to make a statement of some kind. (I can't imagine hauling one of those big machines around for the soda it would hold.)

Re: Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery

#44

Post by colbyolson »

thesnark wrote: post #17

I made a portrait of my girlfriend out of dice. http://www.elusivesnark.com/2008/11/carolines-dice-portrait....

I would love to do something like that, but the weight alone is too much for drywall/normal walls.

Really cool idea though, I'll have to remember this one.

Re: Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery

#45

Post by louislouis »

It was the last year of college, my student card had only 2 months left before it expired. I deliberately lost it and got a replacement which extended the expiration date to 3 years more since new cards were in for next years batch of students. Needless to say I've enjoyed the student discounts all this time.

Hacking Bus Tickets: I was a poor student at the time and 'all day' bus tickets were expensive for me. After 1 week of paying full prices, I had collected enough tickets to duplicate the fonts using photoshop and print my own tickets :D

Coke Machine: At school there was a vending machine where if you pressed the coke button multiple times and fast enough, it would give u 2 cokes for the price of 1.

School Passwords: I was 14 I think, coded up a basic popup box in VB saying 'Please verify your username and password', the input was sent to a txt file and there was a nice little Netscape Navigator icon to make it seem legit lol. I had the .exe running on startup on maybe 2-3 computers. Over 1 week I had hundreds of passwords including the network administrator pass. :D

Re: Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery

#46

Post by noonespecial »

dryicerx wrote: post #37

Chemistry hack. Distilling Alcohol. I wasn't of age at the time, actually was still in high school, and had a hard time getting alcohol, so I decided to make it my self. Designed and built a reflux still with embedded temp sensors, a condenser, and one-way air locked gasoline containers for fermentation. I used sugar and yeast to ferment giving me ~10% abv, then ran it through the still 5-6 times to get ~90% abv... i…

Any kid smart enough to distill his own booze and smart enough to check it for the "makes you go blind" part (using a method other than the friends at a party test) should be exempt from the "drinking age" requirement.

Re: Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery

#47

Post by grizzydot »

In college my friends and I would go to the driving range a lot. It was a 3 tier range with a golf ball dispenser on each level, all networked together. We figured out (by chance) that if we swiped our range card and then quickly selected the bucket size of range balls, it would dispense the balls before it updated the entire system with the new dollar amount that should be on the card. So we basically got back the cost of the card (~ $20) the day we realized the hack just by swiping over and over (a large bucket was $12). All in all we got around $400 worth of balls before they put in a new payment system.

Re: Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery

#49

Post by jjs »

noonespecial wrote: post #46
dryicerx wrote: post #37

Chemistry hack. Distilling Alcohol. I wasn't of age at the time, actually was still in high school, and had a hard time getting alcohol, so I decided to make it my self. Designed and built a reflux still with embedded temp sensors, a condenser, and one-way air locked gasoline containers for fermentation. I used sugar and yeast to ferment giving me ~10% abv, then ran it through the still 5-6 times to get ~90% abv... i…

Any kid smart enough to distill his own booze and smart enough to check it for the "makes you go blind" part (using a method other than the friends at a party test) should be exempt from the "drinking age" requirement.

... and, technically, is. ;)

Re: Ask HN: Your biggest non-technical hack/discovery

#50

Post by jrockway »

louislouis wrote: post #45

It was the last year of college, my student card had only 2 months left before it expired. I deliberately lost it and got a replacement which extended the expiration date to 3 years more since new cards were in for next years batch of students. Needless to say I've enjoyed the student discounts all this time. Hacking Bus Tickets: I was a poor student at the time and 'all day' bus tickets were expensive for me. After…

School Passwords: I was 14 I think, coded up a basic popup box in VB saying 'Please verify your username and password', the input was sent to a txt file and there was a nice little Netscape Navigator icon to make it seem legit lol. I had the .exe running on startup on maybe 2-3 computers. Over 1 week I had hundreds of passwords including the network administrator pass. :D

I think I did you one better. At my high school, the student computers in our dorms (yes, a weird high school) were on the same network as the computer lab computers. To log onto a computer lab computer, you put in your username, password, and the domain name (STUDENT). We set up a computer in our room named STUDNET and changed a few login boxes in the computer lab to log into STUDNET instead of STUDENT. Several hours later, we had several accounts. Oh Windows 98, how I love thee...

The printers were also on this network. They were all HP printers, they all had the control port open (9001?), and they all had the a DNS name in the form of "...-printer.imsa.edu". A brute-force search of our IP space gave us the IP address of all the printers, and a quick shell-script later, the printers' ready message became "OUT OF WATER" instead of "READY". Every printer on the entire campus, all at once.

Oh, the chaos this caused. Upon walking into the main building, several teachers immediately just had to show me this weird message on the printer. "The one in my office is like this, and so is the one in the computer lab. It's so crazy!" I especially loved watching several PhDs in the math department calling HP to ask where to put the water in. People were talking about this for months, and I don't think anyone ever figured out that it was me.

So yeah. Changing the ready message on HP printers is my favorite hack, and it still probably works.

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