Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#1

Post by dryicerx » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 6:17 AM UTC

You know you weren't suppose to do it. It was a immoral and sinful hack or tweak, but you did it anyways. A goto? A linked list of function pointers? Even committed it? What nasty hacks have you do lately?

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#2

Post by dryicerx » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 6:19 AM UTC

The cleaner script was written in python working along side the C fastcgi app running atop Apache. I made the C fcgid app spawn the python script as a child. :(

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#3

Post by noonespecial » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 6:23 AM UTC

I used a bash script to query a mySQL database because we weren't allowed to use "unapproved" libraries and the last time I tried to get permission to use a CPAN module, it took 8 weeks.

I am ashamed.

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#4

Post by cperciva » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 6:44 AM UTC

I used blocking disk I/O from a theoretically non-blocking event loop.

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#5

Post by Herring » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 6:44 AM UTC

Getting into the neighbor's WEP. There wasn't even much to it in the end. My desktop didn't have a wireless card so I had to pipe the connection from a half dead laptop I had lying around.

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#6

Post by crabl » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 6:49 AM UTC

Nice try, FBI.

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#7

Post by bkudria » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 6:54 AM UTC

http://gist.github.com/159121

I'm so sorry.

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#8

Post by csomar » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 6:59 AM UTC

I used a boot to download twitter following pages because it was not allowed to a "non browser" and "non logged user"; it's so bad and some kind of spamming, but i did it any way! :'( :'(

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#9

Post by garply » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 7:11 AM UTC

Gotos aren't necessarily bad - for example when you have a large amount of nested loops and need to break out of a certain number of them.

Re: Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

#10

Post by redcap » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 7:16 AM UTC

garply wrote: post #9

Gotos aren't necessarily bad - for example when you have a large amount of nested loops and need to break out of a certain number of them.

Also good for exception/error handling for languages that don't have that capability built in.

E.g. the SQL script I've been working on today has a number of gotos in it.