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Tell us your naughty stories

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281–290 of 379 posts

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#281
Saturday, October 26th 1996. World Series Game 6 Yankees vs Braves in New York. I'm from NYC but had just started Fall semester away at Michigan State University. I had never had the experience of going to a World Series game and was not going to miss an opportunity to see one at home. I have no money, no ticket and no connection but hey, you never know.

So with the Yankees up 3 games to 2, I decide to hop an Amtrak leaving for NYC the day before and arrive in Grand Central an hour or two before first pitch. I get on the 4 train and half hour later get off at the Stadium. The place is absolutely packed. People as far as you can see. Everybody is chanting and the crowd is electric. I figured I would walk around the Stadium and see what I can see. Maybe there is a chink in the armor. Maybe there is a scam going on I can get in on. As I said, I grew up in New York City. I also used to work the streets of Manhattan selling stuff only tourists would buy. I guess you could say I have a knack for sniffing out scams.

Sure enough I see a tight crowd of people who obviously didn't come together off a ways from one of the Stadium gates. Something told me I should pay closer attention. Every now and then I would see the guy in the center slyly point over towards the nearby gate and see someone in the crowd mosey over to that gate and get in. Lets take a closer look. Turns out the guy outside the gate is in cahoots with his buddy, the ticket taker at the gate! They worked out a password system. You pay the money man and he tells you the password. You tell the password to the gate keeper and he lets you in. $25 and a fake ticket handoff later, I've made it into my first World Series game at Yankee Stadium!

Well, with no assigned seat the entire Stadium was my playground. I wandered from section to section and would keep empty seats warm. When their owner showed up I would just move on to the next section. To cap a perfect scam story, the Yankees closed the series that night, Wade Boggs rode around the outfield on some mounted officers horse and I walked away with the memory of a lifetime. Oh, the password was "Appleseed" if you were curious.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#282
I was struggling to get through Chemistry in college, when I discovered that the online quizzes that made up 25% of our overall grade used time (seconds, not microseconds) as the random seed for deciding which question was shown. This was important because we were allowed two tries to get an answer right. I filled up the computer lab with friends from the class and we all hit "next" at the same time causing us to all be shown the same "randomly chosen" question. We each chose a different answer and then shared the correct answer for the second attempt.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#283
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…

To anyone living in the Philly area, enjoy.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rLdNJ2i7qtM_KyzyrJ2eu...

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#284
I was working at Microsoft Research making a mobile application for the iPhone. For the first month, I didn't even have access to the building. I would always follow someone else in. I also didn't have a Mac. I brought my own. (My manager covered for me.) About a month in, I had finished the first application, and it was ready for app store submission. Oddly, at about the same time, they tried to move someone else into the desk I was using... I didn't even exist in their HR system.

While waiting for legal approval for deploying the app, we drew up some screens and user tested/mocked up the next app on paper. A month passed... and we still weren't sure what legal was thinking or whether my mac would be arriving soon. Then we decided to just build everything on my personal pipeline. In a week, the first of two remaining products was finished, and then we finally received legal's response: we couldn't release an app on the app store.

I converted the apps to be a native-like HTML5 web apps. Then we found that in certain regions (China!), services we relied on were blocked. I set up proxies to redirect the failing requests. Additionally, GPS data is obfuscated in certain regions (China again...).

Then we ran into legal trouble again. Ruby on Rails was not an approved development platform. Fortunately, after a lengthy email argument that my manager, (whom I had taught basic Ruby/Rails skills in order to speed up development), was able to win, legal was convinced that there were no Microsoft products that had the functionality we required.

A couple weeks later, we launched the app to a bunch of people under NDA. The part that took the longest was getting them to sign the NDAs. Also, native-like nested list scrolling was a pain.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#285
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't think of it as helping people, but as providing a useful product for cash and prizes. Backsearching HN will give you ideas on how to generate income for your insight here.

Well, I participate here in hopes I can finally wrap my brain around "how to make money". So far, no magic faerie dust has been found to help me fly, financially. I would totally love to be the next person to post "Thank you HN. X months ago you helped me with my business idea and now I have left my BigCo job, moved to the city of my choosing and am happily working from home!!!" Historical facts: 1) People tend to sp…

Ok, so it's not going to lead to big bucks, or even enough little bucks to leave your job.

But it could provide enough little bucks and recognition to make the handful of hours it took to produce your product more than worthwhile.

Passive income is a great thing.

I wish I was so polarizing. Being able to cleanly tell who hates me and who loves me would help me find my audience/customers quicker.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#286
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I participate here in hopes I can finally wrap my brain around "how to make money". So far, no magic faerie dust has been found to help me fly, financially. I would totally love to be the next person to post "Thank you HN. X months ago you helped me with my business idea and now I have left my BigCo job, moved to the city of my choosing and am happily working from home!!!" Historical facts: 1) People tend to sp…

Ok, so it's not going to lead to big bucks, or even enough little bucks to leave your job. But it could provide enough little bucks and recognition to make the handful of hours it took to produce your product more than worthwhile. Passive income is a great thing. I wish I was so polarizing. Being able to cleanly tell who hates me and who loves me would help me find my audience/customers quicker.

Is it a problem that I know almost nothing about the legal side of a do-it-yourself divorce? I was quite sick so my husband handled that part. I know the social engineering stuff, I'm sure way better than he did (I always knew what to say when he was upset during the divorce to get him to feel okay about how things were going, which is critical to not lawyering up).

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#287
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. You are burn out by helping people. I understand. I'll change the emphasize. You have great product at the hand. Product which can earn you money. Period. Passive income. For you.

Okay, I'll play along: How many pages does the book need to be? How much can/should I charge for it? How on earth would I promote it? Where can I find such info? I have always wanted to be a writer but at the moment my one and only goal is to figure out how to make money from home so I can leave my job and move elsewhere. I'm really not sold (on the idea that I can make money telling people how to not lawyer up). But…

Ok. That's better. I'll try to brainstorm something here, but take, please, into account that I don't live in the US.

You do live there.

> How many pages does the book need to be?

For starters you have to consider state by state differences in law. You can consider staying at high level of abstraction and target all US at once. Second option is to cover these high level matters first and describe details latter, probably state by state.

> How much can/should I charge for it?

$199

The real answer is to test prices. Search HN. There were some disscussions about setting prices.

> How on earth would I promote it?

Where do people interested in divorce concentrate? How to reach them there?

> Where can I find such info?

On the internet? Using your common sense? Asking here?

Btw. some lawyers will be upset by such information reaching public. Take this into account and cover your bases. Don't skimp here, it's for your protection. IANAL etc.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#288
When I was 7 or so I used to love arcades with my focus being on games which got me tickets redeemable for candy. One day I noticed the counting of arcade tickets was done by weighing them on a scale so one day I ran my stack of tickets under the water fountain. Depending on how well I wrung them out I would get 2-3x the tickets. I am glad I found the world of computer security where I get to look for stuff like this all day.

I feel this was somewhere between outright cheating and possible cleverness, probably leaning more towards cheating.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The book about that group, The Eudaemonic Pie, is a great read: http://www.amazon.com/Eudaemonic-Pie-Thomas-Bass/dp/05951423... Recently I ran across another book about the same group, "The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street"

A poorly written book about an interesting topic, I thought.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#290
Summer, 1st year university. I have a summer co-op position doing tech support, which of course bores me out of my mind. Leading to:

- learning win32 apis and writing a screensaver that features the rotating bald head of one of the company executives. when the head bounces off the side of the screen, it plays a homer "do'h!"

- mailing a screenshot of the output of DIR of the company's webserver in an IE window on an external computer to the head network admin and other people that would embarrass him. IIS isn't the most secure webserver.

- discovering that by using '../..' I could set anyone's startup script to an arbitrary file. Used this fact to change the head network admin's to pop up a modal dialog poking fun at him.

Needless to say, I think the network admin hated me. Although he did a bad job, security-wise, in retrospect I don't think that it was so necessary to embarrass him publicly.

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