Earlier quoted context omitted.
what is an MBE?
"Order of the British Empire" - it's awarded by the Queen her self, directly.
Actually "Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire" - the Queen is apparently a Bill & Ted fan.
Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
381–390 of 520 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#382Alright, i know this guy from NYC - he would offer payment processing to companies who could not get payment processing in their own country.
Initially, everyone will be paid out on time and later he will refuse to pay holding 500-1M from each company.
He made 10s of millions doing that you'll be surprised that everyone threatened with a lawsuit but never reached the court.
Now, he has a lot of real estate in NYC.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#383Its an entirely standard thing, but I feel it is unhappy knowing that my paycheque depends upon thousands of mobile game players watching advertising, and feel that it is ethically dubious that my job is to try to cram more ads down their throats.
I'd say that's better than P2W games with lootboxes that target whales. I think's basically gambling.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#384(I didn't go through with this, but considered) While I was a student I worked for a small shop that sold online services. I was something between an intern and a junior developer/security guy. The boss (non technical) privately asked me one day to do some research about automating some data entry processes, basically reading from excel files, some databases, formatting and putting it all in another database. I found…
There is nothing unethical about this. In fact I applaud your boss. If you can automate something instead of pay people to do it, you should do it.
All depends on what would happen to the laid off persons.
If this were a country with good social support and they would get some sort of severance, it would be fair.
If they would not be compensated for the caused harm, it would be unethical, since one's action would be a key contributor to that harm.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#385I 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.
Wouldn't have worked back when I was TA ... First, I'd have been able to run it (or grade it even without running it). And yes. I've seen a lot of crappy Haskell code. I've written a good amount of that myself when I was learning Haskell back then. Second, assuming I didn't know Haskell, I'd have stopped your babbling in the presentation at some point and asked you to run it. Third, any student that does unusual thin…
What does crappy Haskell code loook like?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You got an extra day for an out of memory exception? I wish I was that lucky
It was a bit more nuanced.
These were basically home assignments that we would demo at a lab for a grade. The lab machines had several "resident" programs running on them (some legit, like basic AV, and some installed by lab admins for their own questionable purposes), so the amount of available RAM varied wildly, sometime dipping as low as 300KB. The TAs knew that, but didn't care enough to do anything about it.
So when an assignment that you did on your own machine failed with "oom" at the lab, it was plausible that it was due to all the junk taking up too much space on the lab boxes. The assignments themselves were math-heavy physics modelling tasks, so you they did actually need a lot of memory.
All that said, I think only once someone used this "trick" to get an extension and it was because his truly needed few more hours to hammer its sim into converging.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#387Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#388Circumvented 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.
From an accessibility point of view this can be more than an annoyance. If your video means I can't hear my screen reader, and I'm the sort of user not to plan for this inevitable sort of event, my computer is unusable until it finishes or until I recover sufficiently from being disoriented to remember the hotkeys to get out of there. So please never do this again. Thx.
So what you're saying is that loud ads are grounds for an ADA suit? Color me interested.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have been known to disappear for less.
Have they really? It is the sort of thing you see a lot in fiction but not on reality.
At the very least you'd end up being sued for defamation or whatnot by DOW for the next century or two. DOW is not a company you want to tango with.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#390So 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've done this, leave an obvious trivial bug for the QA to find otherwise they'll keep digging until they find something pointless and hard to fix, which is not a problem in the first place. they have to find something to justify their jobs.
I wonder if there's a name for doing this?