Confess HN: Share your Immoral Hacks, Codes or Tweaks

I am ashamed.

I'm so sorry.

After about six months of pathological random access (and what I assume to be epic fragmentation), the disk failed. I hope to migrate to our shiny new Hadoop cluster while the replacement disk lasts.

I architected a game-creation platform so that all the game runtime code was both legal Flash and legal JavaScript, such that the same code could be inserted verbatim in both the JavaScript editor and the Flash compiled version.

dating has moved online, and the key to getting laid is basically to get as many contacts going as you can. It's like a funnel: The more you put in at the top the more comes out at the bottom. The problem of course is that all that initial contact and writing back and forth with potential subjects is somewhat timeconsuming.

Enter the magic of webscraping and hacking.

It's not hard to make a program that will send a standard message to a chosen group of profiles on a dating site based on search criteria. It's not hard to make an interface that let's you do the initial round of communication with the people that respond in an interface that's somewhat more optimised for communicating with a lot of users at the same time. Once you get past the first three or four messages it's time to move on to the more personal aspects of communication. It saves a lot of time, and you only spend time on girls that have actually shown some interest.

import __builtin__, ctypes

class ImvuGeneratorExit(BaseException): pass

__builtins__['GeneratorExit'] = ImvuGeneratorExit

__builtin__.GeneratorExit = ImvuGeneratorExit

ctypes.c_void_p.in_dll(ctypes.pythonapi, 'PyExc_GeneratorExit').value = id(ImvuGeneratorExit)

Using a negative index on an array in order to get around a signed 16 bit limitation. Just stuck another blank array of the same size in front of it in the memory map and kept going.

For all I know that code is still running :)

It was quite hard to convince the compiler that I wanted to keep the never referenced/read array.

Stupid mainframes and their limits...

#2

In the 386 days you could get a separate co-processor, the 387 for float work (or a weitek if you had the money). The clock line between the two of them was shared but I found out that you could disconnect the clock pin of the 387 and connect it to its own oscillator to overclock it. That way even if the rest of the board could not be overclocked at least the float processor was. By carefully interleaving float and co processor opcodes you could then run a lot faster than you would have been able to otherwise.

Australia was a late qualifier for the tournament. The ticket submission was via email. Tickets were allocated on a first email received basis after 09:00. There was a countdown webpage which advertised the time.

--- Preparation

* I telneted to port 25 of the destination and saw via EHLO that the mail server clock was 1 minute faster than advertised on the webpage, giving a start time advantage

* I pre crafted the SMTP message into a text file. This had the sending time as 09:00:01

* Before the day I checked out how long the mail server would keep open any connections without any input (10 minutes)

---

Cometh the day:

* I opened up several telnet sessions to port 25 , 10 minutes before.

* when the time came, I did several EHLO messages to check my session was alive

* I cut'n'pasted my SMTP message into the server

* I closed all my connections (other people were bouncing at this point as the server connection pool was exhausted)

---

I got my tickets.

  (defun make-record (&rest args) ; insert &allow-other-keys ;-)
    (let ((*db-auto-sync* t))
          (object (make-instance 'record args)))
       (when object
         (update-records-from-instance object))))

That's for record insertion.

For record update, I have something far more sinster. Every accessor has an :after method with explicit SQL inside. Allow me to explain this: Imagine if you had to write a function that does something as a side-effect everytime an assignment is made! E.g. I have a macro that generates explicit slot serializer for ever accessor; I managed this by wrapping defclass twice and now I program in a weird, session-oriented php-like dialect that's just too fucking brittle.

We will go over it after our first demo :-P

[Edit:

I wrote the following database agnostic routines and I deal with the db strictly through them.

LIST-OBJECTS type

LIST-OBJECTS-WHERE type slot value

FIND-OBJECT type slot value

FIND-OBJECT-WHERE type slot value

UPDATE-OBJECT-WHERE type slot value new-value

DELETE-OBJECT-WHERE type slot value

type is both a Lisp class and SQL table name. Slot and value are used in WHERE clauses, e.g. (select [*] type :where [= slot value])

]

The hack was cool, but utterly stupid and pointless (the C++ was used for speed - calling back into PowerBuilder defeated the purpose). The only reason I did it was because the consultant who originally created the C++ DLL managed to convince my boss that the application would run much faster if PowerBuilder supported callbacks. So naturally my boss instructed me to do the impossible. I didn't complain because it seemed like a fun challenge at the time. I didn't tell him that it actually slowed the app down a bit though >:)

  // we don't even pretend to work on anything but i386 and LE arm
  const unsigned char c[] = { 0x78, 0x56, 0x34, 0x12 };
  assert(sizeof(int) == 4 && *((int*)c) == 0x12345678);

Select '<a href="/tickets/ticket/'||i.ticket_id||'">'||lvar_title||'</a><br />' from tickets where ...

because I was to lazy to do it in the proper layer...

"union select " 233455 ", " "usa"

"union select " 233455 ", " "canada"

Then puttied into my linux shell, opened emacs and added "create temporary table select 23456 as 'systemid', 'usa' as 'region'

Then pasted the entire csv of union selects. Did my joins, etc... Got the report out on time. I know now that I could have done it with an emacs macro, but just didn't have time to figure it out.

shudder

I had just taught myself php and wrote a curl script with the classes I wanted, and the few timeslots I wanted, in order. After a brief struggle I finally realized I needed to hit port 443 instead of 80 and, voila, my initial class registration was complete. A few were full but it kept hammering the site every 10 seconds and over the next few hours I got emails whenever it successfully registered me with a class.

I actually thought about charging $5 to handle other students' registrations because they hated dragging out of bed at 8am and refreshing their browser for an hour. Somehow I decided the university wouldn't approve....

When I was doing my graduate course in Computer Engineering, we had to submit loads of assignments each semester for each paper. "Assignment" means something that we should write by hand (print-outs not allowed) on any arbitrary topic provided by the lecturers. There was no problem solving ability required here, it was just answering questions like "What are the features of Java?", "Explain the layers in the TCP/IP model" etc.

As you can assume, this was a rather boring and useless exercise. In the first two years I made some girls from my class to write the assignments (which I am not interested in) for me in exchange for helping them in the computer lab and projects (which they were not much interested in).

By the end of second year, I found out another way to do this. I wrote a program that wrote the assignment for me. Here is how it worked: I will fetch the data from websites like Wikipedia etc and paste it in the program and the program will make it look like my handwriting. I click print and it will print the result to A4 sized papers and I submitted those.

I scanned my handwriting and separated each character and made it look like natural when paragraphs etc were constructed with this program.

The results were so impressive that later when I told this story and showed an assignment to one of my lecturers, he thought that I was just joking!

This hack even though trivial, saved me a lot of time in college.