Hacker News: aabbccsmith

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Write some software, give it away for free"

aabbccsmith — Tue, 05 May 2026 22:30:34 +0000

The framing of this is far nicer/warmer/positive compared to OP's position of being "above" money. With that said, nonograph does look cool.

New comment by aabbccsmith in "NPM debug and chalk packages compromised"

aabbccsmith — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:47:08 +0000

npm's recent provenance feature fixes this, and it's pretty easy to setup. It will seriously help prevent things like this from ever happening again, and I'm really glad that big packages are starting to use it.

New comment by aabbccsmith in "DirFuck – An esolang that uses folders, not files"

aabbccsmith — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 14:34:17 +0000

My favourite part of the README is:

# Is there a use case? no

DirFuck – An esolang that uses folders, not files

aabbccsmith — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 14:31:32 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/boon-cpu/DirFuck

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36310755

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Building a dangerous driving leaderboard (and getting offered a job)"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 23:35:37 +0000

had so much fun working on it :)

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Avoiding homework with code and getting caught"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 03:25:28 +0000

thank you for the kind words :) things are going well for us so far, so fingers crossed it stays like this! You've put a big smile on my face :)

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Nightdrive"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 03:21:28 +0000

This is the sort of thing I'd leave on an unused monitor all the time or have on display somewhere. Really cool aesthetic

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Avoiding homework with code and getting caught"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 02:32:49 +0000

We never really thought about documenting progress, so the photo of the email was taken from a phone camera of a teacher's computer (they had sent the email). We managed to find it while I was writing the article earlier on in the year, in a "deleted pictures" folder. I thought it would be cool to add it on. It's purely because the project spanned such a long time and nothing was really written down or saved.

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Avoiding homework with code and getting caught"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 01:54:18 +0000

It was part of the homework, we had to watch a video and write down notes in a physical notebook. The notebook was never checked because they assumed that a video watched >=1x meant that we understood the task. The videos took a while to watch so we'd rather skip.

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Avoiding homework with code and getting caught"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 01:27:51 +0000

I didn't really get that vibe, especially when we called Colin. He was super friendly. But then again, we didn't want to test it and we complied immediately =)

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Avoiding homework with code and getting caught"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 01:23:30 +0000

It's always a game of cat and mouse... if a human can use a website then it's theoretically possible that a robot can too. I used to do a lot of sneaker botting a few years prior, so I kind of lot about web automation then. Developers will always find a way, even if it means spending more time writing the software than it would have just doing the homework

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Avoiding homework with code and getting caught"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 01:01:31 +0000

That's a good point, you're definitely on to something I think. Reversing classes at a young age would be super engaging for kids as it's "not something you're supposed to do"

My mother is a teacher for ages 7-11 and I help out with her IT curricula sometimes. I think I might do some reversing with her next time I am with them!

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Avoiding homework with code and getting caught"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:58:20 +0000

They were champs! We even connected on LinkedIn with Colin afterwards and he actually offered us summer work but that fell through unfortunately.

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Avoiding homework with code and getting caught"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:57:48 +0000

Burner account was really just a friend of ours, it wasn't something you could just sign up for and join a class. The teacher had to create your user account for you and give you a login, and assign you to a class.

He ended up getting his account reset a lot of times, but it was funny having him answer the entire dataset of questions in literally about 1m30s...

School security always seems to be a funny weak point, it seems common that a school's budget never seems to reach the IT department... and yet everybody is shocked when a vuln is discovered like that :p

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Avoiding homework with code and getting caught"

aabbccsmith — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:35:42 +0000

Hahaha true, and that's really not even a terrible idea to give 24 hours.

We definitely ended things on a good note with Hegarty & Educake. They were really friendly to us and also super helpful to be honest, good team over there.

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Avoiding homework with code and getting caught"

aabbccsmith — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 23:20:01 +0000

Between 2018 and 2020, I wrote a website that cloned the databases of a couple online learning platforms, and used it to skip lots of homework I should have done.

I wrote this at the beginning of the year, but never released it as I was never sure if I was missing details. I realised today there is no point in keeping it hidden, so brushed it up a bit and published it.

Btw, the repo that houses the blog is open source, so feel free to fork or whatever and use it as your own

Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

aabbccsmith — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 23:20:00 +0000

Article URL: https://alistair.blog/mochip

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32945906

Points: 766

# Comments: 160

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Upcoming new HTTP QUERY method"

aabbccsmith — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 21:29:01 +0000

It's more for the SPA age of web apps, where we want to GET a resource from an API, but have a body in the request. For example fetching the user who is currently logged in and getting a JSON response back; it's not something you would do in the address bar.

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Show HN: Beeper – All Your Chats in One App"

aabbccsmith — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 18:06:22 +0000

I wouldn't use this for Discord, as it requires you to insert a user token (aka self botting – which is against the terms of service). Bar that, the app looks quite promising, but I would be wary of what they are offering.

New comment by aabbccsmith in "Vercel raise $40M Series B"

aabbccsmith — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 17:12:04 +0000

This is really well deserved — vercel is a brilliant company + an amazing product.