

Ask HN: What's your greatest non-tech hack? - MWil

Of course this is inspired by the question from the application for YC but I&#x27;m not applying this year and I&#x27;m genuinely interested in sharing and hearing some other great anecdotes.<p>For me, I think it was when I used social engineering to track down the programmers who designed a very expensive product for a vendor in my industry and then negotiated a price to build the same full featured product for 1&#x2F;5th of what the vendor charges for a one-off job.  They were freelancing on odesk&#x2F;elance and I had used the demos that vendors offer of their products to categorize the features and estimate what technologies were involved.  When I talked with the programmer he admitted about how much he was paid for work on their product.<p>The industry is e-discovery for law firms, btw.
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brandonlipman
I had several instances that I thought would make a good example I choose this
one because I thought that this would be different and would definitely not be
considered a tech hack.

"Before christmas, I was buying gifts for my young cousins and I found out
that Toys"R"Us had a policy where they would match any competitor price. I
used this to my advantage, I was able to get presents, using my iPhone, that
were being retailed at $40.00 for around $8.00. Other shoppers asked me to
show them how to do the same. I helped several people free of charge.
Toys"R"Us was not fond of it, I just liked helping families out and showing
them how much money they were able to save."

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andrewhillman
I didn't apply but this is my non-tech hack...

I went to a large University. GEN ED lecture sizes were ~500 students and the
most skipped classes. At the start of each semester, I would stand outside
these 101 lectures to hand out fliers so I could find the students who would:
1) attend and never miss a class and 2) take amazing notes. Before finals, I
typed, printed and bound the notes and sold/hustled them at the student union.
I did 4-5 courses per semester and sold a ridiculous number of them for ~$50
ea. Helped lots of students pass courses they would have otherwise failed.

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xtrycatchx
cooking mung beans in a rice-cooker

