Me and a friend setup a fake electronics store on the dark web and ended up making a lot of money when bitcoin spiked in value.
That's not programming, that's just fraud.
Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
241–250 of 520 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#242So 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 used to do this defensively when submitting 8-bit games for publication back in the 80s. The non-gamers at the publishing company seemed to feel they had to get back to you with a handful of changes. If your game was really polished, the changes would be pointless or even harmful things. I quickly learned to leave in a few obvious things that were trivial fixes, e.g. blocky bitmaps, misspellings, jarring colors. In…
See also the story of the duck and the queen on game battle chess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Chess
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Telemarketing does not help grease the wheels of commerce . It helps grease the wheels of scamming. Commerce is when people buy stuff they do need and that provides value to them. Telemarketing is conning people by pushing them to buy shit they never needed and that won’t provide any value to them. It is not commerce, it is scamming. I’m not criticizing you for doing the necessary things to put food on the table, but…
Nothing about conning or no value in the definition of telemarketing. It's just outbound sales. Some of it is scams, plenty isn't.
I disagree.
You wouldn’t need “outbound sales” if you had a product that people wanted. They would be calling you with their wallets open if it was the case.
You only need outbound sales/scammers if you have a product that you think that people need even though they’ve been living without just fine for ages.
> Some of it is scams, plenty isn't.
Please give me some examples of how some are scams but plenty are not. From personal experiences it's always been the opposite for me. I feel like telemarketing is only used where the product/deal is so bad/unneeded that it wouldn't sell through normal, respectful channels, requiring the use of a telemarketer to put pressure onto the innocent victim to push them towards a purchase.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to ask, why did you choose to take the contract? Financial pressures? Or did you not feel that such a system is morally reprehensible? Personally while I'm opposed to programmer certification, systems like these certainly make me wish such a thing existed.
There will always be someone who can find a moral reason that such systems need to exist. Engineers build weapons, after all.
But see, I can understand weapons building. The motivation is protective towards one's society, and that is the intended result, even if that might not be the actual case.
Whereas the intention of building an oppressive system such as the one described above is, what, selfishness? Laziness? Programmers, because of the high-demand nature of our role, do not tend to be subject to the usual financial pressures that other communities are. I'm not sure what would motivate someone to build such a system as opposed to walking and finding a better job offer.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#245I created software that was used by call center agents to bid on “bathroom” break time slots and kept track of who was on break and actively punished those who didn’t follow the rules. It rewarded those that had higher performance and who took less breaks with higher priority. If an agent didn’t come back from their break a security guard would automatically be dispatched to find them. For the same company I also mad…
This is honestly the most horrifying post in this thread.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scraping is not unethical IMO. If you make the data public then everyone has the right to use it for whatever reason. Arbitrarily restricting what the data can be used for is what I would call unethical.
Scraping becomes unethical when it turns into a DOS, doesn't it? In some cases it wouldn't be an issue, but some scraping definitely makes the service less responsive.
Yep, this is the only thing which I agree with. When I scrape I always try to use as little resources as possible and make sure it’s appropriate for the size of the site I’m scraping (I wouldn’t care about sending 1k requests/second to Facebook, but wouldn’t send more than a dozen few per second to a little e-commerce store).
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#247I used to crack games just for fun, in fact the fun was in cracking the game and not in actually playing the game.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
There will always be someone who can find a moral reason that such systems need to exist. Engineers build weapons, after all.
But see, I can understand weapons building. The motivation is protective towards one's society, and that is the intended result, even if that might not be the actual case. Whereas the intention of building an oppressive system such as the one described above is, what, selfishness? Laziness? Programmers, because of the high-demand nature of our role, do not tend to be subject to the usual financial pressures that othe…
> But see, I can understand weapons building.
This is my point.
Eventually someone will come in and say the system in the OP was necessary for the company to stay afloat, pay its employees or retain value for its retired shareholders.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#249I suspect you're not going to get many personal stories here because it would be self-incriminating. But I have a couple from some people I know in tech. 1. I know the guy who, pre-Snowden, actually designed many of the pieces of network gear needed for the dragnet. His perspective was basically: Yes it's wrong, but what do I know? I just design electronic circuits. 2. Same guy also mentioned how at another company h…
I am not sure I understand the distinction you make between a government and the higher bidder? How can you be reasonably sure that your findings will not be used wrongfully by X gov official?
The highest bidder is likely to be a government agency.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#250I created software that was used by call center agents to bid on “bathroom” break time slots and kept track of who was on break and actively punished those who didn’t follow the rules. It rewarded those that had higher performance and who took less breaks with higher priority. If an agent didn’t come back from their break a security guard would automatically be dispatched to find them. For the same company I also mad…
I have to ask, why did you choose to take the contract? Financial pressures? Or did you not feel that such a system is morally reprehensible? Personally while I'm opposed to programmer certification, systems like these certainly make me wish such a thing existed.
Personally, as both a writer and a programmer, I often consider implementing the systems that I’ve written dystopian fiction about. Not to create a dystopia, but for the same reason I write: to point one out, such that people can get incensed, laws can be made, etc.
To put this another way: the most efficient way we could have possibly found to get the use of nuclear arms in war globally banned, was to have someone use one. The Cold War would have been far riskier if the world hadn’t seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it would have been a stand-off to the use of weapons we would have as-yet had no understanding of the consequences of using. It probably would have ended with the use of hundreds of bombs, rather than just two.
It’s sort of the moral equivalent of a “work to rule” strike: the best way to get through the lesson that something is bad, is to stop pushing back against it and just let it happen for once.