from Hacker News

Client did not pay? Add opacity and decrease it until their site fades away

by lalaland1125 on 2/13/24, 2:19 AM with 29 comments

  • by blendo on 2/13/24, 5:27 AM

    Reminds me of my one devious professional hack.

    Back in the 1990s I supported a website whose users were all in our local business group. It was mostly html tables, with black text on a jarringly bright yellow background.

    Asked my users if I could change it to something more subdued. All said “good idea” except for one adamantly stubborn person who threatened much commotion if anything changed.

    So, every week or two I slightly tweaked the background color such that each week’s change wasn’t really noticeable.

    After 6 months the brightness was exactly where I wanted it to be, and the stubborn user was none the wiser.

  • by olliej on 2/13/24, 5:01 AM

    Client didn't pay? then they shouldn't have any rights to any of your work. Mike monteiro's video on the subject is good watching, but the key element is their is no transfer of ownership or IP rights until full payment.
  • by mustardo on 2/13/24, 7:31 AM

    Not even particularly elegant code, for example, opacity is clamped between 0 and 1 in in the very next line a bounds check is made anyway.

      opacity = (opacity < 0) ? 0 : opacity;
      opacity = (opacity > 1) ? 1 : opacity;
      if(opacity >= 0 && opacity <= 1) {
          document.getElementsByTagName("BODY")[0].style.opacity = opacity;
      }
  • by tremorscript on 2/14/24, 10:03 AM

    Reminds me of another story my friend told me.

    In university, he and his friends contracted with a cook who would make them lunch and dinner. The cook made his money from students in the university especially student sick of canteen food.

    Around the end of the month, which was payment time, the food would keep getting hotter each passing day till he and his friends paid up.

    The cook never asked for the money directly, something to do with his cultural background.

    I thought it was brilliant. The students had to figure out themselves why the food kept getting hotter. Debugging in real life.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 2/13/24, 10:49 AM

  • by gregjor on 2/13/24, 2:26 AM

    Unprofessional and possibly grounds for a lawsuit. If you aren’t getting paid you have customer problems that code won’t fix.
  • by bardan on 2/13/24, 8:59 AM

    There's a prominent link up the top of this repo to a spammy payment processor, or something.
  • by CottonMcKnight on 2/13/24, 5:54 AM

    get-sued.js