161–170 of 520 posts
Was fed up with Quake Live not providing any matchmaking, so I tried to make my own. Of course they didn't have any API, so I needed to scrape their website to get the match results. I sent a lot of requests. So when they blogged about their web site becoming occasionally very slow, I sheepishly emailed them, and asked if this might be due to my scripts. I assumed that of course they'd have some sort of IP based limi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, since you already guessed it: yes, it was Plaid.
I would have no issues working on this. Doesn't seem very unethical. (For people who know the space, it's pretty obvious that you're talking about Plaid :))
I know B2C companies like Mint do this as well, and I don't have an issue with user data being used for market research. But it seemed underhanded since most customers aren't aware of it. If you use Mint you can read their T&C and understand your data is mined. But Plaid is not sold to users, it's sold to companies. So end users of a completely different company which simply uses Plaid for account verification would be implicitly volunteering their data.
The other thing that bothered me is that companies which have valid reasons for not wanting to develop API integrations for Plaid would be strong armed into doing so once Plaid had acquired a critical mass of their users using the methods I helped them develop.
Take people's content and put ads on it. TOS compliant but shady.
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I don't fault the guy for the arbitrage, just for not fulfilling the contract. It would be about equally unethical if he were doing the great work himself and got bored and wandered away.
I strongly disagree. Even if we ignore confidentiality and security issues, there is a fundamental difference between contractors and employees. Employees are generally paid less than contractors and are provided stability inn return the company gets a stable employee. Contractors are expected to be shorter term and change tasking if new opportunities arise, even for a short time. If both parties enter into a deal th…
Was fed up with Quake Live not providing any matchmaking, so I tried to make my own. Of course they didn't have any API, so I needed to scrape their website to get the match results. I sent a lot of requests. So when they blogged about their web site becoming occasionally very slow, I sheepishly emailed them, and asked if this might be due to my scripts. I assumed that of course they'd have some sort of IP based limi…
This is about as far from unethical as you can get...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't fault the guy for the arbitrage, just for not fulfilling the contract. It would be about equally unethical if he were doing the great work himself and got bored and wandered away.
I strongly disagree. Even if we ignore confidentiality and security issues, there is a fundamental difference between contractors and employees. Employees are generally paid less than contractors and are provided stability inn return the company gets a stable employee. Contractors are expected to be shorter term and change tasking if new opportunities arise, even for a short time. If both parties enter into a deal th…
How quaint.
Not me personally, but the company I started my career with (was an intern there for a few months). ERM software. When a new client comes onboard, install the product and database, but make sure not to make any optimizations, not even the basic indexes in the DB. Depending on the usage, the DB will get slower and slower in a few months. Then send a "consultant" who will simply run a script and add indexes etc and tes…
So my dad told me this story once, He was working on a large, industrial construction project and they were nearing the end of it, so a QA engineer was scheduled to do a walk-through, and before that happened a higher-up purposefully damaged finished work, dented a pipe with wrench, unscrewed a bolt, etc... That way when the QA engineer did his checks, he'd find these obvious, easily fixable defects and mark them, wh…
I built my computer graphics final project in Haskell so that the TA wouldn't be able to run it and grade it. Then for our presentation, I babbled on and on about the math and went over time so we wouldn't have to give a really crappy demo.
Reminds me of int main(int args, char ** argv) { static int foo[640*1024]; return 0; } This compiled into a valid MS-DOS .exe, but spit out "Out of memory" and exited when attempted to run. Was quite handy for getting an extra day to work on lab assignments back at school.
Then I re-read is as 640k and went "Oooh"