EQE (https://eqe.fm/about)
Because of the opportunity cost. It's a fun hobby but I wish I made something that made me money. Being a salaried software engineer kinda sucks.
Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
91–100 of 539 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#92I worked for a company that made deep packet inspection based network equipment. Western customers mostly used it for "security" and media streaming man in the middle attacks (actually a useful feature saving lots of bandwidth). The boxes were also sold to Syria and Burma, and were used to facilitate censorship and human right abuses
It would be entirely reasonable to name the company.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#93Something to convince German people to feel comfortable with Google sucking up all their data.
Hey at least I’m not the AMP guy.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#94A system for tracking email marketing recipients. That is, bounce rates, open rates, recurrence and deduplication of email addresses. It dawned on me 10-20 hours into the gig that these customers were professional spammers, and that I was helping them avoid being blacklisted. I scrapped everything I’d made and eventually paid back my fee.
I'm biased as someone who used to work in email marketing, but I'd say there are some important differences between respectable email marketing and spam: * Respectable email marketing = you have a pre-existing relationship (e.g. account on their website); spam = they found your address somewhere * Respectable email marketing = there's an unsubscribe link that works; spam = no unsubscribe link or it doesn't work (Coul…
s/respectable/legal/g
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#95In the early 00s I designed and wrote a system that procured abandoned domain names, analyzed them for SEO purposes (existing pagerank scores, inbound traffic from other respectable domains, etc) and then generated a web of links and artificial content designed purely to sell ads and boost other client domains. The part I enjoyed the most was automating Apache and systems administration work for the server farm, but I regret working on it. I was broke and desperate at 20, and I ended up quitting the job after a few months anyway.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#96Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#97I don't have anything that I deeply regret, but I have one where I somewhat regret my techincal decisions.
It was for a programming language that I developed at the time called OwU[0]. It was supposed to be a sort of mashup between Lisp and K (an ASCII-friendly dialect of APL). I took a lot of design decisions from oK[1], a K dialect with a code design that I admired.
The biggest mistake that I made during my decisions is to seperate between verbs and user-defined functions. This is because in K, verbs behaves like operators, while functions behave like, well, functions. But in Lisp, both built-in and user-defined functions should be fundamentally the same in data type.
Because of this seperation, it was very hard for me to implement functional programming stuff, like fold and reduce, because I have to handle two different data types at the same time.
Not to even mention the fact that I chose to go with objects in the entire language to be dictionaries, and not classes (I implement this in Python). This makes code just generally very messy to me, as I have to figure out how would I access the data to perform operators on them, and this cause me to make a good few bugs.
Overall, OwU is a language that is better than any previous attempt, but there's still a lot of it that I regret.
[0]: https://github.com/HoangTuan110/owu [1]: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It could become very useful honeypot for the police or some government agency tracking crime. Those people found another way to get paid. Although I couldn't ever blame you for shutting it down. I'd probably do the same and try to forget about it for many years.
Unfortunately, I was not contacted by any intelligence agency with a promise of money and lack of prosecution, so that was my choice at that time.
I think it was fortunate, in a sense that these agencies’ employees usually couldn’t care less about your own fate or expenses in all this mess. You’re just a little bug in their gears which rotate regardless. Unless you can gain substantial publicity, it’s not worth the risk.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh... Was it really that hard to guess what they're gonna do with it? How long ago was that? It's not like their abuse of [foreign] workers is anything new.
> How long ago was that? It's not like their abuse of [foreign] workers is anything new. It's also not like it's common knowledge. Myself I only learned about it couple years ago, here on HN , because of some comment threads that segued into discussions about Qatar construction projects. Point being, without knowing anything about OP, including where are they from, you can't assume they had a chance of knowing this b…
I expect it to be very common knowledge, but possibly it's only known in Europe, as we are much closer to the Middle East and the football angle is more relevant.
Here's several articles from 2017, for example.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#100My first job at Microsoft was to build IronRuby, which was an implementation of Ruby on top of the Common Language Runtime. I got the job because I had built a bridge that connected MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter) to the CLR before I joined the company. This project ultimately failed because of a principle that we learned from the school of hard knocks: respect developers' existing code investments. Developers couldn't…
I remember IronRuby. It was a great demonstration and I think you inspired a lot of folks who came after.
Maybe it didn't accomplish your original goal, but props for what you did accomplish. Quite impressive.