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Ask HN: What's your greatest non-tech hack?
10 points by MWil on Oct 21, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
Of course this is inspired by the question from the application for YC but I'm not applying this year and I'm genuinely interested in sharing and hearing some other great anecdotes.

For me, I think it was when I used social engineering to track down the programmers who designed a very expensive product for a vendor in my industry and then negotiated a price to build the same full featured product for 1/5th of what the vendor charges for a one-off job. They were freelancing on odesk/elance and I had used the demos that vendors offer of their products to categorize the features and estimate what technologies were involved. When I talked with the programmer he admitted about how much he was paid for work on their product.

The industry is e-discovery for law firms, btw.



I had several instances that I thought would make a good example I choose this one because I thought that this would be different and would definitely not be considered a tech hack.

"Before christmas, I was buying gifts for my young cousins and I found out that Toys"R"Us had a policy where they would match any competitor price. I used this to my advantage, I was able to get presents, using my iPhone, that were being retailed at $40.00 for around $8.00. Other shoppers asked me to show them how to do the same. I helped several people free of charge. Toys"R"Us was not fond of it, I just liked helping families out and showing them how much money they were able to save."


I didn't apply but this is my non-tech hack...

I went to a large University. GEN ED lecture sizes were ~500 students and the most skipped classes. At the start of each semester, I would stand outside these 101 lectures to hand out fliers so I could find the students who would: 1) attend and never miss a class and 2) take amazing notes. Before finals, I typed, printed and bound the notes and sold/hustled them at the student union. I did 4-5 courses per semester and sold a ridiculous number of them for ~$50 ea. Helped lots of students pass courses they would have otherwise failed.


cooking mung beans in a rice-cooker




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