What's the coolest hack you've seen or done? [closed]

Answer 1

Tesla's device set the record for man-made lightning (42 meters or 130 feet) and all the lights in Colorado Springs had gone out.

Answer 2

The quake3 inverse square root and the MIT Magic/More Magic switch usually make these lists.

Answer 3

And a self-printing program ('quine') in C#, 149 characters long:

C# Quine

class P{static void Main(){var S=“class P{{static void Main(){{var S={1}{0}{1};System.Console.Write(S,S,’{1}’);}}}}”;System.Console.Write(S,S,‘”‘);}}

Answer 4

A couple years ago I was developing a web interface and using some brand-new JS libs for AJAX functionality. The lib only eval'd JS that was in the html doc header, but there was too much data being returned to fit in the header. What to do?

Some poking around revealed that the JS in the header had access to the body of the html doc, so I wrote a generic 'eval the body' function that was returned in the header. Very useful at the time, especially b/c a different JS lib we were evaluating only eval'd JS from the body, so this was compatible for both JS libs and avoided any size constraints from the header!

Yes, simple, but I felt quite awesome for a whole month after figuring this out :)

Answer 5

Steve Wozniak's disk controller.

Answer 6

After several days of debugging a dial-up server that was experiencing an unacceptable number of dropped calls, I traced the problem to a home-grown authentication mechanism that depended on the text representation of the running getty's PID. The getty would generate an error and abort if its PID contained an even number followed by a 9, causing the call to drop and the getty to respawn with a new PID.

After the problem was identified, I was taken off the project and later discovered that the "fix" was to change the numeric-to-text conversion from

sprintf(strval, "%d", pid);

to

sprintf(strval, "%o", pid);

Rather than troubleshooting the authentication routine, someone chose to convert the PID to octal, making it impossible to contain a 9!