Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 539 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#251

Post by slotrans »

Vanit wrote: post #175

About 10 years ago at the start of my career I built a prototype of a Google Analytics analogue that would suck up all your Facebook profile/likes and send it to a server. This is long before Cambridge Analytica when the APIs were wide open.

I did a similar one. For folks who signed into our app with Facebook login, we would go get all their Likes, all their Friends, and all their Friends' Likes. There was some vague idea that we could use this for marketing.

The data volume was huge though and it quickly filled up our database, so we shut it off and threw it all away since it didn't seem to be worth the trouble.

This was in 2012... I didn't think much of it until Cambridge Analytica.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#252

Post by fuzzfactor »

Same thing as the most impactful for me too.

It was a chemical thing. Toxic too.

You've got to figure it's a lot more likely to have impact if there's a somewhat likely negative outcome within the reach of unscrupulous operators, especially if popularization can be a factor in a more widespread negative effect.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#253

Post by 052c7028e »

When I was at Akamai about 5 years ago, I was involved in building the system for making their CDN compliant in China. There were two main features, and they were activated on all servers running inside mainland china (not HK, macau or Taiwan)

1. Logs of the CDN were sent in real time to the ministry of technology -- there was about a 15 minute delay if I remember correctly, and they could impose fines if they were delayed. The log included the url visited, the IP address of the visitor, and a few other things. Perhaps the user agent? I forget.

2. The ministry of technology had a special API to block URLs on the CDN. Basically, they provided a list of URLs that would return a 451, and of course those logs also went to the government.

No other country had this kind of access at the time, but it was considered critical for the business to continue to operate in China. As I understand it, these are required to comply with chinese government regulations, and other CDNs like Cloudflare and Cloudfront have also built similar capabilities. Perhaps jgrahamc can comment on what cloudflare did?

I feel quite guilty about being involved with that project, but the business was set on building it, so I did what I could to limit the blast radius. I would not be surprised if someone got arrested or was killed because of it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#254

Post by CamperBob2 »

toss1 wrote: post #156
Negitivefrags wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is so bad about catching people taking unauthorised breaks?

The same thing that would be bad about using your phone GPS location sensors to automatically send you speeding tickets every time you wander >1mph over the limit. Even without intending to, everyone would go from a ticket or two per decade to dozens of tickets on every commute. "But the law is still the same!?!" Of course it is, but changing from poorly scalable human-required surveillance to always-on, fully-scaled…

One argument in favor of this is that it would pretty much force governments to set reasonable speed limits, rather than optimizing them to ensure that the police have an excuse to pull over almost anyone at any time.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#256

Post by CyberDildonics »

haolez wrote: post #191

I've coded the firmware for a CAN-based communication bus for a medical device with lots of different boards talking to each other. This same company had a war industry department and they used this code in a missile project. It left a weird taste in my mouth. Btw, they got an early version that had a memory leak, and when I went to warn them, they just said: "It's okay! It's just going to run for about 20 seconds!"

A missile needing to dynamically allocate memory is already a ridiculous idea.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#257

Post by kelnos »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #116
AlotOfReading wrote: post #32

I built a lighting system for to save energy by turning off hallway lights when not in use. The environmental aspect was great and saved hundreds of thousands in electricity. Someone eventually realized that the mesh network I built to connect all the lights together and report usage statistics could also be used to track employees moving throughout the building and catch them taking unauthorized breaks in the stairw…

What is so bad about catching people taking unauthorised breaks?

It's more about the negatives of pervasive electronic surveillance. The marginal benefit to the business of catching employees taking a break (which, honestly... they're probably all overworked and should have more breaks anyway) does not outweigh the downsides of our inexorable slide toward being monitored as we do everything.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#258

Post by imdvayn »

wruza wrote: post #98
jbirer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I was not contacted by any intelligence agency with a promise of money and lack of prosecution, so that was my choice at that time.

I think it was fortunate, in a sense that these agencies’ employees usually couldn’t care less about your own fate or expenses in all this mess. You’re just a little bug in their gears which rotate regardless. Unless you can gain substantial publicity, it’s not worth the risk.

It shouldn't be that way though. That honeypot could've been really useful to them, and the cost of providing peace of mind to him is negligible to their orgs.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#259

Post by mhh__ »

mlyle wrote: post #249
mhh__ wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't what the system was notionally designed to do

Yes. The commenter is upset because a mesh network that he helped build for another purpose also provides a convenient dense network of radios that can be used to track staff, and that this is now the primary use case. "All of that made it really easy to just stick a beacon tag inside employee badges and measure the RSSI from the mesh lightbulbs (since they already tracked that to discover who their physical neighbor…

I assumed the rssi thing was there from the start, apparently mistakenly.

If it's any consolation to the original engineer it feels like a non-trivial thing to add

Post reply on HN