Talking with [Tom Nardi] on the podcast this week, he mentioned his favorite kind of hack: the community-developed open-source firmware that can be flashed into a commercial product that has crappy firmware, thus saving it. The example, just for the record, is the CrossPoint open e-book reader firmware that turns a mediocre cheap e-book into something that you can do anything you want with. Very nice!
And that got me thinking about “kinds of hacks” in general. Do we have a classification scheme for the hacks that we see here on Hackaday? For instance, the obvious precursor to many of Tom’s favorite hacks is the breaking-into-the-locked-firmware hack, where a device that didn’t want you loading your own firmware on it is convinced to let you do so. Junk-hacking is probably also a category of its own, where instead of finding your prey on AliExpress, you find it on eBay, or in the alleyway. And the save-it-from-the-landfill repair and renovation hacks are close relatives.
The doing-too-much-with-too-little hacks are maybe my personal favorite. I just love to see when someone manages to get DOOM running in Linux on a computer made with only 8-pin microcontrollers. Because of the nature of the game, these often also include a handful of abusing-a-component-to-do-something-it’s-not-meant-to-do hacks. Heck, we even had a challenge for just exactly those kind of hacks.
Then there are fine-art-hacks, where the aesthetic outcome is as important as the technical, or games-hacks where fun is the end result.
What other broad categories of hacks are we missing? And which are your favorite?
The non astroturfed kind of hack is the best.
There’s a joke (that may be the legend status of an old happening) about two guys going on a foreign land, staying into a hoted that have heating payed by special coins (you buy the coins at the reception and when you want heating, put them in the coin recsptor of the wall heater). Of course it’s the middle of the winter and is very very cold. No doubled layer windows, no special insulation, heating was paramount. The hotel management was perplexed because those two dudes bought only one coin and after 5 nights there was hot in the room. They check the coin box for fake coins or signs of hacking, they find only one coin. In the next morning, when the two dudes were leaving the hotel, the manager asked them how they did it. They refused, the manager then bribed them with money, booze and more stuff until he was told that the heater coin was fitting perfectly into the beer bottle cap, so the dudes fill the cap with water, froze it, then inserted as coin in the heater. Where it melted and evaporated. End of story.
That’s awesome. It’s like the ice bullet/knife murder mystery
There is a similar scene in the movie “Real Genius” but with liquid nitrogen.
https://youtu.be/Rt15978tdE0?si=lbMh_yjIvvQzezON
I think they were keeping each other warm
Not to be that guy but it deserves to be said…
Ones that aren’t done for YouTube clicks.
I’ll take a scrappily written project writeup off of a blog or hackaday’s io site any day. They usually are someone who is genuinely curious and exploring something and documenting how it went, rather than a carefully edited and manicured piece of entertainment media. (Unedited videos are good here too tbh, they’re just not what the tube’s algorithms favor)
And no…. A blog post is not more work than an edited YouTube video. It’s a lot less. And far more educational, and effective as a means of communication.
It’s just harder to use a bunch of psychological tricks to get the viewer to click, then more tricks to keep a viewer hooked so they watch the whole thing, so you can make money by pushing adds in their face.
I miss when project writeups were a more common way to share a cool project. I think it encourages a much more healthy community.
Word, no more e-celebs with huge audiences. I miss those posts where it would be a well documented github repo by a nobody, something about anything that is not about LLMs or doesn’t require me to download gerber files, issues a 3rd party service and wait weeks. If by all means, time has become the most crucial resource.
And then there is the astroturfed content of native ads.
Thirding this. Once in a while a short YouTube is okay but I would love if the articles screen captured the important parts in a design instead of sending me to fast forward through 40 minutes of someone selling supplements, talking about their exwives grand dad, how sick their dog has been, or their six new totally not a sponsor tools and how great they are.
Yes! I don’t know about my favorite hack but my favorite hackaday article is one with a blog post or github. I like to download the source, grep around in it, and answer the “how did they …?” or “did they really …?” queston. A lot of times, the answer is disappointing. A recent article, “how did they implement such an eclectic mix of advanced functionality but leave off the most basic functionality?” answered with “by putting AI slop on github”. Disappointing answer, but so nice to be able to get to it!
I hate seeking around a video wondering if they really wasted 47 minutes of screen time without addressing any of the questions i have!!! And fwiw, people who put stuff in a video almost always waste 47 minutes of screen time without addressing any questions! It’s like googling a recipe these days where they tell you a thousand words about your aunt’s wedding where you first saw this dish, but then at the bottom the punchline is that it’s just 3 cans dumped in a casserole dish, or worse, they forgot to include the recipe at all! That’s not a hack: it’s spam.
i have to admit, my biggest problem with those is ive probibly already watched them on youtube before the article drops. every now and again i see one and dont watch, but i can skim a short article about it and decide if the video is worth my time, but those usually dont provide enough info and just say watch the video at the end. spoilers are for fiction.
You are so right – there is an entire subset of youtube devoted to coming up with the most stupid or wildly impractical hacks or inventions or solutions to non-existent problems purely in order to generate content.
Some I don’t mind – Uri Tuchman for example is at least showing true “mad inventor” vibes as well as interesting true craftsmanship – but so many are just throwing the usual mix of expensive tools/machines/CAD at something that’s just ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous.
Weirdly Colin Furze also gets a pass, maybe because he comes across as genuinely doing ridiculous stuff for the pure childish joy of it rather than treating it too much like a job. Plus he never pretends his stuff is anything but silly fun.
Colin Furze is a league on its own. He started well before being a Youtuber was a job you could live from. He’s made all the most r crazy things mostly for his own fun, and the underground bunker, garage and tunnels are something that requires a lot of commitment.
There are way too many youtubers that spit out project after project that are clearly not meant to last, just a means to make just another video.
My favourite type of hacks are the ones we see around us all the time. When normies give me the sideways look when they hear me use the word “hack” (it has so many meanings, after all) I always recount this .. “Its a hot summers day, families on the beach, in the car park you see a shiny Series 7 Beamer, a few years ago, ok. One of the back windows has been rolled down, the end of beach towel is shoved in and the window rolled back up again, sheltering the back seat from the sun, clearly a kids seat fastened there. Seen that?
‘Yer man pays 50+k for a car, and has to resort to that trick to make it fit for purpose, see, thats’ a hack.
They nod, got it right?
Yeah i love running into hacks in the wild. There was a bicycle guy around here, about 25 years ago he taught himself to weld and made a whole series of long and tall bikes. Always a hoot to see someone around town on one of his ridiculous contraptions. But my all time favorite is one day i saw a bike towing a trailer…the trailer was a rubbermaid style big plastic box that had been mounted on an office rolly chair base somehow, that was towed behind a bike by a handful of bungee cables. Thinking about it, it seems impossible, but the seeing was the believing!
When I was a consultant I had the concept of a $50,000 answer, which is the simple answer to a question that solves the client’s problem in a simple manner and saves them a busload of work. This was just a mental concept I had – I never charged them extra. This happened about a dozen times over the course of my career.
My favorite was when the project needed to process video data of 6-bit words packed into a 32-bit data stream. Doing this with CPU instructions (shifting, masking, and gluing together pieces that spanned words) was too slow to show the actual video, and the client asked me if there was another way to do this.
I suggested that they add some gates to the data bus to automatically do the shifting – set an I/O bit and the next data fetch would be automatically shifted.
They took that idea and used two port memory (memory with two outgoing data busses) so that one bus could automatically shift data based on three I/O bits set by the CPU. And the bus output went directly to the video system, the only thing the CPU had to do was set bits with the right cadence.
With that system the ISR generating the video could run autonomously, freeing the CPU to do all of the decision work. No shifting or masking required.
(And big airplanes could then see the landing strip through dense fog.)
Sometimes a simple answer has big implications.
These are the hacks I like the best.
How did you get into a position to charge 50k for an answer? Got tons of those but somehow getting people to pay seems like it’s personal.
I love efficiency hacks. Code, energy, work, time, etc. Anything that significantly improves on the original goal (or adds relevant functionality) of a system. I’m all for reinventing the wheel, if improvement can be shown.
Small immediately useful things. Quick hobby dopamine hit!
Elaborate or elegant works of art where I am reminded there are awesome people out there. Admiration!
Bizarro highly creative solutions to problems. Inspiration!
Solutions to problems that are reasonable and I was unaware of them. I like to learn new things and I hoard tricks.
Those are my top 4.
I would say I don’t really care for any of these if a person didn’t drive them. Hitting the slop machine on something someone doesn’t understand, then putting another token into the slop machine for a writeup just does nothing for me. I can get free slop machine results from any search engine now. It may as well just be an advertisement.
I want to see the perseverance, the corners cut and the care in the design, the scraped knuckles, the magic smoke. Add in the human requirement to each of those.
re perseverance – Yes, the journey is rewarding, too.
The Art of the Hack
1. Learn how a system works.
2. Learn how it fails, or its limitations.
3. Brainstorm on solutions.
4. Attempt hack. If fail, goto 3.
5. Enjoy dopamine hit, marvel in the elegance of the solution. Enjoy its improvements. If desired, optimize, goto 3.
6. Share solution with Hackaday.
Anything that doesn’t involve gutting a perfectly good or perfectly fixable vintage radio so a Raspberry Pi or Arduino can wear it like a Mr. Belvedere skinsuit.
The Guy Who Plays Mr. Belvedere Fan Club
Doug: Yeah, I’d like to say, partly to talk about it, and partly to let the new guy in on the mood here a little bit. Uh.. Mr. Belvedere is.. the light of my life. Um.. I know I speak for the others.. uh, when I say he is.. so amazing.. you know? And, uh.. he’s just.. I wish.. you know.. I wish I could know him more, you know? Because.. he.. he is one of a kind, you know? He’s.. I think about him all the time, and.. well, I’m wondering – should we kill him?
Mr. Chairman: [ stunned ] For God’s sake, no!
Kevin: Uh.. we usually vote, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman: Well, okay, but before we vote, I’d like Doug to explain why he wants to kill Brocktoon!
Doug: Uh.. I want to meet this girl, and, uh.. I know that she’d be, you know, pretty impressed if she knew I hung out with Mr. Belvedere.
Mr. Chairman: Well, why kill him, then?!
Doug: Um.. because.. so he wouldn’t know how unworthy I am to hang out with him..?
Mr. Chairman: Wait, I don’t follow. What about the girl you want to meet?
Doug: Aw, she’s probably […].
Mr. Chairman: Well, I guess we can vote.. but we really shouldn’t have to, people.. alright.. all those in favor who want to kill Mr. Belvedere, say Aye.
Group: Aye!
Mr. Chairman: All those who don’t think he should be killed, say Nay.
Group: Nay!
Mr. Chairman: The Nays have it. He lives. But the vote shouldn’t have been that close. Which brings me to an area I think we need to discuss. Now, I got a letter from Mr. Belvedere’s publicist. It seems somebody has been killing his housepets again. Now, I’m not gonna ask which one of you is doing it, but I do think we need to do our exercises.
Comic: What exercise?
Phil: The exercise that helps keep the line between reality and fantasy a little less blurry. You’ll see.
Mr. Chairman: Okay, who wants to start?
Cheryl: Okay. I should want to shake hands with Mr. Belvedere, I shouldn’t want to grab a lock of his hair.
Mr. Chairman: That’s good, Cheryl. And, even though it would be really neat to have a lock of his hair, we know that’s not right. Someone else?
Mike: Yeah. Okay. I should want to send him a fan letter telling him how good he was in the episode where he teaches everyone how to cook, but I shouldn’t want to type the letter on a death certificate.
Mr. Chairman: Yes! But, then, you learned that one the hard way, huh? Okay, so let’s keep going. Come on.
Adam: I should like watching “Mr. Belvedere” a lot, but I shouldn’t have to […] at the end of every episode.
Mr. Chairman: That’s right. That is right. Discipline. Next?
Melanie: Uh, yeah! I should want to cook Brocktoon a simple dinner if he truly accepts the offer, but not if I sense that he accepts it telepathically.
Mr. Chairman: Yes, okay.. but let’s keep the exercise in the form of “should” and “shouldn’t”, okay? Next?
Phil: I should want to cook him a simple meal, but I shouldn’t want to cut into him, to tear the flesh, to wear the flesh, to be born unto new worlds where his flesh becomes my key.
Mr. Chairman: [ considering ] Good.
Doug: I got one. I should want to say hi to him nicely, I shouldn’t want to keep him in a big jar in my basement.
Mr. Chairman: Alright, Doug, that’s great, we understand that now. Go on, though. Why shouldn’t you put him in a big jar in your basement?
Doug: Because.. his breath would fog up the glass, and I wouldn’t be able to see him..?
Sgd,
Someone who had a vintage radio in his youth and wishes he’d hung onto it. :(
Anything that can be fixed with a cable tie. Yesterday a van driver asked me if i had a hammer to fix his back door – it kept on swinging out and knocking into baby’s prams on the pavement – not a good look since the company logo was emblazoned boldly on all four sides of the van. A hammer could well have broken the catch anyway, but the cable ties was a perfect quick fix. Always carry cable ties around with me.
Since we can’t put locks on luggage through airports, I put cable ties on zipper pairs. They’re subtle enough to not be noticed, and easy to remove if inspection is required. They keep luggage from accidentally opening, and more importantly – deter casual thieves, as it would be obvious someone opened it.
The knob on our stove broke. Cheap plastic around a metal cylinder with a flat side. Superglue was not enough, since the torque was a lot on such a small part. So i put a tight nylon cable tie around the assembly to reinforce it… years later… still there. (Often, there’s a metal band there, but they never seem to make a difference.) With that success, I put it on all similar knobs to prevent future problems…
Oh, and you can sing “Cable Ties, Cable Ties..” to the tune of “Edelweiss”… ;-)
my favorite hacks are the kludgy ones. if your bom exceeds $5, and isnt 90% salvage parts and junk, its not my kind of hack. i like tool hacks as well, as they tend to give me ideas for my own projects, like grinding old xacto blades into pcb engraving tools. anything than helps me do what i do, and i know im not the only one in that boat.
and i think i left out one of my favorite catgegories, anything that sticks it to the man (making the man stick is optional). if you hack the drm on some piece of consumer hardware or liberate a device from official overpriced refills, or anything that fights forced obsolescence.
One of my favorite tool hacks was when I was a kid, before I had a drivers license. I was helping Dad grease the bearings on his Triumph. He had to unscrew these small bolts with square heads and then screw in the grease gun. He was complaining about the bolts because there wasn’t enough room to turn them 90 degrees at a time. When he got to the second fitting, instead of a 1/4 in wrench, I handed him a 1/4 drive inch socket and an allen wrench and told him to put the drive side of the socket on the bolt and the allen wrench in the other side. He said it was ingenious and it worked great.
I credit that tool hack and his comment as the seed that got me into engineering and problem solving.
The kind that isn’t AI vibe coded slop or the ones where you guys are clearly using AI to summarise youtube videos and then getting huge segments of it incorrect.
The hideously glaring errors on a lot of the 3d printing articles are particularly bad.
My favourite kind of hack to read about is that exact solution to the specific problem that I myself am also facing at that precise moment. This is why i find Hackaday to be such a fantastic resource! What an amazing back-catalogue of hacks!
I have many favorite kind of hacks, but one of them is grossly misusing something to do something weird it is never designed for. Like setting a radio controlled clock by playing sound in your headphones! When I first read about it years ago, I was very skeptical so I had to try. But it worked!
https://bastianborn.de/radio-clock-hack
You can also do the same by misusing a GPIO pin from a Raspberry Pi: https://github.com/harlock974/time-signal
My favourites are anything that rescues, re-purposes, unlocks or prolongs the lifespan of things.
We live in a world of enshittification and consumerism, and the hacks that push back against this are the truly righteous ones and really in the true spirit of hacking – owning your things, controlling them, being able to use them, fix them, and upgrade them as you please.
Also any hacks that make things easier, more accessible, that teach you something or unlock some knowledge or tools that were previously hidden or allow you do do something that was previously hard or costly to achieve.
Perhaps the word we need to coin is de-shittification – any hack that de-shittifies something is a good and righteous hack.
I like all kinds, but my favorites are the ingeniously simple ones. The ones where I can read two sentences or just glance at the picture and go “Oh MAN how did I never think of that? Wait, how did NOBODY think of that before?”
My favorite hacks are, besides being novel, both fun and documented well enough to be REPRODUCIBLE.