I once mixed tabs and spaces.
Unbelievable, how do you sleep at night?
Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
261–270 of 520 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#262Very short backstory: I was very severely punished for breaking security on our pcs at school (utilizing interactive startup on windows 95 to not start the "fortress" process.) For a final project presented which was ostensibly a limited auto-translation application, I made an application which just popped up an alert, "program unable to run due to security" Got an A!
> I was very severely punished for breaking security on our pcs at school
I wonder how common this is. I've seen it happen at my school - when you have a VNC server on every machine with a 3-character password (three guesses what that is...), the local admin password on every machine is school, and the domain admin password is a single dictionary word, bad things are going to happen.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Fr…
People aren't omniscient. People at best look for known unknowns, but not unknown unknowns. Particularly when it comes to tech, that covers a very broad area of things that they don't know are possible.
The idea that if you need to tell people about it for them to know about it and potentially buy it, then the offer is a scam, is baffling to me.
As for inbound leads, their existence doesn't stop outbound sales being productive. they're not mutually exclusive at all. In fact they're complimentary. Outbound sales results in customers, having customers creates awareness of product in the market, people that hear about it through those customers become inbound leads.
Regarding people living fine without the new product. You're just arguing against progress there. Which as a definite luddite and potential anarcho-primitivist, I am all for. But "scam" isn't a synonym for just "bad", and any definition that includes just creating needs would have to include most of modern commerce. Definitely including any and all software developers.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A lot of this work is legally defensible (if you do it correctly) Could you expand on the correctness aspect? I'm currently working in this space for what I believe to be good reasons (to improve the accessibility of a particular service for visually impaired users). But I'm eager not to abuse my position and knowledge.
To be clear, I'm talking about scraping. I think the sibling commenter is talking about developing competing products via reverse engineering ("clean room implementation"). I am also not a lawyer, so I can only tell you the guidance I received from one for the projects I worked on. Technically speaking you can scrape data in a legally defensible way if you do not need to accept any terms of service explicitly prohibi…
Depends on the jurisdiction. For instance Europe allows reverse engineering for inter compatibility. Terms of services carry little value here (none for this clause that's already covered by a specific law).
However, it would be interesting in the case of bank services. Accessing the account from the customer probably let you initiate a variety of actions like money transfers or loans, it's sensible to argue for limited and controlled inter interoperability.
Also, customers are not allowed to share their credentials and he is in breach of his contract. The account should be considered compromised and be locked.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#265Circumvented browser features to force autoplay on videos with high volume on our websites. While not a morally bankrupt thing to do especially compared to some of the other examples, we all felt dirty doing it.
What's it like to work for CNN? Did you ever get to meet Wolf Blitzer?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#266I had to migrate a site for a well know fitness personality many years ago and their database contained plaintext passwords and! Credit card information. Didn’t bother to really fight it at the time. More reason to never give your credit information out if you don’t have to.
Also helped build a site that tricked google into ranking us higher.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#267I 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…
There's a decent (fictional) short story about systems like this: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#268I've done a lot of work involving scraping, data analysis and reversing private API access from mobile applications. A lot of this work is legally defensible (if you do it correctly) and not particularly unethical. After doing a bunch of this type of work I started to accrue subject matter expertise in the area that led other companies to come to me with more questionable projects in mind. I turned down many of these…
Sounds like you would be a valuable member of any company, especially a startup. I’d love to hear your thoughts on more ethical ideas for analyzing difficult to obtain data. Feel free to ping me directly.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#269Not necessarily unethical but certainly annoying, reply all has an episode about the creation of the popup[https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/3-i-didnt-mean-to-brea...]
From the show notes: “Twenty years ago, Ethan Zuckerman did something terrible on the internet. And he's still living with the consequences. “
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#270Earlier 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.
There will also always be someone else to do the work if you don't. Some people just like to eat.