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Ask HN: When have you coded yourself out of a real-life problem?

17 points by jasonjei ↗ HN
What are some of the ways that you coded yourself out of a real-life problem?

For me, I wanted to go to Momofuku Ko, except they have an annoying .NET reservation system for their coveted 12 seats and 2 seatings, which you can only book 6 days in advance for 24 seats. You have seconds to enter your credit card number to confirm.

But it is a good restaurant, and reservations disappear fast; all are gone by 10:00 AM ET. So like any self-respecting hacker, I got TextMate and Ruby out, performed some sudo gem install mechanize magic, did some serious Regex/XQuery work, wrote a function to perform exponential smoothing on calculating the time difference from my clock to the Momofuku clock, and slept soundly at 7 AM Arizona time, knowing that my reservation would be booked (it's unfair I have to get up at 6:55 AM to check if my resy went through, just because I live in a state like Arizona where food is bad except for Pizzeria Bianco and some others!)

Hope to hear some great things from you guys!

Cheers, Jason

Post scriptum: Frank Bruni, former NYT food editor, hates the resy system: NYT, Frank Bruni, "Going Ko-Ko," http://goo.gl/NYfj; NYT, Frank Bruni, "More Fun with Ko," http://goo.gl/gKGZ; NYT, Frank Bruni, "Ko-da," http://goo.gl/6rNc; Departures, "Eating Small in NY," http://departures.com/articles/eating-small-in-new-york

16 comments

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eof
In 10th grade, we had some security software on our computers in high school called 'Fortress' (circa 1998). I had a multi-media project due for a class that I never did. I compiled eofspresentation.exe in VB that did one thing:

Popped up a dialog, "Cannot run due to security"

jasonjei
Did you ever get a grade?
eof
Yeah an A
TeHCrAzY
Reminds me of grabbing a random .dll, renaming it to .doc, putting it on a floppy disk and handing it in, all to gain myself a few extra days to finish my assignment.
threepointone
I did a smililar thing for my final year mid year thesis review - took a pdf, opened it up in wordpad (!), cut out chunks of it, saved it, and submitted it. Got 2 weeks extra, nabbed an A myself.

... not sure if I should have said this in public, but I remember being strangely proud for having bent the system a bit :)

thebigshane
Kids these days don't need to go through all that trouble anymore... http://www.corrupted-files.com/Word.html

"We offer a wide array of corrupted Word files that are guaranteed not to open on a Mac or PC. A corrupted file is a file that contains scrambled and unrecoverable data due to hardware or software failure. Files may become corrupted when something goes wrong while a file is being saved e.g. the program saving the file might crash. Files may also become corrupted when being sent via email. The perfect excuse to buy you that extra time!"

coryl
This is more of a hack than coding, but I owed the school library money for a lost book in grade school. I didn't have the money and didn't want to to tell my parents about it, so I studied the library system.

It was a self-check in, check out system with a scanning wand. You take your book, log your student number, scan the barcode, and it was added to your account inventory. Returning the book was the same way; but if you didn't have the book, you obviously couldn't scan it back in. I figured out you could look up the book's ISBN through your account inventory, write it down, and manually enter it into the return form.

BAM! Lost book was magically returned :D. I told a few friends about it, I'm sure the school lost out on a few hundred dollars worth of books that year.

atomical
There is a particular database system used by newspapers that encodes the date in base64 in a query parameter. You could search and find the dates, but you needed a subscription to access the links. It was setup so if you had the link you could link others to it free of charge.

Well, the guy at the local library with subscription started to get irritated with me after the third or fourth link so I built my own search engine to use their search engine. I was a research assistant at the time.

ryanwaggoner
I was going to Paris for the first time and I had been learning french, but my pronunciation was still terrible. I use a spaced repetition flashcard system [1] to learn new things and improve my recall, and I wanted to use it to learn some french pronunciation. About.com has a 2500-word french audio dictionary [2], so I spent a few hours building a scraper to pull down all the pages, parse out the words (their markup is crazy), download the mp3 files, and build an xml file so I could import it all into my SRS system.

Not a terribly challenging problem, but it's always nice to be able to quickly hack up some code to solve something.

1. http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/

2. http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/audiodictionary.htm

Ixiaus
I use Mnemosyne quite a bit too.

I also have enjoyed writing scrapers for data I wanted but wasn't being provided in a downloadable format - most commonly stuff on forums.

I wrote a scraper that scraped the entire textfiles.org website for their texts (mostly for fun), I wrote a scraper that logged in as me into my favorite phpBB forum and scraped every post in every forum in every thread - the script would create a directory for the forum, a directory within that named by a number to denote which page it was on, a directory within that named after the thread, a directory within that named by a number to denote which page it was on, and a text file containing only the content div (to retain the formatting of the original post).

I used Python and Mechanize for most of this - the phpbb forum scraper was the most fun and rewarding.

I've also written page scrapers for websites that have things like "1324 of the best side boobs!" I didn't want to Save As for all of them! So I wrote a script that downloaded them for me (this one was easy though compared to the phpbb script).

axxl
I hated powerpoint (and still mostly do), so I ended up coding a presentation in BlitzMax (a version of Basic designed for cross platform game development) in order to make a presentation for my geometry class sophomore year. I had all different shapes displayed on screen and transformed them around and such to show off different proofs.
_b8r0
At College they used 386s and 486s running DOS and Windows 3.1. At home I used an Amiga 1200. The two are not exactly compatible. I would routinely be given assignments, have to write them in QuickBasic for class and would have to spend half a day at college instead of at home. I didn't have a Microsoft Basic variant (other than GW-BASIC which wasn't quite compatible) and used AMOS instead to test the algorithm, then rewrite in QuickBasic. I tried submitting work in C but my lecturer would refuse to accept them as we hadn't covered that module yet.

In the end I wrote an AMOS -> QuickBasic converter in C, first for DICE C on Amiga, then tweaked for Turbo C on the PC. I could then do the rest of my coursework at home on my Amiga, instead of the grubby old slow 386s.

sdrinf
Problem: born in hungary. Solution: during high school, I've complemented my english courses using the Internet (reading RFCs, and white papers). After university, I've literally hacked myself out of the country, by doing consulting on the side, and saving every penny I could.

Currently in London, and content, if not happy.

phaedrus
I've written my own custom data recovery tools to recover lost files. The first was a hack of ddrescue to only recover sectors containing a certain string (because the drive had so many bad sectors that a full ddrescue would have taken weeks to complete). Recently I wrote a tool to recover deleted directory contents from ext file systems that works even if all the inodes are gone. I didn't need the file data, only the names and folder structure, and I realized that if you don't need the data you never need to dereference the inodes. Instead you can treat the inode number like a database key to cross reference directory blocks.
randylahey
I realized I had lost an important file (a letter of recommendation from my university co-op placement). I no longer had the e-mail it was attached to (this is prior to me using webmail), nor the e-mail program. But what's this? I still have the mailbox files. Well, I know python has some multipart utilities... maybe I can copy and paste the relevant parts out of this message and into a script and have it write out the attachment sub-message. After a bit of fiddling, it worked!

I was elated. It was by no means a very challenging thing to do, but I would have been totally fucked if I didn't know how to do software development.

fezzl
Back in 7th grade, I wanted to know everything about my high school crush, so I phished her email password via email link baits (followed by fake Hotmail error pages). Worked so well that I started phishing the entire school's passwords.