Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell us your naughty stories

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 379 posts

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#121

Post by Jun8 »

garrettgillas wrote: post #26

When I was in 6th grade ('94) I scanned articles from our encyclopedias onto our 386 and then used OCR software to make it usable as a class research paper. You can imagine what happened the following year when I got dial up. _________________________________________ I also had a computer hardware class in high school that the teacher would often leave for extended periods of time. The other students and I get enough…

This is really sad: as about the same time you were doing the scanning and OCR'ing in '94, I was in a PhD program, and did the same thing thing for our research project in the Wavelet Signal Processing course, because I started it too late. Scanned papers, OCR, and edit, Had a 30 page report in no-time, pure bliss. Always felt bad about it, though.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#122

Post by dageroth »

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.

that's quite brilliant, it should work probably much more reliable than our guessing.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#123

Post by ctdonath »

nhebb wrote: post #37

Studying for an engineering dynamics final, the old "when in doubt, pick C" saying popped into my head, so I decided make a frequency plot of answers for the 4 quizzes we had that term. The prof had B as the correct answer ~50% of the time. At the end of the 2 hour final I had only finished 13 of the 20 problems, so I quickly marked B for the 7 remaining. I got the 2nd highest grade in the class, bumping my grade fro…

My chemistry prof would tell of a student who needed to get just one question right on the multiple-choice final to pass the course. He walked in, picked 'C' for all questions, and walked out.

No correct answers were 'C'.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#124

Post by MichaelGG »

meric wrote: post #72

Back when I was in high school, On one Friday afternoon I discovered the ethernet cables connecting the computer to the network had the same plug on both ends. I wondered what would happen if I had a cable coming out of the wall plugged back into the wall, so I pulled out the cable out of one of the computers and plugged both ends into the wall. On Monday, One of the teachers went to each class and (loudly & angrily)…

$300 fine because the network admin couldn't be bothered to run spanning tree?

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#125

Post by araneae »

nhebb wrote: post #37

Studying for an engineering dynamics final, the old "when in doubt, pick C" saying popped into my head, so I decided make a frequency plot of answers for the 4 quizzes we had that term. The prof had B as the correct answer ~50% of the time. At the end of the 2 hour final I had only finished 13 of the 20 problems, so I quickly marked B for the 7 remaining. I got the 2nd highest grade in the class, bumping my grade fro…

What kind of college did you go to? In the two I went to, the late fees were something like several dollars a day, and you couldn't graduate unless it was paid off. (At best you could negotiate to pay the retail cost of the book.)

Additionally, both colleges would put any textbook that was for a class on "reserve" so you could only have access to it for several hours at a time, and students DEFINITELY used it. I don't believe that no other student in the class wanted your textbook.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#126

Post by araneae »

jasonkester wrote: post #63

Fast Food Hack: When I was in highschool, Burger King ran this "checkers" game, where you'd get a card with a little checkerboard on it, then scratch your way across it by picking squares until you either lost or won a prize. The one feature they advertised was that "Every card is a winner", meaning that if you picked the right path you were guaranteed to win something. A friend had a sister who worked at a Burger Ki…

To be fair, that wasn't really your hack. It was the other kid's. But neat.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#127

Post by eapen »

maxklein wrote: post #4

On my recent trip to Africa, I avoided giving bribes at 3 different spots in the airport by doing the following: When they asked me for "something to have lunch with", I'd lower my voice and say "it's not possible now" then quickly glance at the person behind me. Neither I nor them had to pay anything.

Brilliant - I wish you posted this tip earlier when I went to Africa. Will do it the next time I go to India for sure.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#128

Post by cmkrnl »

My first ever real job was as a data entry operator, when I was about 19. By this time I'd worked with Windows 95, 98, 3.11, NT 4, and had been using Linux exclusively on the home PC ~ 2 years.

Whenever one of us made a mistake in data entry, a supervisor would come over to the terminal (running PC-DOS), unlock some admin functionality with a password, and fix the error. Even at 1-2 mistakes per day, this was a hassle for me. Got around it by using a keylogger (remember TSRs?) to capture the password :)

When the time came to quit, one of the supervisors had recognized that I knew my way around computers. But I'd royally pissed off another supervisor by then, by doing 'attrib +r +h my-data-file' one day. They couldn't extract the data while I was out for lunch :o)

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#129

Post by araneae »

garrettgillas wrote: post #62
garrettgillas wrote: post #26

When I was in 6th grade ('94) I scanned articles from our encyclopedias onto our 386 and then used OCR software to make it usable as a class research paper. You can imagine what happened the following year when I got dial up. _________________________________________ I also had a computer hardware class in high school that the teacher would often leave for extended periods of time. The other students and I get enough…

Ok, one more hack from college although it probably won't work these days. All of the professors in the science department at my university would tape lists of their student's IDs and their test grades outside their office through out the semester including finals. When looking for classes for the following semester, I just had to look at which professors gave better grades on average and sign up for their classes. T…

>it probably won't work these days.

Oh, it absolutely works these days; it's even easier. My undergraduate institution publishes median grades for each course.

There's a bit of an uproar though because they're going to start printing the median grades on students' transcripts...

Post reply on HN