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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?

#61

Post by ivank »

hjorthjort wrote: post #32
ivank wrote: post #9

not mine, but someone programmed The Drop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCOCKS5AJI8

Is this real? Can't find any sources on it.

I don't think that particular feature made it onto the record, but Garret's confession rings true because AT&T did have a lot of capacity problems for a few years after the iPhone launch, especially in New York and San Francisco. I can find a lot of articles from 2009 mentioning dropped calls.

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

#62

Post by dav »

diminoten wrote: post #45
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payday loans are bad but they are not that unethical. The alternative option for people reliant on payday loans are actual loan sharks, which will turn out a lot worse for the debtor. So don’t be so hard on yourself. I think it would be difficult, but possible to run an ethical payday loan company that focuses on building people up and out of long term debt.

I love the Freakanomics podcast that gives both sides to the Payday Loan industry: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/payday-loans/

I'm going to give that a listen this afternoon, thanks!

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

#63

Post by bgnm2000 »

qmalzp wrote: post #55
throwawaymath wrote: post #25

I'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…

First project sounds like Coinbase.

I was thinking the first is Mint

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

#65

Post by eof »

Very 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!

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

#66

Post by beaker52 »

I worked on a penny-bidding site. These guys "auctioned" items like PlayStation, tvs, cars to the user who placed the final bid on an item after 60 seconds of no further bids. Each bid would increase the final price by 1 pence/cent, but each bid would cost 50 pence/cents. You could "win" a $20,000 car for $500.37 and the house would have taken 50,037*50 cents. It might be okay if that was it -- but I was asked to code some "house bidders" who would outbid players until a certain threshold was met. I left that job shortly afterwards.

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

#67

Post by NullPrefix »

diminoten wrote: post #51
j88439h84 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While not a morally bankrupt thing to do Could you explain this position? (Honestly asking.)

From my perspective, at least you could stop going to the website if they did stuff like this, and TBH anyone's free to do whatever they want on their website. A lot of these other stories are doing things without informing customers, or using customer data illegally, and stuff like that. It's sure not great if you want people to come back to your site, but it's not morally bankrupt.

>TBH anyone's free to do whatever they want on their website

That's where you're wrong, kiddo. There's laws now.

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

#68

Post by ryanackley »

throwawaymath wrote: post #25

I'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…

I'm guessing the first company is Plaid. I'm in the ACH payments space so we're a potential customer of Plaid and I vaguely remember a presentation or something where they (Dwolla + Plaid) promise merchants the ability to grab 12 months worth of transaction history from a user's bank account. Could be wrong about that. I do know for sure I made a mental note to myself to never use Plaid as a consumer.

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

#69

Post by iammiles »

j88439h84 wrote: post #40
iammiles wrote: post #31

Circumvented 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.

> While not a morally bankrupt thing to do Could you explain this position? (Honestly asking.)

Aside from the accessibility issues pointed out by another comment, this was mostly an annoyance upon our users that the higher-ups decided converted well. FWIW we did try to argue against it but profits dictate behavior in a large corporation. :-/

Either way, it doesn't exist any more and if you were ever bothered by it (I apologize), there are no over-arching effects that you have to worry about.

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