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Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#461

Post by personlurking »

derefr wrote: post #250
fao_ wrote: post #219

Earlier 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.

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 u…

A bit of a take on Cunningham's Law. Implementing the wrong answer as a means of others reaching the right one.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#462

Post by ameixaseca »

hjek wrote: post #412
jliptzin wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does not eating animal products help with your guilty conscience in this situation?

Animal husbandry has a large negative impact on the environment. After this DOW Grassland app I felt I needed to take a look at the environmental destruction I'm contributing to.

Except the alternative - ie, relying on annuals for food production - destroys top soil and relies on fossil-based fertilizers. It's the epitome of nonsusteinability and environment destruction.

Perennials combined with animals can be made into a much more self-sustainable cycle.

Be careful with numbers, they can be useful but fail to show the full picture at the same time.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#463

Post by forgottenpass »

pc86 wrote: post #455
forgottenpass wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether something is the catercorner of a business model has no bearing on if it is ethical or not.

Market research is not unethical unless you think capitalism is unethical at its roots. And if you do I'm curious why you're spending time on a venture capital forum. And catercorner means diagonal to, not sure what word you're trying to use here.

I am not saying market research is unethical (also not not saying that). I was just pointing out what looks like a total non-sequitur.

It was supposed to be "cornerstone" not "catercorner" but I guess autocorrect?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#464

Post by insomniacity »

iamdave wrote: post #20
charmides wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without giving away more details than you feel comfortable with, could you share more about what the developer was fired for and how it made that executive safe face?

It was a feature set that was supposed to provide additional reporting views and expose data to customers when queried. Turns out one exec had some very embarrassing transactions that emerged from this and he wanted that info suppressed and the person who leaked it fired. The feature worked as designed, and this exec was the one who pushed for it to go to market despite all warnings that a review of the depth of expo…

Are we talking personal transactions on behalf of the exec that happened to be in scope because they were also a user of the software/in the data set? Or are we talking about business transactions by this exec that were professionally embarrassing?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#465

Post by hjek »

ameixaseca wrote: post #462
hjek wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animal husbandry has a large negative impact on the environment. After this DOW Grassland app I felt I needed to take a look at the environmental destruction I'm contributing to.

Except the alternative - ie, relying on annuals for food production - destroys top soil and relies on fossil-based fertilizers. It's the epitome of nonsusteinability and environment destruction. Perennials combined with animals can be made into a much more self-sustainable cycle. Be careful with numbers, they can be useful but fail to show the full picture at the same time.

Back when I was eating meat, I was probably still aware that it was harmful, but in a kind of cynical denial about it.

I've heard that one about "the annual crops" before, and it's simply not true that it's "the" alternative. It's claimed in this one study that's echoed in loads of articles[0][1][2][3] that assumes that vegans don't eat perennials, which is kind of ignoring the existence of apples, apricots, asparagus, artichoke, avocados, broccoli, currants, basil, blue- and blackberry, chives, fennel, garlic, ginger, grapes, kale, kiwis, leek, mint, onions, oregano, pears, persimmons, pineapples, plums, pomegranates, potato, rasp- and strawberries, radish, rhubarb, rosemary, sage, thyme, tomatoes for a start.

This view about animal husbandry being harmless for the environment has been disproven[4][5][6], and is on the line with global warming denialism.

[0]: http://qz.com/749443/being-vegan-isnt-as-environmentally-fri...

[1]: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/earth/going-vegan-isnt-act...

[2]: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/08/11/new-study-reveals-v...

[3]: https://quietkinetic.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/global-veganis...

[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/sep/07/food.foo...

[5]: http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/

[6]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/03/eating-l...

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#466

Post by hjek »

pc86 wrote: post #426
jliptzin wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does not eating animal products help with your guilty conscience in this situation?

It may help with their conscience but it has no positive impact whatsoever.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17700590

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#467

Post by frnkshin »

andy_ppp wrote: post #295
derefr wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

You’re actually suggesting being a sociopath is a good thing because it’ll make all the bad ideas eventually die by us trying them. This is simply not true, we have to make bad ideas die by reason and logic, before we do too much harm. I suppose doubling down of fossil fuels and burning of rainforest is great, we’ll just have to adapt quicker to the super extreme weather. But we can adapt with more aircon! Yay! Maybe…

> You’re actually suggesting being a sociopath is a good thing because it’ll make all the bad ideas eventually die by us trying them.

Being a sociopath could be considered as a person's life choice, but it's not something to be considered bad. It's merely a medical condition.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#468

Post by unclean_scholar »

Once I've developed a tool that replaced a couple of employees for a (client) company.

In another occasion, I was assigned to a project that I didn't find motivating at all, so my plan was to "slack off" and work on my own stuff as much as possible. The only question was how much did I have to work to make the management believe I was giving it my 100%. There was another member in the team, who was a great guy but an average dev, and I realized that I could easily make 2x more progress than him in the eyes of the managers and still have almost half of the day "free", so that is exactly what I did. Later I got a bonus for my "hard work".

But the one I regret the most is installing keyloggers on several computers in high school (msn era) and obtained passwords for most of my classmates. At least I was careful enough and didn't tell anyone at the time.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#469

Post by api »

I wrote a ton of IRC war bots and scripts back when I was a teenager including something called the "Sumo nick collider" and the textbox.irc script. The latter was a general client enhancement script but had tons of extensions for "war."

For you spring chickens "war" was exploiting the IRC protocol to take over channels, kill users, etc. The protocol was pretty vanilla back then and was vulnerable to a lot of those things. This was back in the 1990s.

This included inventing "DCC RAW" based "clonebot" code in the old Unix ircII client. I figured out you could just open a socket with the client so you could write a simple client script to create huge numbers of sock puppets. I'm not 100% sure but I think I was the first one to do this.

I learned a lot from that stuff but these days I wouldn't wreck a public volunteer chat network.

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