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Ask HN: When was the last time you used your tech skills for a real life task?
21 points by sdsd on March 25, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 26 comments
Personally, I compute in 3 ways:

1. Professionally 2. Recreationally 3. Personally

Personally as in, I need to accomplish a task in my normal life, and I use my computer skills to solve it in a way a non-techie wouldn't be able to.

For example, today on Reddit someone asked: "Is there a word, in english, that has the letter ‘V’ and is not followed by a vowel?"

So I ran this on my mac:

    egrep '^[a-z].*v[^eaiouy]' /usr/share/dict/words
The part at the beginning means that the first letter should be lowercase (imo proper nouns don't really count)

And voila, a buttload of them showed up!

I've also used my cybersecurity knowledge to gain access to devices who's security was protecting me from myself, and done the same for many friends.

I enjoy things like that. What about you? Any such small personal tales?




What comes readily is the following: Input where pasting is blocked. I know there are plugins that fix this, but it seldom happens so I don’t bother installing those. I just open the inspector, store the element as a variable in the console, and quickly set the value there.

Another is about mobile internet. Here you activate a prepaid plan for a day, but often the system “forgets” to restrict your internet access when the day is over and you go back to the very expensive default plan (there is no not having internet if you have credit on your account). I used an app at that time call Tasker that had a visual programming workflow like Shortcuts. At 11:50pm every night it turns off data on the phone and sends the code to deactivate the plan (needed to clean stale data on the system, so you can activate the plan again shortly after midnight).


> Input where pasting is blocked.

Likewise when websites block the content and try to force you to subscribe/create an account to continue reading. I use uBlock to zap those out of the page and continue reading. If for some reason that doesn't work, I watch the network tab and read the plan text response from the server.


Javascript bookmarklets are very useful. Although the use cases for them have mostly been for my work in tech.


Not particularly impressive but I guess this would be the most recent thing:

I go to karaoke alone and record myself for practice purposes. You can share the videos to the karaoke company's little social network, but you can't save them permanently... except they apparently don't know dev tools exist.


Probably most commonly is fixing bugs on websites in dev tools. Often if something on a website is broken I can hack an API call together or fix up some HTML and do what I was trying to do. This happened recently when I was trying to download a bill, but the website wasn't working correctly. I was able to look into dev tools and find the broken API call and fix it.

I think my my favourite real life use of tech was many years ago when I was taking some kids to see Santa and stupidly assumed it would be possible to just turn up.

We got there and I was told they were fully booked that day and that I had to buy tickets online. I went on their website and noticed that the day was greyed out so I couldn't click it. When I clicked other days that were available though I saw that it was just navigating me to a page with a query string for the selected date.

Obviously at this point I tried to change the query string to todays date and to my surprise got through to a similar page, but instead for selecting time slots. Again all the time slots were greyed out so then I found out the query string for that from another day with available slots.

In the end I managed to get through to the checkout page and booked tickets for same day. The staff were very confused when we turned back up with tickets, especially since they were now over capacity which shouldn't have been possible. But they acknowledged the tickets were valid so everyone got to see Santa.

Stuff like this is rarely ever possible today unfortunately. In the past you could often even alter the payment total at checkout security was so poor. Not that I ever did that, but I realised it was possible a few times.


Like others said, using dev tools in a browser, I have been able to make my life easier many times.

Also I have found many toys for babies and toddler are really loud for no reason. I usually open such toys and remove speakers or if sound is important I would add a small resistor from some other toy.

Another thing that is sort of related to tech skills is ability to research and learn new topics. I was absolutely not handy but in last few years I have learned various home improvement/maintenance such as changing toilet flush, masonry, taking care of pool, and probably many more such things. But this can be a little bit of curse too. There are many times where I took on a project after watching various YouTube videos, only to find out that it is not as straightforward. For example, masonry needs a lot of practice and that project needs to be redone.


I don't do much recreational coding now, but there are a couple of recent examples:

- I needed to submit something on a website that had a completely broken frontend (like, scripts were busted). Found an old version on the wayback machine that worked and, fortunately, there were no compatibility issues. This is pretty basic, but I could have set up overrides in dev tools to restore a working version of the "original" site.

- Needed to make a hotel reservation, but the online form was broken (NaN for all number inputs, probably broken validator). Was able to guess the expected format and manually issue these requests, which worked.

I often think about technical literacy. Programmers are in this bubble where we think "oh, I'll just use grep and regex" and we can solve all sorts of problems. But 99% of people don't even know what those things are, much less have the foundation necessary to use these tools effectively. This sucks, because technical literacy does not seem to be growing at a rate that matches our societal dependence on these systems.


>I often think about technical literacy. Programmers are in this bubble where we think "oh, I'll just use grep and regex" and we can solve all sorts of problems. But 99% of people don't even know what those things are, much less have the foundation necessary to use these tools effectively. This sucks, because technical literacy does not seem to be growing at a rate that matches our societal dependence on these systems.

Even working in IT this is an issue. For something I used to do we needed to take a bunch of input and turn it into a basic csv before it could be used. For example, feeding a bunch of servers names into some kind of script. People kept coming to me to help them put this together, because I was decent with a text editor. Eventually I decided to make a little website that let people dump in all their garbage data; it would clean it up and format it in various formats, depending on what they needed it for. I figured one or two people on the team would get some use out of it. How wrong I was. It was being used hundreds of times per month. I was attending a demo for some other team a couple years later and someone on the demo used it to get his input in order before using whatever he was trying to demo. Some of these seemingly basic things can be huge for enabling people to do their job effectively.

I always thought I shouldn't have gone into IT, but something else... anything else... and simply used computer skills as a super power. The productivity someone with some basic computer skills can have, compared to the others who don't, is crazy.


> Needed to make a hotel reservation, but the online form was broken (NaN for all number inputs, probably broken validator). Was able to guess the expected format and manually issue these requests, which worked.

Bravo for the neat hack, but did you actually get a confirmation email? I'd not be particularly comfortable arriving at a hotel that I'd booked through the direct, unsanctioned and entirely unexpected use of an HTTP endpoint! Perhaps ringing the hotel's telephone would have been more practical ;)


Soldering and like just enough experience with an Arduino, electronics, and Ohm's law to not hurt myself.

I replaced USB ports of some DJ equipment that became unusable after a USB cable got yanked.

I clip off annoying USB lights.

Instead of throwing away my MX Master mouse I gave it another life as a backup. This involved me trying to replace the battery but completely man handling the delicate tiny port, and still make it work.

Once I got comfortable opening up the guts of electronics I also got comfortable with general repairs.

I replaced my switch joycons that got the drift.

Replaced my cracked phone screen.

Replaced the rotating clutch in my microwave.

So much more.


I have a lot of hand written notes. I wanted to transcribe them. I ended up using Whisper api to do this.

I was also making a Udemy course and I needed to have the captions in a specific format. I ended up doing this in Python.


This only mildly feels like “Tech skills” to me:

I have set a goal for myself to walk 500 miles (tracked exercise) before going to a specific conference. So I built a spreadsheet that tracks my progress, estimates how many miles a day I need, how far ahead (or behind) I am, and the estimated date that I’ll finish. I just passed the first 100 miles threshold, and looking at my progress helps me stay focused and excited about the goal.


Knew what car I was interested in. - narrowed down the search to three different brands/models and wrote a scrapper for a local used cars website. Then this scrapper built up a DB of info about cars available, and I was able to easily query them, and have data about how long were those cars up there (how long from ad to sale), plot price graphs etc. Bought a car with 10% less than the AVG price for the brand/model/year, with really small mileage.


almost every single day I stumble on something broken and have to apply either my software or general engineering skills: from clearing cookies of a broken website in dev console to soldering terrible cheap buttons in some fancy not so cheap device :)


I built the movie torrent finder of my IMDb's movie watchlist

https://github.com/navyad/moviematch


Time and again I use the chrome dev tools to go around broken forms (for example: a website tells me field X is invalid, but it doesn’t tell me why. I check the console errors or the JS and find a way to submit my data)


My doctor has a scheduling site where the footer covers up all the afternoon appointments. I inspect the footer, find where it starts, and delete the div, giving me access to book in the afternoon. I have reported this at least 3 times to the office, and it’s gets escalated to the devs, yet it keeps re-breaking in the exact same way.


Haa, the ol’ position: absolute; !


The page got longer, and they didn’t account for that. So appointment times would go under the z-index of the footer, and then past it vertically. The footer then became a band across the middle of the page.


Most recently built a scraper to download information that I want to track over time automatically. I have the scraper built - now I just need to automate it.


Everyday.

Just not being afraid to try stuff.

Self-efficacy is a powerful thing.

(Meta edit: Both Bandura and Young in a 5 word sentence. That postgrad pedagogy course was worth it!)


> Just not being afraid to try stuff.

Like what?


You're missing entries that start with 'v' by requiring a subsequent 'v'.


Nice! Thanks!


made a morning alarm that plays a playlist. every day at 5 am. i now get up to lovely songs than the buzz kill of a traditional alarm. now im on to making it a more general media player accessible over local network.


This would just make me hate the songs I like.




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