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That’s quite condescending.
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Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
31–40 of 539 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#32I 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 stairwell, so that's its main purpose now.
I'm a lot more paranoid about privacy these days.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#33forensics software that pulled down everything possible from all social media sites at once and put into a forensic container. it would also make a fake disk image for older software. it was originally for lawful collections after u/p was obtained via warrants or willfully etc, but changed hands and was used aggressively like a cloud version of kicking the door in to grab pcs. i refused to scrape where possible and use apis and this was right before the cambridge analytica stuff blew up so a lot of the FB stuff ate dirt at least.
it was technically well made tho, everything integrated into a single executable file that had an web interface:/
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#34I won't say much more here but this second question caught my eye, because the answer is the same as for your earlier question. Some impactful work I am intensely proud of also became a thing that haunts me (or at least challenged my idea of "doing good"). Think about dual-use. You may never really know quite how your creations pan out. Not quite in the league of Mikhail Kalashnikov, but it piqued my now intense inte…
Do you mean the missile would lock on to what the pilot is looking at when it's fired, or it would change target inflight if the pilot looks elsewhere?
I'm intrigued by how missiles work. I bought this [0] book to learn about them but I've forgotten math.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tactical-Strategic-Missile-Guidance...
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#35I 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…
Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes. It's one of the reasons I've grown more disillusioned with computer tech over the years.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#36At a previous employer I helped build an employee monitoring system that was essentially a keylogger and would also take screenshots periodically and on every click. All this data was piped into our cloud and could be used by middle management for granular monitoring and evaluation. The whole product was positioned for process optimisation but I know for a fact that it was used to monitor and eventually reduce headco…
I'm too forgetful to log and fill in time sheets reliably, so I started building a tool do it for me automatically and retroactively (so I don't have to press start/stop on some timer, or even remember to run the software ahead of time) based on data gathered from the system, like file timestamps, browsing history, syslogs, etc. I got deep into gathering all the data and ML analysis, to the point I started brushing w…
hey i did a not super deep version of this but it would hit toggl api to create my time sheet for me. i abandoned it after having to use lots of different software constantly, but i considered releasing it and didnt for same reason
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#37Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#38Early in my career I had a job at a small startup with about 3 other full time devs, including the founder. All of us were more or less clueless.
Project management consisted of the founder telling us what to implement. One day he told me to build something that would help us track the (many) exceptions in the app.
I went on to build a terrible alternative to SaaS bug trackers, which already existed at that time, but no one knew about/had the skills to find out.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
7-8 years ago. I was a lot more naive back then and knew very little about any of the Middle East petro states.
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> IMHO it'd be nice if you donated some of your earnings to a human rights focused NGO operating in the area.
Is there somehow a difference in impact depending on who does this? Maybe if you chipped in, the Qatar slave workers would be even better off. Or is this just about guilt-tripping strangers for their past? :-)