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Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

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Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#231

Post by theyinwhy »

kennu wrote: post #188

A company I worked for in the early 2000's produced a reality tv series which was shot on an island about 1.5km out from the city shore. It needed a decent (but rather temporary) Internet connection and our company headquarters happened to be near by, so my colleagues set up a directional WiFi antenna pointed from the building's rooftop to the island. The total distance of the line-of-sight WiFi connection was about…

Now you need to match your experience with the post above about the van stopping in the link's line of sight and tell us: - what wifi you had and - what the bandwith was.

We need to solve the riddle if it was wifi or laser link.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#232

Post by gondolgames »

mattzito wrote: post #19

In my startup days, we were working on a proof of concept with a really big bank. Because of their security rules, we couldn't have direct access to their systems - so if we wanted to do something remotely, we would have to start a webex, they would join and share their screen, and give us remote control. This worked great, except if we wanted to work over the weekend, since if we left the screen alone for more than…

I think an optical mouse placed on the reflective side of a CD achieves the same "jumping around" - effect.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#233

Post by nailer »

orf wrote: post #85
nailer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the loop, vs setting the date once?

NTP would resync it, and obviously after X hours it would no longer be end of year even if you set the date in the past. It needed to be end of year day for 2 or 3 days.

yeah I get that but `while(true)` seems excessive. Why not just do it once and disable NTP?

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#234

Post by koonsolo »

theyinwhy wrote: post #229
koonsolo wrote: post #194

CTO had to make a deadline for the next morning, so he decided to override the safety system of an Autonomous Guided Vehicle of a few tons. Just bridged over it electrically. Not only this, but he failed to inform the onsite crew that was going to put it in production. AGV went somewhere it wasn't supposed to go, first employee pushed the red safety stop. AGV kept on riding, and thank god there was another person at…

Now I am curios! What deadline needs you to override the safety system of an Autonomous Guided Vehicle?

Cashflow. Customer paid a part on the "delivery" milestone. This means the thing had to drive a bit on-site.

Problem was that it didn't want to move because of wrong interfacing of the safety system. So the solution was quick.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#235

Post by jakobegger »

jballanc wrote: post #12

Not sure if this is still the case, but back when I was at Apple the program that triggered when you pressed a button on an Apple remote pointed at a Macintosh was just a giant AppleScript file that, at the top level, was a giant `if...else if...` statement to try and determine which application had the foreground so that the appropriate action (e.g. next track for iTunes, next slide for Keynote, next chapter marker…

So that‘s why that remote was always so unreliable.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#236

Post by orf »

nailer wrote: post #233
orf wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NTP would resync it, and obviously after X hours it would no longer be end of year even if you set the date in the past. It needed to be end of year day for 2 or 3 days.

yeah I get that but `while(true)` seems excessive. Why not just do it once and disable NTP?

because time moves forwards, and if you set it to 4pm then in 1.5 hours it will be 5.30pm, and the end-of-year stuff will kick in?

Three lines of bash seemed simpler. It's a hack, yes, and there are better ways. But really who gives a damn.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#237

Post by Asooka »

rcarmo wrote: post #113

The other day a former colleague pinged me with a screenshot from one of our secondary RADIUS servers, asking if he could remove my former user account from a bit of Perl code (we used Radiator). That ‘if’ block exempted me, the CEO and the CMO from traffic limits (which at the time would forcibly disconnect you) and make sure we had 24/7 access (I had set it up during testing because they kept calling us to remove t…

Hm, 10 years at 200KB/day (about average for a Dilbert strip) would come out to 730000KB or 713MB. That seems rather quaint compared to the ~50GB git repo we have :)

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#238

Post by jonstaab »

mlevental wrote: post #152
jonstaab wrote: post #34

Just recently I had to put together a web-based UI for editing vector graphics (clothing tags) and export them to pdf for printing. In order to avoid writing and maintaining two separate codebases, I re-used the client side code as my rendering code. So I ended up with a server serving the editor frontend, as well as api endpoints that would use puppeteer and headless chrome to make a request (to itself) to load the…

wut. why did you do this? why didn't you just handle all of it in the frontend? jspdf makes PDFs in browser.

I would have loved to, but one of the sticking points was that the label file had to be serialized, saved, and later interpolated with data from a bunch of different records, which is why I used svg over canvas, wrote my own editor, etc. jsPDF seems great for imperatively generating a pdf, but not for editing/loading template files. Plus, since the pdf generation had to happen server side, I would have needed a headless browser anyway.

It's super weird, and I've been over it from every direction but I don't know how I could have done it differently.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#239

Post by Paperweight »

chrissnell wrote: post #52

In 1997, I worked with FedEx to build an integrated order management system for the e-commerce company that I ran with my dad. Orders would come into my Perl-based order management system and the pickers would use the web interface to print a packing slip. A bash script would generate a Postscript barcode and then my Perl would generate a packing slip in LaTeX that included that barcode. The LaTeX-generated PS file w…

Talk about "bespoke".

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#240

Post by ryall »

Odenwaelder wrote: post #74
neverminder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got one of those from "Only on WIndows" series. One of my colleagues uses WIndows and tends to remote in from home. Unfortunately when a cleaner cleans the office after hours she sometimes accidentally hits the CAPS key and he can't log in anymore remotely. His solution was to rip out the CAPS key and cover the hole with duct tape.

I do this, too. The first thing I do when I get a new keyboard is to remove the caps lock key. I never used it in my 20 years of PC usages and I don't get why it's still there. Back in my CounterStrike gaming days I would also remove the Windows key because it would crash the game when accidentally pressed.

Ahh the good old CounterStrike quick exit! If you were lucky you could alt-tab back in, but you'd have a big mouse arrow where your reticle used to be :D

I ended up coding a utility (in VS6!) to disable the windows key when you launched the game.

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