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The time I hacked my high school
- dgant 16y agoSimilar to "Better to do and ask forgiveness, than to ask permission first"
- noonespecial 16y agoAnd they say you can't get a decent education in schools anymore. Everyone in the Chess Club now has an intimate understanding of how money moves through governments. See you in Congress Nate.
- mcknz 16y agoMore like Wall Street. Generate excessive leverage and let the government bail you out via taxpayers.
- sprout 16y agoPolitics are politics. Any time more than 10 people form an organization, there are odd political heuristics used by the establishment that can be gamed.
- xilun0 16y agoI apparently missed the part were he took part of the money for himself and his friends after his "business" failed.
- crpatino 16y agoHe apparently refused to do so... >> When I graduated, Chess Club had $500 in the bank. I considered holding one last tournament with massive prizes, but ultimately decided to leave the money for future generations of Chess Club.
- citricsquid 16y agoExcellent, although the "we didn't need so much money" might give the impression they were taking money that other clubs could have used, although that's government for you!
- sp4rki 16y agoI'm under the impression that this hack didn't really mean other clubs got less money. On the contrary, it seems to me that thanks to his actions (which resulted on the restrictions for all clubs being softened) caused all of the clubs to make more money with increasing lunch sales.
- megablast 16y agoThe other clubs did lose out, since he was taking spots in the lunch queue he did not need, and stopping other clubs from using. Nowhere does it say they council changed its restrictions due to the chess club. The fact is, chess club does not need much money, nor fancy chess sets. Nevertheless, good work, nobody was really hurt, survival of the smartest club and all that.
- cbr 16y ago> Nowhere does it say they council changed its restrictions due to the chess club. Actually no: "Soon afterwards, the student government relaxed the rules to let clubs have lunch sales more days per week."
- citricsquid 16y agoah okay, I read it as if there were limited places and they acquired more by pressuring the people into needing them to make more, if there's no limit then awesome, I retract my distaste!
- sp4rki 16y agoOh there where limits in place. The school allowed one club to do a sale per week. That's one sale per week regardless of the club, and clubs that had a precedent generally took most of the dates allowed to do sales. After this, the school realized that more clubs needed more money and they now allowed more then one sale per week, and more than one club to do said sales per week.
- hnal943 16y agoIf only your student body showed fiscal constraint, this wouldn't have worked.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoOnce again, a perverse incentive accomplishes the opposite of its intended objective.
- colbyolson 16y agoWhile I approve of finding a way to get your foot in the door for lunch sales, the soon abusing of it really turned me off. Too much like politics really. Other clubs or the school itself could have used that money.
- sp4rki 16y agoI wouldn't call this an abuse. It made it so all the clubs where making more money, so everyone was really profiting from this.
- pyre 16y agoEven though the rules about one sale per week were relaxed, it seems like each day could only have one club making a sale, and there was still a queue for those days. He was saying that since his group had a 'precedent' of 'needing money' they still got priority in that queue. There is no guarantee that other groups were or weren't missing out on money. There is just isn't enough information to make that statement.
- sp4rki 16y agoYeah let's put it this way. Say school has no vacations so they used to get 52 sales a year, in which of course the clubs with a precedent of needing more money took precedence. Now say they now get 104, or hell... 156 sales a year because of the change in rules. Let's say that clubs that needed money took 80% of the days (this not changing in the worst case scenario), leaving 10 or 11 days for the rest of the clubs before, the remaining sales for this other clubs increases to 21 or 32 respectively. The only way that the chess club was going to take away sales from the other clubs is if their percentage of sales increases, and even then it would have to increase beyond a threshold where it started eating up the extra days beyond the original sales the other clubs where having. Sure it could be the case that other clubs where missing out, but it is very much more probable that everyone was benefiting from the chess club 'hack'. Besides, you could argue that if your club does nothing to take at least some advantage of the relaxed rules it's the other clubs' fault, not the chess club's. In the end the clubs profited, the members profited, and the businesses that provided the food profited. This is a good compromise if X club didn't get much benefits after all.
- BrandonM 16y agoAn excellent hack that left a bad taste in my mouth.
- lylejohnson 16y agoAll those references to school lunch?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ryanelkins 16y agoI remember the time I "hacked" my school library's computers. I changed the homepage on the browsers to my Geocities blog (this was almost 15 years ago). Later that day I was pulled from class by a security guard. In the library was most of campus security and most of the administrative staff. They were sure that I had put my blog on their servers and destroyed their website. They even had some teacher from the computer lab who couldn't seem to figure it out. Once I showed them how to change the homepage back (there was a tense moment when their server took forever to respond) they stopped threatening to have me arrested and made me sit quietly at a table until the period was over.
- mrcharles 16y agoWe'd just put a batch file attached to autoexec on our school computers which prompted with Cannot read C:\ Abort, Retry, Fail?, and then we made batch files for A, R, and F which just printed "Error" or something similar. It was pretty awesome watching the "computer expert" claim the harddrives had died and needed to be replaced.
- illumin8 16y agoI did something similar - I had TSR programs written for DOS that "simulated" viruses. They simulated viruses like Cascade (where all of the characters on your screen would fall to the bottom and lie in a pile every few minutes) but didn't actually replicate. I put this in the autoexec.bat file on every computer in the lab during my Pascal programming class. The next class was a word processing class. Apparently the FBI was called to investigate when the computer teacher couldn't figure out that it wasn't a real virus. I wasn't really punished because I hadn't done any damage, but my parents got called. As usual, someone with limited computer skills that can't get a better job somewhere else, ends up teaching computers for slightly more than minimum wage. We used to have a lot of fun on the Novell network as well when the IT guy (think comic book guy from the Simpsons in real life) would walk away from his desk and leave it logged in. We would give ourselves admin and wreak havoc for a few hours until he noticed there was more than one superuser.
- 16y ago
- symkat 16y agoThe students who bought the food at the lunch sales most likely did not care what their money was going to. This was not like paying taxes, it was getting restaurant food at a markup at your high school. I'm sure that those who actually thought about where the money for their food was going were few and far between. The end-result of this hack was that the student government opened up selling outside food at lunch time more often for more clubs than previously allowed. I see this as good for everyone involved, with the possible exception perhaps of the poor kids.
- araneae 16y agoOr the rich kids' arteries.
- symkat 16y agoThe high-school I went to served pizza and french fries regularly. The food was extremely unhealthy and to my knowledge that hasn't changed much. It's far easier to deep fry a few hundred pounds of tater tots than to make a few thousand sandwiches and sliced apples. I doubt either option was fairly healthy for the students, but I wouldn't use a high-school cafeteria as the epitome of healthy living. Also for some reason the rich kids at my school typically brought their own lunch and ate more natural food than the middle-class or the poor kids. Anecdotal at best, but that was my experience.
- blizkreeg 16y agoIn the late 90s there was an email service in India that mailed you a check if you logged in a minimum number of times a month (heady dotcom dayz). I received a few $5 checks - in Rupees that was a decent amount of pocket money for a student! While playing around once, I figured that if you entered the answer to the "Pet's name" security question as "pet's name" verbatim, it gave you the password in plain text! And this for _any_ account. It was fun hacking into email accounts. I tried to persuade the girl I had a crush on at the time to join the service saying she could get money if she uses the service. She never did. Woman's intuition I guess.
- eru 16y agoSomewhat off-topic, I guess.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hfinney 16y agoWith great power comes great responsibility.
- jasonlbaptiste 16y agoPlease tell us about the time you, nathanmarz, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage. :D
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mattparcher 16y agoLucky. At my high school, the cafeteria made it real hard for anyone but the student government to sell food at lunch — our club had to collect dues from members who wanted pizza delivered. Then again, I knew a guy who would drive to the local taco shop before lunch and then sell real burritos to the other students to make a few bucks.
- aneth 16y agoThis is one of those questionably ethical "hacks" that entrepreneurs commonly use to gain advantage. There was no great harm, but there was deceit and some harm. Socrates would not approve, but I think Paul Graham would. When the victor tells the history, everyone cheers around the campfire, while the defeated cry foul and regroup their forces for revenge.
- n-ion 16y agoi know this will come off as dick-ish... just saying this hack seems more like a ruse... which i guess is a hack... i was expecting more from such an inflammatory title...