
Tell us your naughty stories - neilk
Paul Graham recently mentioned that one of the characteristics Y Combinator looks for is "naughtiness" -- an intolerance for bureaucratic rules, a history of beating the system. Go read about it here: (http://paulgraham.com/founders.html)<p>So what are your stories?
======
olalonde
(I know, that's totally wrong and probably not what PG refers to by "beating
the system".)

Some years ago, my friend and I decided to kick off the night by drinking some
beer in a park, downtown Montreal. After a few minutes, it started raining
like hell. We had to get inside somewhere and the closest place was a
university building which was "fortunately" still opened. We went inside and
walked by the security, each carefully dissimulating our beer through our
jacket. After wandering some time through the hallways, we finally found an
unlocked classroom to finish our booze. Once done, we slowly walked back to
the main entrance. We would soon realize that time had flied by and the
building was long closed.

Fortunately there was still a security guy. We kindly asked him if he could
unlock the door for us. Of course, we looked somewhat drunk and he asked us,
on an authoritative tone, what we were doing here. My friend came up with the
lamest lie. The guy wasn't stupid and obviously knew we were hiding something.
By that time, another security guy had came by. "I have to get us out of the
shit", I thought to myself. I took all my courage and asked: "Ok, so you won't
let us out just because we are gay?". The guy became visibly panicked,
probably frightened to lose his job over homophobia. He almost apologized and
quickly let us out. I was really proud of social engineering our way out of
this delicate situation. My friend wasn't, he started yelling incoherently at
me. I told him to get over it: "Who cares if he thinks you're gay? You're
never going to see him again". I was wrong. Remember the second security guy
who was standing there all along? It happened to be a friend of his very
catholic father.

------
burningion
Free College Hack:

In high school, I had a rough time with family stuff and my grades started to
slack. I knew that getting a scholarship would be crucial if I wanted to go to
college in the future. However, my grades simply weren't going to cut it for
the Florida Lottery Bright Futures scholarship. I needed a 3.5+ GPA, a 1250+
SAT score, and 60 hours of community service in order to get their best 100%
scholarship.

At the rate I was going, my GPA wouldn't be near that.

So I did some research, and I found out that the Bright Futures Scholarship
was also applicable to home schooled students. Intrigued, I researched a bit
into what made up a home schooled student's GPA.

I found a legal loophole here. One of the ways that the State of Florida
graded home schooled students was by letting them talk to a psychologist. The
psychologist said you were performing at a grade level, and you graduated.
Grades were simply "made up".

So I dropped out of high school end of sophomore year, and created my own home
schooled program. Which basically consisted of building a boat, programming,
and volunteering at ECHO (echonet.org)

In dropping out, I basically had two years to practice taking the SAT's in
order to get above a 1270. I scored a 1280 and got a 100% free ride into any
State school.

But by the time I'd spent 2 years out of the educational system, I'd decided a
year of living in the rain forest would be better than partying at school. So
I turned down the scholarship and moved to the Panamanian rain forest instead.

~~~
mcrittenden
Geez, awesome story. How was the rain forest? Motivation for moving there? Do
you regret turning down the scholarship?

~~~
burningion
Rain forest was incredible. Howler monkeys put me to sleep every night, and I
never had such vivid of dreams as I did when living there.

Motivation for moving there: Just something I felt like I needed to do. I kind
of developed my own alternative college course, which consisted of traveling
the world a bit and learning a few salable skills along the way.

Do I regret turning down the scholarship: Long story short, no. I knew I
wanted to eventually be in business for myself, and I knew the field I was
interested in (programming) wasn't being adapted quickly enough by higher
education. I figured I'd be much better off coding my own projects and
learning from there.

Basically, I had a realization that there were two types of people in the
world: those who expected the world to act a certain way, (ie going to school,
getting educated == guaranteed success) and those who supposed the world was
open to influence (ie create your own reality).

I decided that I would rather take responsibility for creating my own world.
It was definitely a painful experience at times, but has been worth it.

Now I'm working at a company I love doing incredibly challenging work with
people who are incredible. So no, I don't regret it.

~~~
bgraves
Wow! This all sounds incredible! You should write a book about it all...very
intriguing.

------
jasonkester
I used to work as a salaried employee for a consulting firm. I'd record my
hours on a timesheet so that they could bill the right clients, but anything
over 40 hours a week was ignored on my paycheck. The understanding was that if
ever your hours dropped below 40, you could bill an overhead number to make up
for the difference, thus the fairness of not getting paid for overtime.

So a year in, I only managed to find 35 hours of work one week, so I called up
HR and got that overhead number to put down for those extra 5 hours. Next day,
I found myself in a meeting with my boss and his boss, being put on some form
of probationary "hourly" status, working part time until I could get my
workload back up to speed. I could work as few as 24 hours per week, and I'd
only get paid for the hours I worked.

So naturally things picked up and soon I found myself working 50 and 60 hour
weeks again, and amazingly, my new "hourly" status meant I was getting paid
for all of them. HR sent up the necessary paperwork to get me back onto
"Salaried" mode and I told them I'd get it right back to them.

1 month later, they sent that paperwork again, and I apologized for letting it
go on so long.

Next month, my boss delivered it by hand and I promised to "get right on it."

Finally, after 180 days of billing 60 hour weeks and getting paid for all of
it, I found myself back in that same room with my boss, his boss, and now
_his_ boss, all of whom wanting to know why I hadn't filled in that paperwork.

I laid out the math for them. Silence... Then uncontrolled laughter from all
hands. Congratulations, son. But how about we fill out that paperwork right
now?

~~~
tpz
Don't kid yourself. You were called into those meetings because, like at many
companies, there was a promise of time in return for extra time put in but,
like at many companies, that promise was never intended to go both ways.

The first meeting was because you dared to utilize their promise and get some
time in return.

The second meeting was because their usual course of action in such first
meetings backfired on them and you were in the room to get brought back into
line (specifically, back onto salary.)

You didn't mention quitting in response or forcing them to give you a raise in
acknowledgment of your efforts. Did you?

~~~
jasonkester
Thanks for paraphrasing, but all that was implied in what I wrote. It was
company policy to promote the illusion of paid undertime at the expense of no
paid overtime. The only problem was that they'd written the policy in a way
that it could be exploited.

~~~
tpz
I figured that either the original situation went over your head or that your
post went over mine, so at least now I know which. That and that I should have
gotten more sleep last night. :)

At least you were able to work the system there for a good six months. The
vast majority of people finding themselves in that kind of work situation
don't tend to fare nearly as well as you did.

------
davidst
I rode a motorcycle across Russia and several of the former Soviet republics
eight years ago. You can't help but learn many useful hacks along the way.

Here's one: How to deal with the police. Their work is boring and it's not
unusual for them to go long stretches of time without being paid. They see you
coming up the road-- They're curious and you look interesting. They motion for
you to pull over and unless you've managed to get so close that you can
plausibly claim you didn't see the baton waving you'd better obey them.

The hack: For goodness sake don't sit their dumbly and wait for them to speak
up! If you do they'll have to justify pulling you over. "Document!", and
you're screwed. The next thirty minutes are spent going through your papers
and your belongings while they look for any pretense to hit you up for a
fine/bribe. Yes, it's corrupt, but understand that is the only way of life for
them. Empathy and understanding will get you much further than casting
judgment.

Be the first to speak. Raise your helmet visor, smile and ask for help of some
kind. Even something as simple as, "Skolka kilometer Volgograd?" will do. When
they answer, nod, smile, shake their hand and say, "Speciba."

There's a 75% chance you're done and you can go on your way. The remaining 25%
involves a longer conversation with limited English (and compliment them on
their English no matter what) and pointing out your route on a map and where
you're going. They may offer you a drink or to share a meal. Feel free to do
so if you have time.

I never once paid a bribe which must be some kind of record.

~~~
amadiver
What does '"Skolka kilometer Volgograd?" will do. When they answer, nod,
smile, shake their hand and say, "Speciba."' mean? I'm having no luck with
online translators.

~~~
cowpewter
From context, I'm guessing, "How many kilometers to Volgograd?" and "Thanks"

~~~
Natsu
I'm betting you did more than mere guessing, because you can reason the whole
thing out from the context.

If you did what I did, you first assumed that kilometer was the same in both
languages, then that Volgograd was a proper noun (due to being capitalized)
and used the context of 'pointing to a map' to infer that it was a place of
some kind. That means that Skolka is a question word due to the question mark
at the end of the sentence. From there, it's hardly a stretch to assume that
Skolka means something like 'how many', because there aren't many questions
involving distance and a place that it would make sense to ask.

The context of smiling and shaking their hand means that "Speciba" is a word
expressing appreciation, so you can confidently translate it as something like
"thanks."

------
jgrahamc
I spent 6 months commuting between France and Germany flying on a Sunday night
in one direction and a Friday night in the other. To avoid waiting in airports
for any length of time I hacked my boarding passes.

I was always flying in economy but I would check in on line and print my real
boarding pass, then modify the PDF of the boarding pass and change it to a
seat in business with whatever other indications where necessary for a genuine
business class passenger (e.g. the word BUSINESS or PREMIUM in big letters). I
got all that information by picking up a discarded boarding pass at the
airport.

Then I could arrive at the airport and skip all the lines using my fake
boarding pass to go down the special business class channel and then use my
real boarding pass to board the plane.

I only did this at airports where boarding passes were manually verified.

~~~
ceejayoz
I wonder how many terrorism charges you'd be up on if you did that in the US
these days.

~~~
jedbrown
Bruce Schneier has discussed this many times on his blog, but from the
perspective of flying on someone else's ticket. The problem is that security
usually isn't electronically checking that the boarding pass you are holding
us actually valid, and the gate isn't checking IDs. This is still possible at
many/most US airports.

------
jasonkester
Fast Food Hack:

When I was in highschool, Burger King ran this "checkers" game, where you'd
get a card with a little checkerboard on it, then scratch your way across it
by picking squares until you either lost or won a prize. The one feature they
advertised was that "Every card is a winner", meaning that if you picked the
right path you were guaranteed to win something.

A friend had a sister who worked at a Burger King, so he picked up a huge
stack of these cards and spent a night scratching off all the spaces from all
of them. It turned out they had a control code at the bottom that could be
correlated back to the card configuration, so he was able to put together a
cheat sheet that had the winning moves for every code.

All that month, meals for every kid in the school would consist of walking
into Burger King, asking for a "Complimentary Game Card", which they were
legally obligated to provide. Then, after a minute of consultation at a table,
returning to the counter: "Looks like I won a small fries. And could I have
another game card?"

Fun times. The kid who discovered the pattern claimed to have won a Carribbean
Cruise.

~~~
TooSmugToFail
This reminded me of the time when I was a kid (maybe 5 or 6 years old), I went
with my aunt to buy the newspaper or something like that. They were also
selling these scratch lottery tickets and my aunt would usually buy me one or
two.

I don't really remember how, but I figured out that the scratch-off paint on
the winning tickets had a slightly jagged edge.

My aunt couldn't beleive it, nor could the seller: she would buy me the first
ticket, I'd pick it out, scratch it and use the proceeds to buy another one.
This went on for a few days... After my aunt bought me the first one, I'd
proceed going through the whole stack until I picked out all the winning
tickets.

Unfortunately, the best I could do is win back the money invested, as the most
frequent prize amount was the price of the ticket.

------
harold
I once had a client that paid with a bad check. To make matters worse, the
check had arrived several weeks late. Rumor had it that his business was on
shaky ground.

I knew something was up when the teller at my bank noticed the client's name
and said they would have to verify the check (check was drawn on a different
bank) And of course it was revealed there were non sufficient funds.

Bad check in hand, I went to his bank and tried to cash it, knowing they would
not do so. Sure enough, the teller apologized and asked me to contact the
client for resolution. Maybe it was her sympathetic tone that prompted me to
ask, but she revealed the account was only $18 short of clearing. So I pulled
$18 out of my pocket and asked her to deposit it on behalf of that account.
She then cashed my check for $2,850.

The client called a few days later, very angry, because several of his checks
to "more important" people had bounced instead. His business failed a few
months later.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I find it odd that they effectively revealed the balance of someone else's
account to basically a total stranger.

------
earbitscom
At my very first internet job, in 1998 or so, I was hired as a temp. They said
they wanted me to find websites that would be good publishers for their
content network. They said to do so by searching AltaVista for sites, and then
looking to see if they had a web counter, the kind that say "You are visitor
number XXX". If the counter said over 100,000 they considered that a good
sized publisher and someone else would be in charge of recruiting them. In
retrospect, of course, there was no indication of how long it had taken the
site to get that 100,000 visitors, nor did any good site use the counters
much. But I didn't really know all of that then.

So I ask the other temp, "How do you do this?" And he says, "Well, right now I
decided to find sports sites, so I just search for the word 'football' and
click each result, scroll down, and see if there is a counter over 100,000." I
said, "How many do you usually find?" He says, "Yesterday, I found 6."

I did this for about 2 minutes until I got smart. I searched for 'You are
visitor number' and instantly got only sites with counters. Within a few hours
I had logged a ton of sites. At the end of that day, they fired the other temp
and asked me to work full time, but the agreement with the temp agency said
that they couldn't hire me for 90 days after they let me go. So, they fired me
and told me that I could work from home as an independent contractor for the
90 day period. They would pay me to keep finding sites, and offered to pay me
$10 per site that I found for up to 50 sites per week ($500). They had no idea
I was able to find sites so quickly.

I spent the next 90 days building a Rage Against the Machine fan site with my
friend at home and, every Friday, I'd spend 20 minutes logging 50 sites using
my "You are visitor number" technique, drive into the office, drop off my
list, and collect my $500 check that they thought I had worked all week to
earn.

~~~
earbitscom
Also...in High School typing class, I was a two-finger typer. Every morning we
had to take a two sentence typing test to see if we had improved. Rather than
learn to type like I was supposed to, I just memorized all of the two sentence
phrases that made up the tests. Within a couple weeks of the class, it didn't
matter which phrases popped up, I was two-finger typing over 80 words per
minute.

~~~
jedbrown
When did you learn to type, or are you still paying for this "hack"?

~~~
earbitscom
Oh no...I finally learned to type around 1998. I moved to L.A. My roommate
bailed on me and left me here. I discovered Yahoo! Chat to pass the time and
somehow that's what finally forced me to become a better typist. Just tested
myself for shits and giggles - adjusted speed of 71 wpm. ;)

------
lisper
I used to be a researcher, so I wrote a lot of grant proposals. I started to
get tired of having to speculate about what I might be able to deliver so I
spent a year or two under-promising on my proposals and eventually got a year
ahead of my proposals. So what I wrote up in my proposals was something that I
had already done the year before but not yet published. So I'd get my grant,
work on something completely new, then deliver the previous year's work, and
then write up a new proposal to do whatever I had actually done most recently.
I got a reputation for consistently delivering on my promises.

Then one year I had a proposal rejected on the grounds that what I was
proposing was impossible to do on the budget I had allocated. That's when I
decided to quit and do something else.

~~~
aeontech
That is brilliant.

~~~
lisper
Thanks :-)

------
randomtask
I lived in Germany for a bit. While there I really wanted to learn to speak
German properly, but when I first arrived my spoken German was pretty awful.
Since many Germans speak English pretty well and could evidently tell from the
way I was pronouncing things that I was an English speaker they would often
switch to speaking English with me mid-conversation. This annoyed me because
I'd gone to a lot of effort to move there, was trying my best to learn the
language, and this was clearly hindering my efforts.

So I came up with a plan. Whenever a conversation would switch to English in
this way I'd lay on a really thick accent, use lots of slang and idiomatic
phrases, and generally try and make things difficult for the other person to
understand. The result was often that the other person would look puzzled and
the conversation would switch back to German. Eventually I learned how to
pronounce things in a way that didn't immediately betray me as a foreigner,
but this trick helped a good bit in the beginning.

~~~
middus
A friend of mine is from Ireland and went to a Scandinavian country. Same
story there: people would switch to English as soon as they found out that
she's from Ireland. Her trick: "Sorry, I come from the Gaeltacht. My first
language is Gaeilge."

~~~
randomtask
I was mistaken for being American a lot. I'm pretty sure it was the default
nationality to guess when they couldn't place an accent. Good to hear it
wasn't just happening to me though ;)

------
Mz
Surfed the zero percent interest rate promos on credit cards: rolled debt onto
a zero percent card (thus not really making a payment that month because you
just moved the debt around) and had lower payments until the promo ran out.
Repeat with new promo on a different card.

One I'm proud of but might not be counted as a hack here (not exactly naughty,
but good for blowing people's minds, so similarly satisfying to me): Amicable
divorce without lawyers. Saved probably tens of thousands of dollars on
lawyers fees and had the added bonus that since we didn't lawyer up, we
weren't getting antagonistic "cover your ass" advice from lawyers. This meant
there was more money to go around (and less paranoia), so we both were able to
refrain from squabbling about the small stuff and say "whatever makes it
easiest for you". I had people tell me I was crazy to trust my ex but I got a
lot more money out of it than I otherwise would have (more than I could have
legally insisted on had I fought with him).

We went to the courthouse together to file the papers. The person behind the
counter was telling him "you need to do yadda yadda". I guess they thought I
was his new love interest, not the future ex. He turned to me and said
something like "Did you hear that? You need to sign here." I signed there
while the person behind the counter tried to pick their eyeballs back up off
the floor. I guess they had never seen anything like it before.

~~~
stakent
You can have great product idea here. Ebook - how I ... etc.

~~~
Mz
I'm pretty burnt out on trying to help people. It really goes over very poorly
and I get lambasted for it and, so far, there has really been no money in it.
:-/ But when I start that webcomic I keep swearing I will start, it might be
good material. :-D

~~~
runjake
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.

~~~
Mz
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 speak highly of my writing ability -- even published authors
and publishing company founders -- and I have had what began as an email of
mine on a list wind up being quoted (after much editing) in a book.

2) I tend to be very polarizing: People either love me or hate me. Not much in
between. The only thing I have found so far that reduces the amount I get
attacked is to go out of my way to avoid public praise. This isn't a real good
tactic for advertising something but has worked well for helping to encourage
a budding grass roots movement for folks who are really deathly ill and whom
all the experts have written off.

3) People find me provocative, which is generally a bad thing if you are
trying to be helpful. In the entertainment industry, "provocative" is a good
thing. I also tend to be a ham, which is something I find I have to seriously
tone down when trying to "give advice". That isn't working well for me. My
sense of humor is critical to my ability to cope effectively, so it is
practically lying for me to give advice without a few (er, a few zillion)
tongue-in-cheek, humorous observations thrown in.

4) Comedians are the people with the socially accepted role for making the
kinds of social observations I am very good at making. Giving people that
information straight up really, really bombs. I know: I've been doing it for
years (and going down in flames for it, over and over). The serious version of
my observations goes over about as well as dousing someone in gasoline and
setting them on fire.

Anyway, I would love it if you were right and I could easily make big bucks
this way (or even enough little bucks to leave my job). But it isn't fitting
with my understanding of the direction I need to go.

~~~
runjake
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.

~~~
Mz
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).

------
nhebb
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 from a B to an A.

\----

My last year of college I was low on funds, so at the beginning of each term I
would go to the school library and see if they stocked any of the textbooks. I
could usually find 1 or 2. I'd check them out and keep them the whole term,
paying only a $5 late fee - vs. the $100 textbook cost. _(In case you think
this is inethical, based on the past checkout records, nobody ever checked
these books out)_

\----

Hack I wish I'd thought of: A college buddy spent the first day of summer
vacation going into all the bars in downtown Portland and getting info about
their happy hours. He had every day of the week mapped out and got dinner and
a beer for $1/night.

~~~
listic
Does _every_ bar have happy hours? I thought it's rare thing for bars to have.

~~~
hansef
In Portland, yes, nearly every bar. Although you probably can't pull off a
beer and dinner for $1 anymore most places.

------
dageroth
I bootstrapped my first startup by playing roulette in a casino every night. A
Cinema close by was giving out 10 Euro coupons for the casino to play with, so
we went first to the cinema every night, asked the people coming out for their
tickets and then hit the casino to play with the 10 Euros. Each of us were
netting about 400 Euros per month, which was enough to cover the ramen ;-) And
that for a nice refreshing half an hour tour in the evening.

The stupid EU put an end to it by changing the gambling laws and prohibiting
casinos to give out coupons for chips - someone might get addicted - instead
the new coupons allowed free entry and a drink, but until then it worked like
a charm.

The casino people were a little freaked out at first, shooting us suspicious
looks but after three weeks they got used to us...;-)

~~~
nollidge
Isn't roulette a losing game? Or did you have some optimal betting strategy?

~~~
metamemetics
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.

~~~
lesterbuck
The book about that group, The Eudaemonic Pie, is a great read:

[http://www.amazon.com/Eudaemonic-Pie-Thomas-
Bass/dp/05951423...](http://www.amazon.com/Eudaemonic-Pie-Thomas-
Bass/dp/0595142362/)

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"

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

------
maxklein
On my recent trip to Africa, I avoided giving bribes at 3 different spots in
the airport by doing the following:

When they asked me for "something to have lunch with", I'd lower my voice and
say "it's not possible now" then quickly glance at the person behind me.

Neither I nor them had to pay anything.

~~~
bvi
Ok, I don't get it.

~~~
wallflower
By glancing back, he is implying that the person behind him is something like
a plain-clothes security officer (who should not be bribed)

~~~
mattmaroon
I got that part, but why would you have to give bribes to African airport
officials?

~~~
catshirt
Right- I am confused by "avoided giving bribes" since typically bribes are
something you go out of your way to provide.

I am guessing corrupt officials basically request money from you for no
reason- and it's expected you give it to them (for no reason as well). Then,
they just call it a "bribe". But I'm guessing... pardon my cultural ignorance.

~~~
kapitti
There's quite a few airports around the world where you'll run into this sort
of scam. In Guadalajara, I've had to pay a "fee" to board a flight that I
already had a seat on. In Bangalore I had to pay another fee so that my
luggage would not go missing or be damaged.

------
garrettgillas
When I was in 6th grade ('94) I scanned articles from our encyclopedias onto
our 386 and then used OCR software to make it usable as a class research
paper. You can imagine what happened the following year when I got dial up.

_________________________________________

I also had a computer hardware class in high school that the teacher would
often leave for extended periods of time. The other students and I get enough
systems running and scrounged a router so that we could play multiplayer
Warcraft II during class (which was an old game even back then). We pulled
this off for about a month before we got caught. It turned out the teacher
really didn't care anyway.

_________________________________________

When I lived in rural Mexico, I used to tape pictures of Jesus to the outside
of my packages that I sent home so that the shady people in the mail system
wouldn't mess with them.

_________________________________________

My old boss used to add useless revisions every time that I sent him an email
saying that part of a project was finished such as "Change the font up to 12px
on that navigation please. What? It's already at 12? Can you make it 12 and a
half? No, 13px is way too big but I want it bigger than 12 so just fix it
OK?"...yeah, that guy. Anyway, I found that if I sent him emails at the end of
the day, he would not read them until the following morning when he had the
most emails to respond to. Therefore, sending him finished tasks at the end of
the day meant fewer useless revisions. I found that outlook has a "delay
delivery" setting so as I finished tasks through the day, I would que them to
send at about 7:30 at night, when I could be sure that he wasn't working. Lo
and behold, the endless revisions went down by about 90% and I got a lot more
stuff done.

~~~
garrettgillas
Ok, one more hack from college although it probably won't work these days.

All of the professors in the science department at my university would tape
lists of their student's IDs and their test grades outside their office
through out the semester including finals. When looking for classes for the
following semester, I just had to look at which professors gave better grades
on average and sign up for their classes. The difference was quites
staggering.

Some professors consistently failed roughly half of their students while
others would have over 3/4 the class with A's consistently. Granted, there
were some variable to consider like which course was being taught and the fact
that some groups of students are sometimes simply better performers than
others. But there was no way I was going to see that kind of data displayed
publicly and not take advantage of it.

~~~
TheSOB88
So you actually took the 75% A classes? Did you learn a lot from those profs,
or were they just giving the As away? I would figure that, knowing nothing
else about the prof, the one with grades in the middle would be the most
effective teacher.

~~~
araneae
In my experience, the median grades are higher for smaller classes, and those
smaller classes are often more advanced and populated by graduate students.
It's not that the professor is easier, it's that everyone works really hard
and learns a lot, because they're motivated by the work itself.

This does not hold true for large classes where the median grade is an A,
however; those are usually genuinely easier.

------
Xk
About ten years ago, I went to my father's work one Saturday afternoon. He
worked at [big software company]. Throughout the entire building there were
doors that were locked, and to open them, you'd put your badge next to the
scanner and the door would open. These doors were everywhere. The doors had to
be able to be opened from the other side without a badge, though. In case
there was ever an emergency, people would need to be able to get out without a
badge.

I noticed this when we let the building for lunch: the door was automatically
opened as we walked towards it. When we got back from lunch, being the curious
ten year old I was, I tried to figure out how it worked. It turns out they had
a motion detector pointing in front of the door, and whenever it detected
motion, the magnetic locks on the door would open.

So, I asked my father for a stack of paper, went to the elevator room on the
locked side of one of these doors, and for thirty minutes made paper airplanes
and threw them through the crack in the middle of the double doors until I
found out how to make a plane which would expand enough to trip the motion
detector. After another half hour of practice, it would only take one or two
throws to trip the detector.

The next time I visited his work, and after a few emails to the building
security, the cracks in all the doors were sealed.

I've been interested in security ever since then.

------
rjurney
For my first experiment testing boundaries, I went round the building taping
off red high five zones, put up posters outlining an official high five
incentive program, and started recruiting a high five squad. The Wall Street
Journal picked the story up and it worked out well for everyone. We still high
five a lot.

Then I stole a conference room called Battle Ship, moved into it with my big
purple chair, end table and lamp, renamed it Pirate Ship, and repurposed it as
a library for quiet hacking. I posted to the company group, "I sank your
battleship," with a humorous story, and it was a hit. I drew a sketchup file
of a remodeled room with pyramid foam like at YC, an egg chair, and a data
scientist brain washing video on a pull down screen from the overhead
projector. I knew I was at the right company when the official response was to
rebuild the room to my design (it was even dirt cheap to do so). We
brainwashed our first candidate this week.

Finally I promoted myself because I didn't like my old title. That's going
well so far.

Probably none of this would have gone as well without a supportive boss
running cover I never saw, but if you mean well, are a type A, and are totally
committed... at most companies you can get away with anything that advances
the mission. As in all walks of life you have to sell.

Shenanigans like these taught me how the system operates, so now I can get
real things done the same way.

~~~
makmanalp
This is great! Are you hiring?

~~~
rjurney
Yes. Aggressively. rjurney at linkedin.com

Rubyists, javscript hackers, the data obsessed, information designers... all
badly needed.

------
brandnewlow
Journalism Hack:

During J-School I found a letter to the editor in a neighborhood paper from
someone complaining about the busted up sidewalks. I decided to do a story
about it and needed to interview the original letter writer. Unfortunately the
paper only published her first name, "Judy" and no contact info.

I found the piece of sidewalk in question. Stopped, turned, and looked around
at the 4 high-rise appt. buildings across the street. I pulled out my
notebook, wrote "Please let Judy know a reporter is here to talk about the
sidewalks with her," on it, walked into the fanciest, snootiest building, gave
it to the doorman, and 15 minutes later, the writer of the letter to the
editor "Judy" came down and did the interview. I got my source.

I was pretty sure the writer of such a letter would have to be well-off and
cantankerous enough to be top-of-mind with her doorman.

------
iuguy
I used to live in a new build block of flats that was mostly buy to let - it
was actually still being built at the time and I was amongst the first to move
in. I wanted high speed broadband but it was quite expensive at the time
(8mbit was about £50/month back then) but I was close enough to the exchange
to get it. I bought a wireless access point, set myself up as a linksys
reseller and sold WRTs to most of my floor offering unlimited Internet access
for £10/month. I then used a Linux box as my gateway for the wireless, split
everyone off from my internal network and throttled connections based on the
amount they paid. When new people moved in I came round to see them (usually
with a pre-configured router) and offered them 12 months (as that's how long
most tenancy agreements were) for £100 plus £50 for the router.

I ended up having 5 8 meg ADSL lines and almost the entire block on the
network, each getting 512k-2mbit for £10 a month and a nice profit margin too!

------
bugsy
I started work at a place where I didn't have an office but worked on a
folding table with a broken chair in a small storage room. After the first
month of this it became intolerable. I noticed though that there was a very
large office formerly used as a hardware testing lab that was no longer
occupied. I came in one weekend with some friends when no one was there and
moved most everything out of that room up two stories to a large storage area,
and furnished it with the good old filing cabinet and hollow door desk, put
posters on the wall, and swapped in a new high end computer and monitors that
were supposed to be for an executive. Everyone assumed that someone else had
cleared this and by the time anyone figured it out (if they did) no one said
anything.

At places where I don't get a business card, I borrow one from the executives
and have it cloned at a card shop with my own info. Usually I will get two or
three boxes each with different titles and then pass these out at conferences
with a title appropriate to whatever I am discussing with someone.

Speaking of conferences, I have never asked for permission to go to them. I
just do, and then submit expenses.

~~~
wyclif
_Speaking of conferences, I have never asked for permission to go to them. I
just do, and then submit expenses._

In certain cases it's far easier to apologise later than ask for permission
first.

~~~
tomedme
Straight out of the 4HWW book, but something I now do a lot more - and so far
so good!

~~~
TamDenholm
Big fan of Tim Ferriss too but the saying is much older.

Its attributed to Grace Hopper, a Rear Admiral in the Navy and a programmer.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Murray_Hopper>
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper>

~~~
wyclif
I've got to disagree with you on Ferriss. The man is an utter fraud.

------
enjalot
In highschool some friends and I came across a method for duplicating items in
Diablo II and we sold the items using PayPal by advertising in the chat rooms.
We didn't do the actual hacking of the game, but it felt like hacking to get
paid hundreds of dollars for essentially digital toys.

More recently my friend and I wanted to throw an Ubuntu release party (also my
birthday party) so we decided to walk around campus and recruit Ubuntu Girls.
It was surprisingly easy, we wore Ubuntu shirts and hats and just walked up
and asked "have you ever modeled before?" invariably they giggle and say no
then we follow with something to the effect of "I don't believe it!" and
"would you like to try for a good cause?" We ended up with 5 really fun girls
to serve the drinks at the party. We are part of the Florida Ubuntu Team but
we did it all on our own, we even had to print our own shirts (which was the
only payment for the girls).

------
makmanalp
At my highschool cafeteria we'd use these RFID charge cards which you could
load cash into. Now, I didn't have the means to access an RFID reader to mess
around with it, but turns out that there were other problems.

Being the absent minded person that I am, I'd often lose these cards, pay some
extra amount to get a new card, and then find the old cards in my pocket, in a
bag etc. The old cards wouldn't work in the main cafeteria but they'd transfer
the cash amount you had into the new card (minus the card fee) for you.
However, they _would_ work in the coffee vending machines. It turns out they
actually stored the cash value _in_ the cards!

So, I ended up loading a large sum of money in a card, "losing" it, and me and
my friends had free coffee and hot chocolate for the better part of the most
academically challenging two years of my life.

~~~
JeremyStein
How did they know how much money to transfer if it was stored on the lost
card?

~~~
Konerak
They can't - if you take money of the card using a coffee machine, they don't
know how about it unless they log the coffee-transaction, in which case the
auther above was bound to get in trouble for getting free coffee.

------
brandnewlow
Meeting women hack:

I was bored one Saturday night and didn't have anything to do. I'd also struck
out on a date recently and wanted to get some positive momentum going on that
front.

There's a club near my neighborhood that always has a long line and is quite
popular. So I got spiffed up, went over there, and waited ACROSS THE STREET
from the club, watching the line.

About 10 minutes later, I see a gaggle of late 20s women round the corner and
start heading toward the back of the line. One of them had a tiara on so this
was clearly a bachelorette party. I speed walked to the back of the line
myself and got just in front of the five of them.

I kept my back to them, stood squarely in their way, and held up the line on
purpose while I looked at my phone. This got me a jab in the back from the
bride-to-be. I turned with a big smile on my face to mess with her and her
friends.

15 minutes later, one of them paid my cover to get into the club, I had a beer
with them. Then I excused myself to "go meet up with some other friends" set
up a lunch date with one and got her phone number. We went out a few days
later. It didn't go anywhere, but next time I'm in that situation, I have a
go-to spot now.

------
jasonkester
My girlfriend is English and I'm American. We met while traveling, so for the
first several years we were together neither of us had a visa to reside in the
other's country.

For a while we'd fly back and forth between the US and England every few
months, and we did a bunch of traveling to allow the return restrictions to
expire.

Finally we got fed up and simply moved to Spain, where neither one of us is
allowed to live, but they just don't check very hard. Lived there for a little
over a year, coming and going as we pleased with never an issue with
immigrations.

~~~
Someone
The UK and Spain are in the EU. EU citizens can freely move between member
states
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Market_(European_Union...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Market_\(European_Union\)#Freedom_of_movement_of_people)),
so your girlfriend can legally live in Spain for as long as she wishes.

~~~
jasonkester
Indeed. That's actually how we managed to rent an apartment, since she was
legally allowed to live there.

I, however, was the stereotypical undocumented alien, living in the country
illegally, not learning the language or integrating with the culture, stealing
jobs from the local economy, sneaking across the border into the land of
opportunity.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
Not quite. As you were her bf, you have the same right as her. This is perhaps
one of the benefits of being in the EU that in some cases you have more rights
living in another country, that is spain, than in the UK, for a Uk citizen,
especially in situations where a relationship with a person outside of the EU
is involved.

~~~
hasenj
Are you saying that "boyfriend" is a legally recognised relationship status in
Europe?

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
It kind of depends on the Member State and the exact law of the EU. I do know
however that it does not need to be husband and wife in many cases.

------
doki_pen
Once upon a time I was a linecook. At the end of every night the manager would
inspect your station for cleanliness. Most managers felt that they should at
least find one more thing for you to do before you leave, or they weren't
doing a good job. It was really arbitrary and there was always a risk that it
would be something time consuming.

I started a practice of messing my station with something really easy to
finish up before inpection. Maybe a blob of mayo on the counter. Worked like a
charm.

I've also applied this concept to software for clueless clients. I've only
recently learned that it's called a Duck[0].

[0] <http://goo.gl/yDgC> (stack overflow)

~~~
petercooper
I've heard of something similar being done in accounts in order to give any
auditors or tax inspectors something to find. Nothing big, of course. I'm
personally not convinced this would help get rid of them quicker but who
knows.

------
joe_bleau
Freshman year in college.

Phase I: Got up _very_ early and signed up for a (very overbooked) ME class
that included lab time in the machine shop, something I knew would be a lot of
fun (been hanging around and working in shops for years).

Turns out the class was a pre-req for a very popular ME class involving a
robot competition that all the seniors wanted. Due to the overbooking, limited
lab space, and the pre-req status, the prof decided to give preference to the
upperclassman that didn't have any other chance to get the class in. As the
only freshman, I was out. As were all the sophomores.

But I didn't pout or run off like the others did. I stayed long enough to take
the first day shop tour, where I put phase II of my plan in play.

I'd been hanging around the lab/shop in question off and on for several weeks
before and had gotten friendly with Marty, the shop instructor. When he saw me
in the class tour and learned that I was out because of the overbooking, he
offered to the prof to stretch the shop rules and let me in anyway (knowing
that I wouldn't require much supervision).

Victory over the system as a freshman!

Needless to say, many of the sophomores came by and griped about it later. I'm
not sure if they were mad at me for bending the rules, or themselves for not
thinking of it first.

------
user24
Once I was working in a data-entry center, literally typing hand-completed
hard-copy questionnaire booklets about dog food into a computer. It was really
dull.

Every hour we'd have someone come over and check the little counter on our
screens to make sure we were doing at least 12 per hour.

So I screenshotted the software, took it into MS-Paint and edited the counter
to read 12, and every time they came around I'd just alt-tab to the screenshot
and they were never the wiser.

------
ericn
College hack: I was tired of college so I changed my major to General Studies
which had the laxest requirements. The biggest requirement was a certain
number of classes at the 3000 level or higher. Then I did a year abroad in
Paris. The exchange program gave 3000-level credit for any course taken in
French (as opposed to English). So I took first-year courses and finished my
degree early. Plus I got to name my degree. Bachelor of Computational
Linguistics

\-----------

I had a terrible supervisor at work. He would send incomprehensible one-line
emails that he dumped into his Blackberry at all hours. They would usually be
some unimportant and ridiculous task for me to do. At first, I would stress
out trying to do them all to a high level. I eventually started replying
immediately to the email with the short, cryptic message "Need more detail."
That put the ball back in his court, and of course he'd never send anything
back.

------
zaphar
hrmmm...

In college I worked in housekeeping. Every summer we would refinish the floors
of various sections of the campus. Invariably someone would get past the signs
and barriers and walk on the freshly waxed floors. So one summer I'd had
enough and decided to do something about it. We set all the barriers up as
usual with one small change. We posted an additional sign up somewhere where
they could only see it if they were already standing on the waxed floor. The
sign read "Congratulations. You have just cost the school 300 dollars" I had
calculated the cost of footprints in the floor based off of man hours and
materials. The next day I was called into Comptrollers office. He was holding
the sign and having trouble being serious while scolding me. Apparently the
dean of the college had brought it into him.

\---------

Also in college I hacked into the school network (microsoft network so it
wasn't hard). I didn't actually do anything that would get me in trouble like
change grades or move money around. (yes I had full access to the financial
records) I just got the utility they used to bypass the school web proxy. I
left a message for the IT department so they could close the holes but they
never did.

\-----

I also learned to pick locks in college. Most of the professors had personal
locks on their doors and kept whatever hours they pleased. They still wanted
their office vacuumed and trash emptied though. My solution was to pick the
locks to their office. They never found out but there wasn't a room in that
college I couldn't get into. Only one lock gave me trouble but I just went
over the ceiling for that one. :-)

------
McP
Back in the day when you had to pay for games, I really wanted Wing Commander
III but it cost a whopping £39.99 which was far more than I could afford with
my few savings. Solution: I designed a voucher for PC World giving £25 off the
price of the game, and printed it off on an inkjet. I went to the shop, handed
the game and the fake voucher to the cashier, who looked at it with obvious
suspicion and told me "I'm going to get the manager". At this point I was on
the edge of running out of the door, but I held my nerve and tried to look
nonchalant. The manager came over and luckily for me her mind seemed to be on
other things as she just glanced at the voucher, said "yeah that's fine" and
walked off. So I paid £14.99, took the game and walked past the security guard
out of the store, then sprinted for the next mile in case someone discovered
my fraud. But every time I played the game I felt a little bit dirty. Until a
few months later I saw the game in the bargain bin for £4.99

~~~
cma
Until I read your last sentence I was going to add: the joke was on you.

------
FiddlerClamp
I was applying for a temp position and said I knew Office 97 when I only knew
95, and not the advanced stuff.

The temp agency had a computerized test for Office, which displayed a real
Office UI and a text bar above that would say things like "Now, print this
document." If you selected anything other than File, Print, it would
immediately score against you and move on. Whoever wrote the program thought
they were pretty clever to have it register a mistake once you picked a menu
option, and not to let you hunt around for the right answer.

I soon realized that as long as I kept the mouse button down, I could move the
cursor through all the menus without triggering a "selected" event. By going
through the menus I found the answers easily, and I was able to score 99% on
the test (the one error I made happened before I figured out the cheat).

Oh, and the company I went to work for hired me from the temp agency.

------
waterhouse
At several summer camps, we wore lanyards that carried our dining hall cards.
Occasionally, I forgot mine. But I gained admittance to the dining hall
anyway...

The structure of the dining hall was this: There were several tables outside
the building, and more tables directly inside, and then there was the entrance
to the kitchen/buffet area with the food. On the right side of the entrance,
there was a cashier who swiped people's cards as they came in. People would go
in, get a tray of food, and come out to eat; later, they might bring their
tray back in for more food. Those who went back in just passed by the cashier
to the left; you didn't have to pay twice to get seconds.

So, here's what I did: Send in a friend, who picks up two trays at once (still
stacked; it looks almost the same as a single tray) with an extra plate
(again, stacked under another) and comes out. Out at the table, I take his
extra tray, put an extra plate on it, maybe scrub a bit of food on it, put on
his lanyard, and carry the tray "back" in to get "seconds". No one ever
questioned me.

------
binarymax
Crashed countless high profile parties. An example: when I was living in
Bangkok, after a Fado opera I walked right into the royal after party. Spent
some time chatting with a princess and the queen.

Treat the velvet rope as a suggestion. Walk on in casually and confidently as
though you have 100% right to be there, half the time nobody will stop
you...especially if you are dressed properly.

~~~
StavrosK
_Everything_ is a suggestion. As long as you look like you belong, nobody will
stop you 95% of the time.

~~~
gaius
Best clothing for this is not a tux, it's a yellow workman's jacket.

~~~
StavrosK
It depends on the occasion, but yes, bonus if you appear to work there.

My favorite place to go is the women's bathroom. They _always_ have soap,
paper towels and usually something like hair gel or other amenities. Men's
bathrooms have _nothing_ , plus women are cool about it.

~~~
gaius
When my gym was doing some building work, men and women swapped changing rooms
(all the builders were men) and I was amazed at how clean, spacious, and well-
appointed theirs was. You know they even have individual shower cubicles, not
just a big open space with shower heads hanging from the ceiling? Luxury!

~~~
cmkrnl
I'm guessing you didn't miss the black broth either.

------
nicholaides
Senior year, I took a intro Psych course where the final was online. The
questions were multiple choice, chosen from a large pool. The test was setup
in such a way that we could re-take the exam as many times as we want and
students would receive their highest score as their final exam grade. The idea
was that if you took it 20 times, you would inevitably learn most of the
material.

So, I imagine you can guess how I took the exam. After writing an running few
scripts, my final exam scores showed that I took the exam 31 times: The first
30 times (as I was collecting questions and their answers) I received 0% and
each exam took ~30 seconds. On the 31st exam I got 100% and it took ~45
seconds.

As you would expect, I got an A+ for the course. I never did bring it up to
the prof.

In a similar vein, in my astronomy course we had online quizes and one type of
question asked us to identify a picture. Viewing the page's source would
occasionally reveal the the picture's filename, e.g. "sagittarius.gif".

~~~
araneae
We had a weekly biology quiz that was randomly generated from a set of
questions, but would save your progress. However, it gave you the answers to
the questions you got wrong in real time, but it would only send _your_
answers at the end of the quiz.

So all you had to do was get the first question right (if you didn't save 1
answer, it would generate a new quiz for you), exit the quiz, then reopen it
and collect all the answers to the quiz. Then before exiting the quiz,
disconnect from the internet. When you opened it up again you'd fill in
questions 2-10 with the correct answers.

------
bdr
At my last job, I snuck in some premature optimizations.

~~~
StavrosK
Didn't you get the memo? Those are evil, not just naughty.

~~~
tripa
They're not evil. Just the root of it.

~~~
jdp23
One of my first mentors had that on his desk.

~~~
StavrosK
Was he Dijkstra?

~~~
jdp23
No, Jean Brouwers -- he was a legend in the CAD space at the time.

------
kilian
In high-school I was part of the webteam. This gave us slightly elevated
privileges meaning we could get away with a lot of simple windows NT/XP
hacking. We had internet on the 'non-internet' machine much to the awe of
everyone else, chatted with each other via netsend, played games (until the
admin sent us a netsend telling us to stop).

Also, all pc's were numbered corresponding to their network name. You can
reboot pc's via netsend. Much fun was had :) This went on until we could print
on the machines of the principal + other higher-up stuff. We never dared doing
that though.

...then I went to college and got an email from one of the sysadmins telling
me I had a virus and that I should use [random windows antivirus]. I was using
IRC on Ubuntu on a non-standard port. I got a really sour reply from the
sysadmin upon telling him that.

~~~
makmanalp
Hahahah, I figured out exactly what net send * did when I turned my head and
looked at all the other computers in the lab :P

~~~
nitrogen
The help for net send is very dangerous to a young and curious user. It shows
the *, but doesn't say what it does.

------
metamemetics
When Microsoft launched Live search (pre-bing) they needed someway to inflate
their search usage to tell advertisers people actually use the site. So they
launch Club Live, which has a series of word games offering points and prizes
for winning. Every time one types a word in a word game, it automatically
searches for the word in a search frame next to the game.

So naturally I wrote a program that scripted mouse/keyboard movements with
searching and changing in-memory variables used by Flash. It solved games
20-30 times faster than I could, without me even being at the computer (I ran
it 24/7 on an old desktop).

Eventually other people started doing this too and the hole was plugged. But I
received quite a few free copies of Vista Ultimate and Xbox360 controllers
that found their way on ebay.

~~~
jdp23
There was a lot of exploitation of Club Live. Some of it had been factored in
as a cost of doing business but it wouldn't surprise me if they underestimated
it.

Overall, Club Live was a brilliant strategy. Despite horrible execution it
still succeeded in ratcheting up the pressure on Yahoo by demonstrating that
MS was willing to buy market share. With minimal cash reserves and no product
of its own to put through the channel there was no way for Yahoo to compete.
There sure were a lot of things they could have done better though.

------
hippich
At 7th class we started studying computers. Like using MS-DOS commands, then -
norton commander, then, eventually - programming in Turbo Pascal.

We had some old IPX based LAN, where every's pupil's disk was remotely hosted
on the server, and once you turn computer on, it asks you for your
login/password. After you are logged in, you have your own D: drive where all
only yours files located. This had been done after several pupil's claims that
they had done some task before, and someone just deleted their files.

Our teacher had "admin" login password, which allowed him to access all files
on server.

On the first class, he explained all of this to us. Friend of mine tried to do
jokes and asked "And what if some pupil will hack somehow network and will get
his hands on admin login/password?". Teacher told, that he will give A mark
for the rest of length of this course (i.e. from 7th class to 11th class - 4
years!)

Long story short - I have wrote small program on assembler, which was
essentially what today called "keylogger". It was running residentially,
intercepting some msdos interrupt (used to execute program), checking which
program is about to start, and if it is "login.exe" - log all keypresses into
a file.

The problem was - there were no floppy drives (for security reason), and at
this time - no USB too (it was back in 1997). So I printed out the whole
source on small peace of paper (1/4 of A4) and entered it line by line in
Turbo Pascal IDE. Luckily, I had TASM there, as a part of Turbo Pascal. That's
it - entered and compiled right on machine.

I had to wait a bit until teacher used machine I was studying at, but
eventually he did it and I had his login/password.

I disclosed in full all of this to teacher and he kept his word - I never
attended this class and had A mark till end of the school =)Freed some time
for "real" hacking =))

------
michaelw
Before dropping out of college 25 years ago I took an ASM programming course.
The processor was the PDP 11. The official terminals were dec writers to an
emulator but I happened to have access to a PDP 11 unix box.

I cut my teeth doing Z80 ASM hacking on a Timex Sinclair and had no patience
for this required class.

I wrote all my assignments in C and dumped the intermediate output. The grader
always gave me nice comments like "well structured code."

~~~
Natsu
When I took my assembly language course back in college, the teacher graded us
by comparing the size of our solution to his solution and assessing a penalty
for every extra byte we wasted, so we couldn't do things like that. You also
got no partial credit for non-working solutions.

That said, I _did_ read the manual and figured out how to make my solution
call his solution, but I couldn't use that because the TAs were smarter than
that and the teacher was very interested in anyone who could beat his
solutions by even one byte.

------
joshfraser
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.

------
sushrutbidwai
I was once pulled over by a traffic police here in India. I was not carrying
my license and that means around 200 bucks (Rs) in bribe. To get out of paying
bribe I acted that I am dialing a number and speaking to a senior police
officer (I knew one name who was my friend's uncle) and complaining to him
about the officer who pulled me over. Officer apologized and I didnt have to
pay the bribe.

\----------

When I was in college we had only one printer (dot-matrix) to take print-outs
of our submissions. Towards end of semester there always was a long waiting
line to get print-outs done and no one owned printer (very few owned
computers). So I built a book-keeping s/w and scheduling s/w along with
library of assignments. IT had a database system built using Cobol which will
take roll number and name of a students replace it at appropriate places in
the source code and print out copies. All we needed to do was make sure the
printer always had paper rolls and entire printing, which used to take days,
was done in matter of hours. I was told the s/w was still in use in the
college.

PS - I never encouraged copying of grade work though, always wrote my own
programs even though attached which ever one I got to file.

------
rjurney
I got hammered the day before my Moscow residency permit expired and changed
the blue expiration date with purple pen. Smeared it a little. Problem solved.
That made the next few months fairly exhilarating each time I was stopped by
the militsia at random for looking Chechyn. I had permission to be in country,
just not in city.

------
asnyder
Six years ago my brother rented out a beach house in another state for the
summer and would let me stay there with some friends. One fun summer week a
good friend and I were enjoying the house to ourselves and decided to make a
7-11 run to pick up some much needed snacks and other provisions.

When we got back from our adventure my key wouldn't open the door. Unbeknownst
to us, this was the one time that closing the door triggered an old lock on
the door that we didn't have the key for. Amazingly, we had taken care to
ensure that both the back and patio doors, along with all the windows were
locked before we left, thus cementing our unfortunate predicament. It was
already late in the day and the broker's office was closed, leaving us with
what it seemed to be a limited amount of options. We could call a locksmith
and try to convince him to let us in, which would likely cost more money than
we were willing to spend, or we could stay outside for the night in the
house's semi-sheltered porch area and walk to the broker in the morning.

Although it was summer, it still got chilly at night, and I most definitely
did not want to stay outside. While thinking over our options in the porch
area I noticed there was one of those big outdoor candles that come in a metal
housing. Fortunately, the housing had a handle, and I was young enough to
think I could do something with it. With much finagling, I was able to remove
the handle from the housing and bend it into a hook. My plan was to try to use
the hook to jimmy open the window somehow so that I could climb in through the
window and open the door. After several failed attempts my always skeptical
friend reminded me that I was wasting my time and should accept the situation
for the night. Fortunately, I ignored his advice and persisted through several
more attempts. Finally, I was able to sliver my makeshift hook through the
frame of one of the windows and manipulate my way to close proximity of the
window's lock. After flailing with the wire for several more minutes I finally
hit the window's lock and opened the window. After which I climbed in and
opened the door. I had successfully broken in to our rented beach house. I
immediately taped over the broken lock to prevent this situation from
repeating itself.

My friend of course was absolutely shocked, and still recounts the story in
amazement.

Fortunately none of our neighbors thought that two unknown teenagers breaking
into a house the least bit suspicious,

~~~
StavrosK
Lockpicking skills come in handy in those situations. This reminds me of the
time a friend got locked out of his car, but his trunk was open. The car only
had 4 doors, however, so it wasn't much use.

In the trunk was a broomstick, some rope and a, erm, we call them "parrot
wrenches". Fortunately, one of the rear speakers could be lifted up a bit, so
I fastened the wrench to the broomstick with the rope and slid it through the
small hole (it was just enough to fit). Through that small hole, I manoeuvred
to the rear door lock and pushed it up.

All my friends remember that MacGuyver moment to this day.

~~~
jtheory
I miss having an old car -- a few years back I had recently moved overseas,
and was driving a car I could reasonably buy with cash from the ATM (no bank
account yet, etc). Well, one day I managed to lock my keys in the car (and
myself, my wife and 2 friends out of it) while we were at the grocery store. I
turned around, jogged back into the store, bought a screwdriver and a coat-
hanger, and jogged back out. The screwdriver was to push the upper corner of
the door away from the frame (easy to open a little space, but hard to do with
just fingers); the coat hanger was to snag the lock and pull it up.

The hardest part was actually getting the screwdriver out of its damned
unbreakable-but-dangerously-sharp plastic packaging.

All-in-all, we only got home about 5 minutes later than we would have!

------
meric
Back when I was in high school, On one Friday afternoon I discovered the
ethernet cables connecting the computer to the network had the same plug on
both ends. I wondered what would happen if I had a cable coming out of the
wall plugged back into the wall, so I pulled out the cable out of one of the
computers and plugged both ends into the wall.

On Monday, One of the teachers went to each class and (loudly & angrily) asked
"Who was it that pulled the cable from one computer and plugged it into the
wall?!". It was only when they got to our class, I realize something was wrong
because of something I did, so I timidly said "I did".

Well, as you might have guessed, what happened was a short-circuit and all the
computers in the school couldn't connect to any network anymore. The office
staff lost all their current work and had to work for extra 4 more hours
_each_ , doing office work _manually_. They didn't find out what was the
problem until Monday.

The principal asked me why I did it, and I answered "I was curious." Due to my
"stellar" past performance and history at the school, I was fined $300 (the
cost of the technician) and sentenced to 2 days suspension. I was told that if
I was any other student I'd have been expelled. My lesson that day was: "If
you ever muck with stuff for fun, PUT IT BACK TO IT WAS BEFORE."

My school record indicates I have been put in detention 0 times and suspended
2 days in total.

~~~
MichaelGG
$300 fine because the network admin couldn't be bothered to run spanning tree?

~~~
meric
I don't think we had a 'network guy' at the high school. It was just the
computer teacher who was responsible for everything related to IT, so I'm
guessing the school outsourced all the networking.

------
ajays
In the late 90s, I was working in a univ lab as a post-doc, when the IPO
market was hot. There there was this brokerage company ("Wit Capital") which
would give out IPOs to us serfs on a first-come, first-served basis. They
usually got very few shares (maybe a couple of 1000 at most), and gave out
only 100 to each applicant; and the competition was fierce. I wrote a Perl
script which would poll their site (usually they announced an IPO in the
evening), and if there was an IPO, it would fill out the web forms and submit
it immediately. (This was before WWW:Mechanize and all those modules). I got
in on quite a few of those, flipped them, and made a nice sum.

Later, ETrade got in the game. They would give you at most 100 shares. But I
realized that you could open multiple accounts in ETrade and increase your
chances of getting the IPOs. So I opened 35 accounts in all. Once again I
wrote Perl scripts to fill in the multi-step forms and submit them. This was
pure screen scraping and LWP. Once again I got into a lot of IPOs. (Side note:
but this time I decided to hang on to many of them, instead of flipping them
immediately. Sadly, I ended up losing a good chunk of money too; but overall
still came out quite ahead :) ).

\-----

When I was in the univ lab, the dorms got ethernet. Lots of students started
sharing their disks via Windows. I hacked together a "search engine" with
smbclient and Perl which would crawl their shares and index their contents;
and with a simple Perl+curses app, I could pick stuff and download it. Soon I
had 10s of GBs of music, movies, etc.

------
wallflower
In a dorm, in the pre-digital cable days and _before_ our dorm officially had
cable, we bought hundreds of feet of cable and some signal amplifiers and
gained access to the basement/maintenance areas and spliced the cable feed
from the Dean who had it and ran cable up through the ducts to the ten or so
rooms in our wing. Over Winter break, we came back and found the signal lost
(someone had removed a segment to tell us that yeah, we know what you're
doing). We replaced it.

~~~
Terretta
In my dorm the extra run had to go from the ceiling above the dean's office,
room to room above the drop ceiling tiles, through the built-in closets' top
cabinets, and through cinderblock between every other room.

Students were not allowed to have TVs, so the other part of the hack was to be
in a video production class to be allowed to have a monitor, but open it up
and splice a tuner to a BNC input then use a coax to BNC coupler, so the
monitor looked absolutely normal from the outside.

Awfully complicated to end up watching USA's "Up All Night" B movies hosted by
Gilbert Gottfried.

~~~
sbierwagen
>Students were not allowed to have TVs

Where the hell did you go to school, Utah?

------
jtheory
When I was still working as a software dev in a shared cubicle, my cube-mate
and I would bitch about the distracting psychological effect of having that
open door _behind_ us while we worked. The cubicle walls were decently high --
you had to be pretty tall to peer over them -- but we were in a central
location, so other developers, managers, execs, etc. were constantly walking
by and scanning us and our screens.

Not that we were doing anything reprehensible, but the idea that we could work
for 4 hours straight then spend 5 minutes on Slashdot and be shoulder-surfed
by just the wrong person didn't sit well.

Well, during a tour of the new server room, we found a little side closet
containing... leftover cubicle pieces! Knowing it probably wouldn't fly, we
ran the idea by the boss anyway: can we take the leftover pieces and build an
entryway to our cubicle?

Hmm - he'd check on that and get back to us. Soon the word came back -- kudos
for our creativity, sure it was a neat idea, but due to fire regulations we
couldn't extend our cube into that main hallway.

Okay, so he didn't want to mess with the status quo but didn't want to have to
argue about it, so he was passing the buck, which I admit annoyed me a bit.
Fortunately, it's pretty trivial to call the local Fire Marshall and check
this sort of thing, so I did. Turns out that if your hallway is still as wide
as the exit door, you aren't breaking any regulations, so the cube-mate and I
brought lunch the next day, waited until the rest of the office went out to
eat, and got out the allen wrenches.

We were just tightening the last bolts when or manager got back.

\--Hey guys, now wait a minute - \--Ah, don't worry! It's okay: I checked with
the fire marshall, and we actually _could_ expand by another 5 or 6 feet and
still be fine! We're sticking to the original plan, though...

He didn't have much response to that beyond a wry smile.

------
mburnett
Back when they first started the "Buy a large popcorn and get unlimited
refills" thing at the movie theater, I would simply save my bag from previous
movies, wipe them down and bring them back the next time.

Unfortunately, they changed it to "1 free refill" and then even amended "Same
day only" to the promotion. So I stopped doing it at that point.

I don't mind hacking the system if I can figure out a way to technically
follow all the rules.

~~~
DTrejo
This can be circumvented by taking a used popcorn out of the trash, and taking
it to be refilled. They're not dirty at all.

------
QuantumGood
Overnight, I secretly built and installed a large outdoor product display at a
huge annual Midwest festival without management approval or knowledge that
broke some key rules of my contract (I was in management with about 50 of my
own employees).

If it failed, I would almost certainly be fired. I have never experienced the
tension that I did when the owner and general manager met me by that display
when they saw it on the way in that morning. (I didn't tell them I had
designed it for easy removal--it looked semi-permanent.)

The result? Sales that had been flat for years, never rising above $6500/day
at the shop location by the display more than doubled. Total sales broke
$200,000 for the 13 days the display was up, and had never broken $100,000 for
the 15 days of the festival.

I've always understood marketing. Even when I was only first learning to read
I would rewrite signs and billboards in my head when the family would drive
somewhere—making them more persuasive, more concise, etc.

At the same job, without telling anyone I computerized (early 90's) sales and
inventory tracking on my home computer, which they eventually bought from me
when they began to rely on it more and more.

Also, when management wouldn't spring for something I thought we needed, I
recruited outside investors, bought what was needed, and paid back the
investors from profits. (First investor made 50% on their investment over one
weekend—which made it easy to get others.)

------
jiganti
My dad told me a simple hack last year when dealing with calling cell phone
companies. When you're first told by voice recognition to vocally describe
what you need, say 'cancel service'.

You'll be helped much faster than you would if you described the problem
accurately, since they care much more about getting people to continue paying
that are on the verge of not doing that anymore.

The first person that talks to you doesn't really know what you said (only
that the call was directed to them), but when you describe what you really
need help with, they redirect you to where you need to be. For some reason
it's much faster this way, maybe because being redirected by a human instead
of the computer doesn't put you in such a long queue.

~~~
DTrejo
Get a human on the phone really fast:

<http://gethuman.com/>

------
kgc
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.

------
jlongster
Oh college, the days when we would sit around forging emails between guys and
girls on campus, professing their love to one another. Or sending an email
from the dean to our rebellious friend calling him in. Or using the "net send"
command on XP workstations to send alerts to all computers across campus. Or
when we would tunnel through the college filtering service to download music.
Ol' friend, those were good times.

~~~
gvb
It wasn't my hack, but someone did a hack that gave me months of
entertainment.

I worked for Smiths Industries, and my buddies were smart enough to register
"si.com". Sports Illustrated was a little too slow (ultimately they bought the
domain - my buddies got nothing, life is not fair).

Anyway, someone on a University of Michigan lab email list forged an email...
the "from" was a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, with a bunch of "CC:s" to
other "SI models" and CC:ed the UofM email list. The email was pretty well
done, something to the effect of "Hey Tyra, do you know why we are getting
this strange email from this UofM lab?" There were a surprising number of
students that fell for it.

At the time, I was responsible for catching bounced email and dealing with it.
For the next couple of months I was entertained by lovelorn UofM students
trying to hit on Tyra and all her friends. :-D I saved all the email in an
archive, but lost it at some point, moving between computer systems. :-( One
of my life's major regrets.

------
netcan
When I was 11 coca cola ran a competition where you could get a free movie
ticket if you collected 20 (something like that) caps. All the kids were
collecting caps from bins and recycle places so they were hard to find. A
friend and I got 2 tickets each, trading all our caps in on the last day.

We found out that at the trade in centres were packed on the last day and that
the caps went into opaque bags. The promotion came back at some point (I think
it may have even been immediately). We figured we could use (much easier to
find) RC cola caps instead. It worked. We got about 10 tickets each.

I don't think you could motivate kids to do stuff like that anymore.

------
libber
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.

------
ig1
In my university they gave sequential IP addresses and phone numbers to all
the room, I combined this data with our uni LDAP system, so I could go from
any identifier (photo, email, name, room number, telephone number, ip address)
to any other identifier.

It's was more for a fun hack than anything else, but it raised the issue that
from someones IP address you could figure out who they were and where they
lived, so my uni ended up changing IP allocation procedure sometime after
that.

Also as a side effect I found a number of "black holes" in the LDAP system
that queries for certain users returned a null result, after going through the
list by hand I figured out that they were "VIP" students (typically
sons/daughters of the powerful/famous) - it turned out that by merging the
data sets in the way I had, I'd also built a system that highlighted the
personal details of the "secret" students, the exact opposite of what the
university had intended.

------
ifesdjeen
i'm not quite sure whether it's naughty or not, nevertheless. just recenty i
thought of starting looking for exploits on different websites and reporting
them to administration.

during first two weeks, I've found two small communities (one was for writers
and second one for designers), and found JS-injection vulnerability on both.
On the first one i decided to stay anonymous, and whenever admin displayed
info (after the fix), all the people in community started calling that
"anonymous" words and saying that i've got nothing to do except for looking
how to find these things in someone else's nice and quiet website.

another (third) website was for keyboard-addicts. they were competing on who
types faster. i wrote a little script, and got my typing speed up to 14K
symbols per minute, they asked me to confirm it though the capture image, I
confirmed it to some point using first several words from capture and Google.
well, all the people hated me again, since they wanted it to be a "pure
competition". even though my intention was to find and report (i was also
giving precise explanations on how to fix these things), people still
considered me evil.

BTW, if you're still using jevix on python systems, you'll be hacked by
someone soon, since they allow scirpt tag injection inside of [img]. so be
careful, escape strings and treat people who're finding vulnerabilities as
_people_ not like they've-got-nothing-else-to-do dogs)

~~~
StavrosK
This reminds me of the time I hacked an online game to get a high score:

<http://www.korokithakis.net/node/96>

------
dholowiski
This isn't that naughty, just a little subversive. I used to be the team lead
in the tech support department at a company that manufactured high tech
products. Our research department where all the super secret new products were
developed was anshort walk from our building.

I discovered that there was a meeting room in that building full of super
secret, half finished, one of a kind products- and anybody could book the
room.

So I booked the room for our weekly team meetings (which were a waste of time
anyway). So every week we (a bunch of geeks) got to check out the new stuff,
while the other tams talked about customer satisfaction and average hold times
(bleh$.

I told my team that although we weren't doing anything wrong, if we asked for
permission we'd surely be denied. We never got in trouble, and we had tons of
fun. Later on I figured out how we could spend an hour playing games once a
week, but that's another story.

~~~
dpritchett
That sounds like a good way to familiarize your team with the product lines
and to let your front-line experiences influence product development. Good
job!

~~~
maushu
And that sounds like a good excuse if he got caught.

------
mikeklaas
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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> I don't think that it was so necessary to embarrass him publicly.

A good lesson to learn, albeit at someone else's expense.

------
cmos
In high school instead of getting a summer job I would work on my science fair
project once I learned they give out cash prizes called 'scholarships'.

3 years in a row I won first or second place in the State Science fair, and
usually about $500 to $1000 in 'scholarship' money.

The kicker was my senior year, when I won 'runner up' for a $10,000
scholarship to the college I had already been accepted to. I found the guy who
won and was thrilled he was undecided about which school he was going to. I
got his number and talked about the pro's and con's of that school as unbiased
as possible, and later that week he called me to tell me he wasn't going. So I
would then get the scholarship.

I'm pretty sure it was the Science fairs (and robot, but that's another story)
that got me into college, since my high school GPA was 2.8 and I got a 410 in
my verbal SAT.

------
siculars
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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I wonder if the passwords changed. You could have made your $25 back, and then
some.

------
pistoriusp
Internet in South Africa is expensive. It's still expensive, but in 2002 when
I started my first job, anything better than dial-up was REALLY expensive.

The cost was split in two:

Really expensive bandwidth, and less expensive, but still costly, line rental.

My boss' parents lived in a town about 200 kilometers from us. They owned a
stationary shop and also happened to have an agreement with a large ISP to
store equipment in their shop. The equipment serviced the dial-up users in the
town, and the stationary shop could use the Internet "for free" in exchange.

I figured out that it would be cheaper to get a line all the way from the
computer college to the stationary store and simply "borrow" the bandwidth.

Instead of our 64kbit/s we got 320kbit/s for the same price!

~~~
jeza
I was in Morocco recently with no computers at all in the hotel, let alone
wifi. It felt weird in the 21st century looking into their office, only to see
a desk with some kind of paper filing system. Not to mention they have to
handle all their bookings on paper.

So I went to a net café to do some essential stuff. The computers there were
painfully slow, as was their internet connection shared between a number of
computers. Pulled my laptop out and turns out there was an open wifi network
with a much faster connection. I ended up doing everything on the laptop, but
paid the net café anyway on that occasion because there was no where I could
use the laptop inconspicuously.

In the end it seemed there were quite a few open wifi networks around in
Morocco. I guess they're counting on not many people having laptops.

------
jonhendry
Pretty minor, but while working on FedFunds/Eurodollar trading software at a
big bank, I came in on the weekend and reconfigured my cubicle walls so that
the entrance was in the same aisle as my coworkers, rather than being on the
opposite side and having to walk all the way around to talk to them.

Normally I believe that sort of thing involved the maintenance staff, etc, at
who-knows-what expense.

~~~
moonpolysoft
Egads man. Keep it safe for work.

~~~
jonhendry
I like to live on the edge, what can I say.

Another time I started looking through a cardboard box that had been sitting
outside my cube for months. It had office supplies and things in it. I started
eyeing items like a stapler.

The guy in the next cube pops out and says "those are her personal effects!".
Apparently the older woman in the opposite cube (I never met her) popped her
clogs at some point, and this was her unclaimed stuff.

Oops!

(Okay, that's unintentionally-cringe-inducing-naughty, not hack-naughty. But I
find it amusing these days.)

~~~
henrikschroder
What color was the stapler?

~~~
jonhendry
Not red.

------
moron4hire
I had a really hard time convincing a large, corporate client to setup such
basic things like a version control system, a central bug tracking system, or
any kind of project documentation repository. Oh, did I mention this was only
three years ago? It's 2007 and you're not using version control? Anyway, one
day, another consultant who sat next to me got laid off and the company's IT
guys never came around to remove his computer. So, I moved the computer into
the cabinet over my desk and used it as my "phantom dev server" or
alternatively "The Travis" (after our laid-off compatriot). I even used it as
a staging server for testing deployments. There was one time that a clueless
cable-jockey came up looking for the machine, I told him someone had come for
it months ago, and we never heard from him again.

Eventually, I developed a simple content management system on the product
website because the company's policies were preventing us from making copy and
FAQ changes as fast as we needed. Unfortunately, I couldn't get approval to do
the project, even though I had a little bandwidth and it was something we
really, really needed. I told my confidant in the company what I was doing and
he ran interference for me for two days while I cranked the code out. We had
to wait a month for another project to get finished to slip it in along-side
an approved site deployment, but once it was in the wild, our lives became
incredibly easier.

We almost let the cat out of the bag once when we made a change _too_ quickly,
though. Management wanted us to change some of the contact info on the site,
and to change most of the branding of the site. Since I setup _everything_ to
be hosted out of the CMS, including stylesheets, no deployment was necessary.
What should have taken two weeks (1 day to finish and then 9 days of
bureaucratic shenanigans), took only one day. The plan was to wait the 9 days,
then tell them about the change, and use the time to get caught up on support
tickets and other "secret" programming going on (like a complete rewrite of
the desktop product software, this time without VB6... in 2008). One of the
execs dropped into our area for an update, and the stupid phone-support guy
blabbed about "oh yeah, that's already done." I stabbed him in the leg with a
pen, and "clarified" that the "work was complete and was now in the deployment
pipeline." That wasn't the first or the last time that stupid goober's mouth
almost got us in trouble.

I miss that job. It was hard to work in the stifling environment of an
ossified corporate structure, but I had good friends I was working with, and
despite our team being considered "black sheep" and "dangerous mavericks",
everyone respected our productivity and we were always involved in all new
policy decisions (basically, they were just upset to be told they were wrong).
We skirted many lay-offs after that first round because of it.

~~~
hardik
If it weren't for people like you so many big companies will simply cease to
produce any output at all!

~~~
moron4hire
Yeah, well, I can't say it was any altruistic desire to help the company. Most
of their fulltime employees saw us consultants as threats to their jobs, so
they weren't very happy to have us around. I was more concerned with not
getting blamed for missing deadlines and not letting my skills stagnate. That
was the ultimate reason why I left, when it was decided that the software
upgrade from VB6 to _.NET 2.0_ (by the time that decision was made, .NET 4 had
just been released) was not going to happen. I knew I had things I wanted to
accomplish, and they were standing in my way. Maybe if they had worked with
me, it could have benefited them a little more, but I've since learned that
companies can and will make such unproductive decisions and I need to keep my
exuberant productivity for my own projects.

------
jmspring
During the summer after my first year of college (early 90s), I did temp work
for a company finding comps for mortgage applications. Searching was slow, but
printing was even slower. I installed a print spooler so I could get more done
and not stress. The higher ups were impressed with my productivity and wanted
me to quit school and go full-time, which I declined. Some full time peers
were jealous, realized what I did and complained to the IT department. I was
let go for installing unauthorized software when the real issue was setting a
higher bar for performance.

------
Huppie
I think I was fourteen, playing an online space-sim with my older brother.
Because he decided to join a clan with mostly US-based members we had trouble
being present at the moment that clan-wars where fought. Lucky for us these
would mostly be decided days before actually going to war. I found that some
guy made a simple helper javascript that used an XMLHTTPRequest to automate
one or two actions.

Flash forward a few weeks... I built a sidebar that would be active in the
browser, quickly showing stats and allowing you to automate entire battles.
Ah, fun times :)

(I've learned quite a lot of javascript those days, and still wish I would've
used that knowledge to build something awesome. I've had multiple prototypes
of AJAX-chat clients but never finished any one of them...)

\---

A few years later we reverse-engineered (just about) the entire economy of
another on-line 'learn economy' game. You would compete with other players in
a city, buying shops, selling goods, etc. A new game would start every month
or so... it took two months to figure it out. First try was with excel (why on
earth did we do that?). The second one was a script that would scrape the data
of a few thousand people every day, then compare how their actions had
resulted in a lower/higher score, etc :) We went on to more shady tactics to
gain points, altering input values to buy goods cheaper than possible from the
dropdown-boxes, selling them at a better margin, etc.

------
natep
Definitely not as impressive as some of the top rated on here, but I have a
few stories.

\--

One year in college I worked for a storage company. They were short on drivers
so I volunteered (having driven vans and trucks in my last job). Thing was,
they needed me to be over 21 (or 25?) for their insurance. Nobody was, so I
just got in the van and started driving. A few days later, they had me take
their drivers test, and then I got to be a driver anyways (with the raise that
went with). I got to drive around and do house calls while most of my
coworkers had to move stuff into/out of dorms all day.

\--

Rather than write a lot of networking code to give a program remote-control
abilities, we decided to install the program locally and VNC into the remote
machines, and use Skype to get sound from them.

\--

Recently, I discovered Git and have pretty much fallen for it. My work still
uses svn (mostly), so I've been using git-svn. I went to my supervisor and
told him I thought we'd be better of using git (since we're trying to use svn
that way anyways), and it turns out, he had a budget that needed to be used by
the end of this fiscal year, which I was able to use to teach myself more of
Git. That budget's used up now, so I'll have to do the rest on my own time,
but he's said if I can make a compelling enough case, future projects will use
git. I've also become the guy my coworkers call for help with svn, so whenever
I can (without being annoying), I try to point out how git is better for X.

------
colinsidoti
My high school had a work study program that was designed for students that
weren't planning to attend college (IE: auto mechanic, electrician,
cosmetologist). It allowed these students to get a job before they even
graduated, and made their job search significantly easier. As a senior, I was
the first student to take advantage of work study with the intention of going
to college. It took many meetings with the principal and my teachers, but was
worth working for a startup in NYC :).

~~~
octover
I had something similar. We had two programs that you could leave school early
for work stuff. They were work release which required being in certain related
classes to the job, and internship. I was in to computers, taking the AP CS
class, doing the school's website in another unofficial class, but not Novell
networking which was the only computer work release class, so I couldn't get
work release. However the internship teacher had been a PE teacher at my
middle school, and I'd gone to him to ask about it, so when the counselor told
us that I didn't qualify, he quickly offered to put me in the internship
program.

Technically internships were supposed to be unpaid, but I didn't know that. I
almost let the cat out of the bag that I was just going to work early at the
end of the year presentation on my internship to other students, the teacher
and a vice principle, but quickly recovered following my teacher's scramble to
cover our asses.

------
makmanalp
My college would sponsor students' travel expenses to go and do volunteer work
at a major game dev conference (if you volunteered, you'd get to see it for
free). The problem was that the sponsorship only covered game dev majors. So I
quickly declared a double major. Bonus perks include access to lab with the
best computers on campus. I need to remember to drop it before I graduate ...
Too bad I was busy with other work and never did end up going to the
conference.

~~~
eli
GDC, I'm assuming? I figured that's why there were way more volunteers than
the conference could possibly have required.

~~~
makmanalp
Indeed! The interesting thing is, due to overwhelming requests there was a
selection process for the volunteers where you'd basically defend why you're a
good choice for this.

------
bhickey
Toward the end of my senior year of college, the Dean of the College solicited
nominations for senior orator.

This year was different than years past because the school's computer systems
had recently been integrated with one another in a $26 million boondoggle (a
story for another time). The office sent out a link to a webapp where each
student could submit two nominations. The webapp was a form containing the
first and last names of each student and (dramatic pause) it was keyed on
student id. I phoned up a friend and confirmed his id number.

[Is disseminating a list of the student body a FERPA violation?]

The wheels in my head started turning a bit. The university obliges each
student to carry health insurance. If you can't prove you have insurance, you
have to eat the school's program. Opt-out was done through a web form where
you entered your name, DOB, and student id number. I went back to that form,
plugged in my info and _BAM_ , it presented me with the old opt-out page pre-
populated with all of the health insurance information I had previously
submitted. With the aforementioned friend's permission, we verified that it
worked on his account too. Ugh.

I walked to the IT Helpdesk and informed them of the problem and the page was
promptly killed. It took them 21 days to fix.

------
zeddy
I was taking a computer science course back in the late '80s in the UK. The
course was a straight-to-masters 4 year undergraduate course. One of the
requirements was that you were 'sponsored' by a company to get through the
course, and IIRC they actually payed some of the tuition. You also had to
present your thesis at the end of the 4 years to the faculty and
representatives from the various sponsoring companies, a usually sombre and
somewhat dull 2-day affair (6 students each day, of the 12 or so of us in each
year).

Early in the final year, some friends and I were talking about the
presentation, and relating how dull the previous year's was. Earnest
undergrads desperately trying not to screw up, and impress the array of suits
before them. During the conversation, we decided that it would be awesome if
someone showed up in full evening dress.... and later on in the evening,
somewhat worse for the wear, I proclaimed that if someone procured me an
evening dress, I would wear it for my presentation.

Fast forward to the night before our presentation, after a less than stellar
academic year on my part. A knock on the door just after I get back from a
subdued night at the bar. A friend has found something for me to wear - not an
evening dress, after all, but a dayglo orange halter top and mini-skirt. I
figure, what the hell, as I didn't seem to have much to lose.

Next day, I'm on second. I show up early wearing an unseasonable long winter
coat (it's may, and even in the north of England it's too warm for a long
winter coat). I get a few odd looks, but I don't think anyone actually
realizes that I'm presenting next that day.

First guy on that morning finished his presentation, and now it's my turn to
present. I stand up at the back of the room, and take off my coat. The prof at
the front who is MCing this shindig is the only one who is looking in my
direction, and he said something like 'And now we have Mr. Pe.....'. His jaw
dropped. I think it was the only time I ever saw him speechless. But then, he
probably didn't see male students dressed in dayglo orange mini-skirts and
halter tops every day, either...

I stood up, walked to the front, and gave my presentation as if there was
nothing unusual going on. You know, I figured I'd already blown it so hard I
couldn't screw it up any more. It was probably one of the easiest
presentations I've ever done.

Anyway, a few weeks later I found out I'd passed, and I often wonder how much
that last minute costume change worked in my favor... I did hear that the next
year, the invitations discretely had 'business attire required' on them...

------
zimbu668
At a previous company the software engineers also had to answer the tech
support line for our product. This was not a popular activity so all calls had
to be logged and if your numbers were too far below the average you got chewed
out at the end of the month.

Now some calls were really easy to handle, like if there was a deadlock in the
database, you'd just pull up the db manager and pick one of the processes to
kill. Now the database didn't have enough information to detect when a
deadlock occured, because technically the deadlock was in the java code it was
just easiest to clear it up by killing one of the db processes.

I modified how we created our db processes, giving them a name which contained
enough information to detect a deadlock automatically, add in an eclipse
plugin that polled the db every few seconds and I became the king of tech
support. The light would go red and my hand would hover over the phone just
waiting for a call.

I was kind enough to give my boss a copy of the software when I left the
company.

------
sp4rki
When I was in 8th grade I was really into security and decided to try my luck
at hacking into the teachers terminals and downloading the bimestrial exams
into a floppy. I got all the exams but one. Erased my tracks and went on my
way passing all the exams (as did the rest of the class)... The day before the
last one, I decided to try again, but I got booted out of the system before
erasing my tracks and got caught with the floppy when I tried to leave the
school.

Funny thing is that the biology test had to be remade and the teacher made it
really difficult as it had pissed her off. Most people did mediocrely (though
I think only the class dumbo failed), but my parents made me study biology all
that day to make sure I was punished. I got an A.

Also I was supposed to get expelled for my breach, rather than that, I got
extra credits if I spent a week in the summer helping secure their network,
and I didn't have to take any computer classes (which consisted of "hey lets
do html!") the rest of that year.

------
eduardo_f
I got a loan ($38k, 0% interest, 25-year term) from the Spanish government to
pay for my master's in the US - after I graduated and had already paid for it
(50%-off scholarship made it easier). I'm using this money to bootstrap.

Did a three-day cruise in the Baltic sea with my girlfriend for free after
applying social engineering to a Swedish-only rewards program.

I love this stuff :)

------
jchonphoenix
Certain movie sites on the web limit the amount of viewing time you have for
watching movies.

Thus, I wrote myself my very own web proxy. Every single time I run out of
viewing time, I ssh into one of many university machines, run my proxy, point
my browser at the proxy, and keep watching my movie. Now I have unlimited
viewing time everywhere.

:)

------
sogrady
Three small stories. All minor, none particularly naughty.

1\. In the 80's when I was young, I heard from a friend about a phone hack. By
dialing a particular sequence, you could redial your own phone number, turning
your phone system into an intercom. I tried this, dialed my home phone number
and got my parents, who were very confused to learn that I was in our kitchen,
talking to them upstairs, on our phoneline. This had no practical purpose - or
impact - other than to surprise them.

2\. When traveling with my father at one point, we made a stopover at
Minneapolis, I believe it was. They made us deplane, but the pilots and
attendants came and went by punching in a door code. I did nothing more than
watch them punch it in, then followed them, entered the code and let myself
back on board. My Dad was surprised when I could open the door, and the
attendants were surprised to discover us back on the plane already.

Obviously, this is not something to try these days.

3\. In high school, I got stopped by the police quite a bit. Usually because I
was speeding, but also because my car was old and beat up.

One of the things I discovered was that a subset of the police wasn't eager to
give you a speeding ticket - and impact your insurance rates - but they felt
they had to do something. So I gave them something.

When stopped, I would initially "hunt" for my wallet, which had my license and
insurance card in it, only to not turn it up, instead handing them just the
registration from the glove compartment. On two occasions, I got tickets for
not having these times, which - while as superficially expensive as a speeding
ticket - did not apply points to my insurance and thereby increase my rates.
If it looked like they were going to give me both, I would "find" my wallet in
a crease under the driver's seat.

I'm not sure I'd try this now, and I certainly wouldn't try it every time I
was stopped, it may well still work on occasion. Of course you're better off
not getting stopped in the first place...

------
techbio
I am a 25% partner of website X, which earns in the low six-figures. The 75%
partner has a majority rules attitude, and all accounts and passwords, and
when he decided unilaterally to take a nice salary, and then reneg on a buyout
agreement, I could see things turning wrong.

Having built the site (technical cofounder, translated as: free coder) I have
a backend to all of the user's email addresses (10,000 or so, having been
collected since the time I started working on it).

Soon to be ex-partner is kind of a volatile jerk, and I am by nature a little
paranoid, so I sent the list to a couple of friends and family members, in
case I needed someone to orchestrate a mailing. Kind of like being in a
thriller with smaller stakes.

Anyone else leave a time bomb or easter egg?

TL;DR: Take care of your technical co-founders. Better yet, understand how to
code for yourself.

~~~
staunch
Even as a minority stakeholder you have rights. It's possible a lawyer could
help you achieve a settlement of some kind.

By doing something illegal (like stealing proprietary information) you're
severely decreasing your chances things working out well.

~~~
techbio
It is a gray area. A cost of inexperience too--I have learned a lot about
partnership contracts and operating agreements. The other party choked off my
profit share to the point where a lawyer is a heavy expense for me right now.

Next time they will be settled from the outset :)

------
zohaibr
Six months ago I decided to quit my day time job and move to Austin. I worked
in Finance and there is no way the banks let you work remotely. I had been in
my position for three years and in the last one year, almost all my managers
left the group. I was the only one which had knowledge about all the critical
processes.

I told my boss at that time that I am moving to Austin and if you really want
me which you do, let me work remotely. They could not give me a contract and
thus decided to keep on my same salary. I worked less and less hours every
month until last month, when they decided they did not need me. I worked on my
startup while getting paid and working barely 1-2 hours a week.

~~~
davidandgoliath
Sounds more like thievery than 'naughty'.

------
iloveyouocean
Free airport long-term parking hack. Upon returning from your trip, walk
through the long-term parking gate and grab a new ticket from the machine. As
you are leaving the lot, hand the attendant the new ticket. Tada, free
parking.

~~~
aeontech
Doesn't work at the airports where the ticket machine only gives tickets when
there's weight of the car on the sensors beneath the roadway.

~~~
viggity
actually, they don't use weight, the sensors they use are inductive coils - so
if you take a strong neodymium magnet and wave it above the coil it should
hopefully trip it

<http://www.wikihow.com/Trigger-Green-Traffic-Lights>

~~~
aeontech
Interesting, I had no idea. I did wonder how much trouble it would be to place
sensors under the roadway; this makes for a much more elegant solution.

------
corruption
Sold instructions on ebay about how to beat a little known tax law [it's now
plugged]. A friend went to work for the tax man and in training they were told
about me and how it's so important to not let these tricks get out, as it
could cost the country lots of money. I promptly stopped as I didn't realize I
was on their radar!

Reverse engineered an algorithm from a huge international company who kept it
under lock and key using publicly available data and used it with their
competitors. They still have it under lock and key.

Bought textbooks at fundraising sales and sold them to university students the
next year for a 3000% markup.

Others I'd only tell in person :)

~~~
elai
Aren't those little known tax laws usually easy for them to give you a ton of
crap about, disregard and have you go through courts to actually get the
benefit?

~~~
fragmede
Let x = cost of tax lawyer; y = money saved by utilizing little known tax law.
If X is less than Y....

------
pskomoroch
Free sodas freshman year. Chem lab + NaCl + soda machine + Russian roomate.

~~~
hebejebelus
Can you elaborate? I could do with some free drinks…

~~~
awakeasleep
<http://www.snopes.com/science/saltwater.asp>

It says false at the top, but goes on to explain it did actually work for a
period of time, by shorting out the mechanism.

One kid was even electrocuted when he tried it on an ungrounded machine!

------
IChrisI
I realize I'm a bit late to this thread, but I've enjoyed reading others'
stories and felt I should share.

I tend to abuse HTML browser-based games by using bookmarklets. I played
Parallel Universe 2 for awhile, and when I got bored I set up a bookmarklet
that would adventure out into a particular level, fight enemies, collect
treasure, and even resurrect itself when it died. The game's item-selling
interface kind of sucked, it just said the item name and you could click for
details, but that's rather inefficient since I had 1k-2k items after a day of
auto-playing. I made a bookmarklet that opened each item window, grabbed the
items's stats, wrote them to the item list, and closed the window. It took ~15
minutes to run for that many items, but hey, I had to find the best ones
somehow right? :)

I played The Hacker Project for awhile too. They had voting links - they were
on about 20 top-game lists, and they gave everybody a small reward for voting
once a day. The voting link went to a vote.php?link=n page, for n=1-20. Did
they allow numbers over 20? Nope. How about under 1? Yep! I went to
vote.php?link=0, vote.php?link=-1, and checked a few to make sure they worked.
Then I set up a script to vote 6 times a second and left it running for almost
a week before I got banned. I was moving up in ranks quite fast, I think I
almost got into the top 10. I hacked The Hacker Project!

------
IsaacL
"Sorry, I can't make it to X - because of family problems." It's an excuse
that makes it possible to get out of loads of things, because most people will
just nod and say "ok, sure, I understand" and question no further.

First heard it used when attending a 5-day TEFL course; one student had
decided that it was a waste of time, so skipped the last day by using this
excuse. (He had enough attendance to pass). I've only used it once, since it
feels slightly unethical, but it's very effective.

------
InsideMole
Typically, all organizations get bureaucratic when they grow above certain
level, and still work the same way they used to -- and even then it's
difficult.

My typical response has been to play by their own rules: If they say I've
omitted some attachment from some application (the formal applications always
seem to be important!), I swamp them in paper, which usually makes them more
reasonable;

I go around them in the organization, and reach the bureaucrat from on top --
their work is surprisingly effective, when pushed by their own bosses;

If they try to play me out of the game by refusing to give me passwords to
accounts I need for my work -- they'll tell me to clean up their server and
then give me a regular restricted user account, because to give me admin
privs, they'd have to click a radio button -- I will just go around snooping
to get the credentials for some "general" admin account, as the computers have
several admin accounts, although some are more equal than others. But they
really don't store their passwords the way they should! ;)

I loved this story about weaseling a useful piece of code in a product update
that was at the top. Been there, done that. :D

Sometimes the admins just don't check the code, even if they had the knowhow.

------
svrocks
the fancy boarding school i went to had a monopoly on book-selling. Every year
students would pay full price for textbooks in the fall and sell them back to
the bookstore for a fraction of the cost at the end of the year.

I decided this was retarded and made a riskless market in textbooks at the end
of my senior year by matching buyers and sellers and pocketing the spread
(often >50%). I think I made like $800.

------
deltasquare4
We had a filtered internet access at the consulting company I used to work
for, which blocked personal mails, social networks and blogging platforms and
software downloads (apparently, you need approval of the IT department to
install any software on your machine). I subscribed to RSS feeds from tech
blogs via Google Reader and deployed a download proxy on my website server to
bypass these restrictions.

The same company wouldn't allow flash drives in any of the machines for
security reasons. We had a couple of testing Mac Pros on another network where
we needed to deploy our application frequently. I installed the USB mass
storage drivers back into these machines to enable Flash drive access.
Everything was smooth after that.

We weren't using an issue tracker for our application because the in-house
tracker was total crap and less usable compared to pen and paper. We weren't
permitted to install any other tracker (not even an open source one).
Eventually, I took the plunge and (secretly) installed Redmine on my machine.
It saved us a lot of time (and a lot of paper, too).

------
bnycum
Once in middle school we had a test in a history class that just totally
slipped my mind. Our class period was divided by lunch, and everyday during
lunch there were 2 girls that stayed behind and ate lunch with the teacher and
helped her grade. Turns out they stole the test the day before while the
teacher ran to make copies during lunch. The girls share this information with
everyone they can find, for every history class. I find out right before class
but only manage to snag 5 answers. We took the test, and soon the teacher
caught on when everyone passed with flying colors, tons of trouble all around.
She came up to me and told me "I'm so glad to know you didn't cheat", and
handed me my paper with only those 5 correct answers.

------
cmkrnl
My first ever real job was as a data entry operator, when I was about 19. By
this time I'd worked with Windows 95, 98, 3.11, NT 4, and had been using Linux
exclusively on the home PC ~ 2 years.

Whenever one of us made a mistake in data entry, a supervisor would come over
to the terminal (running PC-DOS), unlock some admin functionality with a
password, and fix the error. Even at 1-2 mistakes per day, this was a hassle
for me. Got around it by using a keylogger (remember TSRs?) to capture the
password :)

When the time came to quit, one of the supervisors had recognized that I knew
my way around computers. But I'd royally pissed off another supervisor by
then, by doing 'attrib +r +h my-data-file' one day. They couldn't extract the
data while I was out for lunch :o)

------
rmason
The college library had dollar changers for use with the photocopy machines. I
had a friend who made the discovery that if he copied both sides of a dollar
bill and glued them together with some rubber cement that there were older
machines that would give him change. So in exchange for two nickels investment
he'd get back four quarters.

He literally lived on this hack for an entire year. Course this was 40 years
ago and those 'older' change machines were probably some of the first ever
built and not very sophisticated.

Why it took the college a year to upgrade the machines I will never know. He
wouldn't have been that hard for the police to find. All the local bartenders
knew as the quarters guy ;<).

~~~
drp
Counterfeiting is on the wrong side of the line between naughty and evil.

------
techbio
I went to Punahou Academy in Hawaii. I think it was Pauahi Hall (long time
ago) but in the basement near keyboarding class were mens and a ladies rooms,
with doorways on opposite sides of an upward stairwell.

Well, at the back of the bathrooms were matching doors, to a personal student
file storage room and network interface boards under the staircase. We were
able to defeat the lock with edge of our laminated student ID cards.

Naughtily, we smoked in there. And tried to look up hot junior's phone
numbers, or obstruct campus security lines so as to come and go truantly. We
were pretty harmless though. Someone found cigarette ashes, and the
MasterLocks appeared.

------
curtisspope
I snuck into a bunch of concerts
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dncp1/iama_guy_who_snu...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dncp1/iama_guy_who_snuck_into_23_concerts_for_free_ask/)

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mathewsi
Great question.

In middle-school I set up a shared folder on my school's computer network so
my friends and I could share research with each other for a couple school
projects.

It was removed by administrators within a couple of weeks, but it was helpful
while it lasted.

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abraham
My youth was spent home schooled in a house with no electricity, phone, or
plumbing. Much of our food was grown in gardens and in the winter we had to
pull the laundry on sleds 1/4 of a mile to the car.

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jdavid
anyone else figure out that cable channels were blocked with bandpass filters
when they were a kid? #freeHBO

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Tichy
I tend to run red traffic lights when cycling. Does that count?

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shareme
I boot strapped my University book and lab fees at Purdue by holding a begin-
of-semester Poker night, the finite mathematics came in handy :)

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TheSOB88
I stopped going to (and failed) a CS class in college because it was boring,
and I already had a job with a company who I'd worked with. That count?

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techbio
I see a short film series!

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idiotb
I once cracked into President of India's office. But, unfortunately I got
caught on one final check and then don't ask... (super bad!)

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yemkay
We had DOS based terminals in our college computer lab. Each of us had a
different working directory, but the directories were all accessible by each
other. Once I and my friend opened a directory of a girl student and created a
batch file named "cd.bat" which prints some garbage texts on the screen.
Whenever she runs "cd" command from her working directory, this batch file
would get executed!

