
Please share your (non-computer) system hacker stories - Tichy
The new question from the yc application "Please tell us about the time you (...) most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage" filters me out right there, so far I can't think of anything. How about you? I love that kind of stories, and I suppose giving them away now won't hurt the applicants chances?<p>I can only imagine that my whole live is a kind of hack: I hacked my girl-friends brain so that she actually went out with me. I hacked my own brain so that I managed to learn Computer Science, exercise regularly and eat reasonably healthy. I twisted my CV in the right way to land that job etc. And so on... But I guess that is not quite what YC is looking for... But I mean, people's life are essentially an attempt at optimizing their standing in the system, are they not?<p>I guess I am also not quite the "real world" systems hacker, because often it seems to entail taking advantage of somebody else? Ever since I read "The Art Of Intrusion", I remember it's lessons in all sorts of situations. Like today I was standing in line for cinema tickets, which were likely to be sold out before my turn. It would have been fun to try something, but not really fair towards the other queuing people. Not that I had a really great idea, but who knows, something might have worked (art of intrusion style, discover name of some employee of the cinema, then call cinema and pretend that person was supposed to reserve some tickets for me - one idea).
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cperciva
I assume that the PG et al. mean "hack" in the positive sense -- as much as
news.yc occasionally sounds cultish, I don't think they're following the usual
cult scheme of having prospective members confess their crimes in order to
ensure that the cult has blackmail material on everybody. :-)

That said, I'm having trouble coming up with a good example of what would
qualify here -- the best I have so far is when I was a new graduate student at
Oxford and dug through the Exam Decrees And Regulations (also known as the
"big grey book") to discover what nobody else in the Computing Lab was aware
of: That instead of writing a 50 page dissertation at the end of my first year
and being examined on it, I could count the fact that I had a paper published
in a major journal as equivalent to holding a Master's degree, and thereby
transfer from Probationary Research Student status to D.Phil. Student status
six months early and with hundreds of hours less work.

I would personally call this "reading the rules and understanding how they
work" rather than "hacking the system", but maybe that's what they mean.

~~~
pg
That is exactly what we mean.

~~~
cperciva
In that case, could I suggest making the question a bit clearer (perhaps
s/hacked (.*) system/made $1 system work/ or by giving an example of what you
mean)? The fact that I apparently had exactly what you were looking for, yet
wasn't sure if it qualified at all, is I think a good indication that the
language is ambiguous.

~~~
mixmax
If it had been me doing the application (haven't seen it) I would probably
build in some ambiguity. It gives a greater degree of freedom for the
applicant, and also in the real world you have to deal with ambiguity on a
daily basis, so I would like to see how an applicant deals with it.

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sanj
Years back, I helped run 6.270, the LEGO Robotics contest. The winners got a
very cool Lego watch. One of them was a friend of mine. She was more than a
little bummed because the stem on her watch didn't pull out far enough to
allow the time to be set.

Recalling that an adage that "even a broken clock is right twice a day", I
suggested she remove the battery. Then, when the current time was the same as
the time on the watch, reinstall the battery.

I've never seen her so delighted!

~~~
aston
Quality. Plus one just for mentioning 6.270.

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mooneater
I volunteered with my (then-) future wife to help build a big community
playground.

At one point there were maybe 5 of use moving this tube slide into place. It
was a very big, heavy, very twisty-shaped tubed. And we could feel it starting
to slip.

We were all struggling to hold it up. It wasnt working, and there was noone
else nearby to help.

Suddenly I leaped up and grabbed a hold onto an edge at the top. As I leaped I
could hear and feel people being like "wha..?" because the shape was so
strange, it was really hard to tell where the center of gravity was and how to
adjust it.

But in that moment, all my physics and calculus classes merged with instinct
like never before. I was hanging from this very counterintuitive top edge with
all my weight, and it stopped it slipping. The group then had time to organize
how to ease it - and me - down.

I am generally a non-athletic geek. That morning I felt like a sports star.
The best part was, I needed no external validation for it. My intellect was no
longer relegated to the exam halls.

------
jgrahamc
I travel very frequently by plane and almost always in economy. At one
particular airport that I regularly fly through there's always a really long
line for security, except for business and first class passengers.

Happily, my airline offers online checkin and the print out is a PDF file. So
I download the PDF file and print out my genuine boarding pass and put it in
my bag, then I doctor the boarding pass in Acrobat so that it says Business
instead of Economy and I change my seat assignment from something like 125H to
2D to make it look legit. Obviously, my name, flight, date, etc. are all
genuine.

------
iamwil
I have another one for the application, but this one would have been a better
hack had it worked.

I use to work at research lab where they named all the buildings after
numbers. No rhyme or reason. Building 1 was next to Building 9, which
connected to Building 42. For the important buildings, they were named after
famous ex-directors. They were building a new building, and I decided to name
it after my roommate (who is no director), Ian Montoya (name changed), who
also worked there.

The whole campus is connected via walkways between buildings, so you can walk
to the cafeteria from your office without going outside. So, you often ended
up walking with other employees on your way to lunch. What Ian and I would do
when we found ourselves in a cluster was to act out a scripted conversation as
if it was normal conversation:

    
    
      me: did you hear about that new building they're building?
      Ian: You mean BUILDING 23?
      me: yeah, THAT'S THE ONE.
      Ian: Yeah, what about it?
      me: I hear that they're going to call it the Ian Montoya Building.
      Ian: The IAN MONTOYA BUILDING?
      me: Yeah, the IAN MONTOYA BUILDING.
      Ian: huh, I should remember that, the IAN MONTOYA BUILDING.
    

I'd correct people when they mentioned it, at meetings, in the hallways, at
lunch, hoping it'd spread, but alas, I only was able to get the new hires to
call it that.

The only other one off the top of my head is a small one. From June until
April of next year, whenever people would ask, I'd tell them my birthday was
on April 1st. I also changed it on friendster, and other places mentioning my
birthday that friends would see. Come April 1st, I got a couple calls for my
birthday. "Happy Birthday!" they'd say, and I'd go, "Thanks! April Fools!"
After that, I had to convince them that I wasn't joking.

~~~
rw
Wright State?

------
DocSavage
My dissertation involved segmenting and rendering brains from 3D MR images of
the head. One of the ways I checked my software was by hacking the head off a
cadaver, imaging it, hacking out the brain, and then successfully matching
volumes and photographs of the brain sulci from various POVs with the 3D
renderings generated from the segmented images. That's probably my most
successful hacking of a non-computer system :)

~~~
yters
Has anyone ever placed speakers or moving parts in the cadavers? I often
wanted to do this at my college.

~~~
DocSavage
We must pay respect to the people who donate their bodies for educational and
scientific studies. So if the speakers or moving parts don't increase our
knowledge, the keeper of the cadavers should veto their use. The excellent
book "Stiff" by Mary Roach describes many interesting uses of cadavers, from
crash test dummies to Death's Acre in Knoxville, TN.

~~~
yters
Good point, that was wrong of me.

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aristus
Hmm. I was bored in high school, and wanted to keep up my summer job. So I
enrolled in a dropout prevention program intended for people who had to work
to support their families & such. My high school career was a short morning of
advanced-placement classes & then my "real" job. The counselors and teachers
didn't like it, but couldn't do much about it.

------
yters
Well, you don't always have to subvert the system to take advantage of the
situation. For instance, last time I was at the airport I skipped two lines
because I was just more aware (probably more awake:).

As for fun hacks, during college and group of friends and I put together a
raft from an old futon frame and trash bags instead of studying one night. We
sailed 14 people out to a small island in a nearby pond and planted our flag.

------
henning
In high school, I filled out some form on the Princeton Review's website
claiming I was a high school teacher in order to download sample Advanced
Placement tests. I worked through them and thought nothing more of it.

A month later the teachers in my AP classes gave me those same tests,
unmodified. I did pretty well.

I went to a community college for a year and then transferred over to
university to save some money, and it turned out by taking a calculus test
with about a month more of material in it, I could get out of an entire extra
semester of calculus classes. I taught myself the extra stuff and skipped an
entire year of math.

...I got nothin'. Good thing I'm not applying for YC funding!

------
Leon
Sometimes when visiting big cities I'll check google maps/city newspapers for
big construction projects and high end hotels - then get reservations at them
for a fifth the price. It's how I ended up in a penthouse at a swanky hotel in
Toronto for an eighth of what it would have cost me otherwise.

Besides, when you're twenty stories up and can sleep through anything who
cares what's going on outside?

------
mixmax
Did a nice real-world hack in Ibiza some 10 years back...

A friend of mine and I went to Ibiza in may hoping to land some kind of bar
job, thinking it would be pretty easy.

It turned out that we weren't the only ones to have gotten this great idea,
and all the bars and clubs in the place had already hired for the summer
season, so getting a job was near impossible. After having been there for
around 2 weeks we had no money, no jobs, no food and no money to get back
home. And we didn't even speak the language..

Desperate measures were needed, So I thought up a plan...

Back home I had been to this club where a guy was running a tequila slammer
bar over in the corner of the club - basically just a slab of wood across two
upright steel drums, a bottle of tequila, sprite and lemons and a couple of
shot glasses. He would fill the shotglasses with half sprite, half tequila,
slam them into the table so the sprite fizzed up, and people would gulp it
down while it was still fizzing.

I noticed that noone did tequila slammers in Ibiza...

So my plan was to locate the club I most wanted to work in (the one with the
hottest and most drunk chicks obviously), talk to the manager and tell him how
amazingly cool I was, and that back home I was a huge celebrity with my crazy
tequila slammer bar. And that he should be honored that he was the first one I
offered to strike a deal with to do my stuff. He would make loads of money,
and his place would be the most popular in town because of me and my amazing
skills.

I had of course never done a tequila slammer in my life...

So I sent my friend down the club I had chosen pretending to be my manager
with a handwritten letter explaining my successful (and faked...) track record
as a master tequila slammer showman. He said that I would be along the next
day, and that they had 24 hours to consider my offer, or I would move on.

The next day I went down to the club to meet the manager. He was impressed by
the letter that I had written, and agreed that I had to be quite a star based
on the experience and track record that I had made up the day before. So we
struck a deal: I would get a 14 day period to show that I was as amazing as i
said I was.

The next day my friend and I set up a bar in the back of the club and got
ready for the action. I was scared shitless since I had set pretty high
expectations for everyone, and the word had gotten around the club about this
crazy guy that was supposed to be some kind of star. To top it off the manager
of the bar had brought in the managers of quite a few of the other bars to
show off his new amazing crazy new tequila bar. Everyone was expecting a huge
spectacle of a show.

Since I had never done a tequila slammer in my life it was pretty obvious that
I needed to do something drastic to survive this. So I went for broke and
decided to start off by doing the first 10 shots myself, get totally drunk and
just go crazy. And pray to god....

It worked: It went totally wild, I ended the night wearing nothing but
underwear, having slammed tequilas on the bar, on the walls, the floor, the
ceiling, and on peoples forehead. I think I broke at least fifty shot glasses,
I was standing, sometimes lying, in a poddle of tequila and sprite. But people
loved it.

After 14 days I got a sweet deal, making good money for being drunk, chatting
up girls and generally having a splendid time. There was even an article in a
major Spanish magazine about this crazy drunk Dane in Ibiza slamming tequilas
on peoples forehead...

~~~
cperciva
_[...] So I sent my friend down the club I had chosen pretending to be my
manager with a handwritten letter explaining my successful (and faked...)
track record as a master tequila slammer showman [...]_

As entertaining as the story is, I'm not sure that I'd count "being an
effective fraud" as a skill I would want in someone I was considering funding.
Some people may have a different perspective -- I've certainly heard it said
that being able to lie with a straight face is a vital skill in business --
but given that the YC motto is "Make something people want", not "Lie to
people to get them to pay for what you can offer them", I hope the YC crew
doesn't take this view.

~~~
mixmax
But on a more serious note...

The difference is intent. And there is a lesson to be learnt for startups.

If you go into a meeting with a customer and he asks for something that you
think you can deliver, but are not sure you answer yes. And then you go back
to your office, work your ass off and hope for the best. Sometimes you make
it, sometimes you don't. This is not fraud, since you think (or hope...) that
you can deliver - you have an intent of fulfilling your contract. It is merely
pushing the envelope, which is what business people do. In a startup this is
needed if you want to get ahead, the odds are stacked against you so you need
every break you can get, even if that means exaggerating a bit to land the
deal.

Good business people know this, as long as your intent is good this is OK.
Developers often don't understand this, primarily because good business people
don't bother them with how it works - just like good developers don't bother
business people with what happens under the hood of their programs. As long as
it works.

~~~
cperciva
_If you go into a meeting with a customer and he asks for something that you
think you can deliver, but are not sure you answer yes. And then you go back
to your office, work your ass off and hope for the best._

Yes, but you don't (or shouldn't) lie to your customer and claim that you have
a successful track record of doing exactly what he's asking you to do.

If you're interviewing for a job and your interviewer asks if you can program
in language X (which you have little or no experience with), it's one thing to
say that you can learn it; it's quite another to have listed "10 years of
experience with language X" on your resume when you first applied for the
position.

~~~
mixmax
Well I don't think myspace got to where they are today by being really great
guys. And they sure as hell haven't got a great codebase and a a great
product.

How do you think it happened?

~~~
DaniFong
I don't think cperciva's sense of morals is conditioned on wanting to be the
next Myspace.

If it's a success, the way you run your startup and the lessons you learn will
have a tremendous effect on the rest of your life. It takes a huge amount of
effort to get something going. You don't have time to make dozens of
businesses, and if you're not clear about your values early on, you can find
yourself a success, but without a strong internal sense of accomplishment.

------
chris_l
> But I mean, people's life are essentially an attempt at optimizing their
> standing in the system, are they not?

Scary! But actually I used to think that way...

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jgrahamc
Here's a very minor hack. One time I was going to the movies at Shoreline
(Mountain View) and I wanted to go and see "Spy Game". Unfortunately, it was
sold out.

But I have really good eye sight and I could see from the door which movies
were playing on the same side of the theater as Spy Game. There's one control
point on each side of the theater and so I bought a ticket for a less wanted
movie on the same side as Spy Game. Showed my ticket to the guy who let me
through. Then I simply walked into Spy Game and found a really crappy seat
near the back (all that was left).

Good movie, though.

------
ojbyrne
I missed a large part of grade 10 because of moving and travelling. When time
came to register for school (in Montreal, Quebec) the public school system
wanted me to repeat grade 10 because I had missed so much. I and my parents
found a private school that had entrance exams, and they let me take both the
grade 10 and grade 11 exams. Passed the grade 11 one, and went right into
grade 11.

------
dawnerd
During my senior year in highschool, I was taking my second year of film
production. We had a new teacher who didn't really know everything he was
trying to teach. My previous teacher was a big name in the industry (he
animated the end credits to Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
and a United Airlines commercial involving a dragon.) I learned more than I
probably should have from him, but kept it a secret. At finals time senior
year, most of the questions were opinionated (how many gigs does video take on
a HDD, how many cuts does a typical commercial have etc..) I ended up getting
100% because I told the teacher he was wrong and proved how I was right.
Everyone else did poorly.

------
murrayh
Clearly not my hack, but worth mentioning:
<http://www.snopes.com/business/deals/pudding.asp>

------
shimon
My proudest hack combines computers and the public school system. In 1998,
going into my senior year of high school, I really wanted to take Computer
Science AP. That year, the AP board was switching the course curriculum from
Pascal to C++. Unfortunately for us, the school's computer lab was ancient-- a
set of 8088 PCs with no hard drives, with each student given a floppy
containing a bootable Pascal environment and all his/her code. The school
didn't have any money for a new lab full of computers, and was planning to
cancel the course. So I came up with the idea of building one reasonably
powerful linux server, and networking the existing PCs to it using a bootable
"dumb terminal" disk. Cost: about $2000 for the server and 20 network cards.

Several friends and I worked over the summer to set up our linux lab. It
turned out the network card device driver, built for x86 boxes, wouldn't work
on these 8088 CPUs. So we bought a big pile of old 386 motherboards with CPUs
and RAM from a friendly alum for $200. It turned out the 8088 cases were not
standard, with metal bumps that would instantly short one of our new
motherboards. So we installed them on top of their anti-static bags, with only
expansion cards to hold stuff in place. Everything except the server was
overtly cheap and flimsy, like the 10-base-2 coax network we used instead of
10-base-T because it didn't require an expensive hub. But everything was also
easily replaceable, and we built extras just in case the usual firm smack
didn't fix a broken machine.

Then, on our last work visit at the end of summer, we got some discouraging
news: the teacher who was supposed to lead CS AP in our new lab had suddenly
departed for a better-paying job at another school district. We finished the
lab, wondering how we'd get by without a teacher. The course remained
tentatively scheduled and for the first few days we tried to teach everyone
how to use the OS and compiler while supervised by a friendly but clueless
substitute teacher.

Luckily, we ended up with a much better teacher. Brad Kuhn, a CS graduate
student at the nearby University of Cincinnati, came to meet us and knew he
was our only chance. Though I'm sure he didn't enjoy some of the disciplinary
responsibilities that came with being a high school teacher, he shared with us
a deep knowledge of CS and an honest passion for free software. (Brad went on
to become director of the Free Software Foundation, and is now CTO at the
Software Freedom Law Center.) We hung out after school playing netris and
debating when (or if) Microsoft would start publishing free software. There
was no shortage of disagreement.

That was ten years ago in Cincinnati, but my former classmates remain among my
closest friends. We're now the age Brad was when he took that job. What am I
going to do this year that will have as positive an impact on the world as
Brad's decision to take that job 10 years ago? What are you going to do?

