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Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#121
post #104

I 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

Ultimately you are like a kitchen knive maker whose knive was used in a stabbing. It was entirely the stabbers fault and does not diminish the utility of your product. In a corporate setting, mitm'ing TLS and blocking sites by category is routine practice (better ways to stop bad stuff but expensive firewals are a waste when most traffic is TLS).

There's a difference between selling knives to the general public, vs seeking out violent criminals and specifically marketing your knives to them.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#123
I don't know for certain, but when I was an undergrad I was helping a PhD student with his thesis around text classification, mostly grunt work, speeding up some hastily thrown together algorithms, etc. He said it was for his company, which was good enough for me; I was getting experience, he was friendly and polite and we enjoyed each other's company and mutual learning.

I found out years later (this was in the mid 1980's), that his company was "The Company"; the US CIA.

So I don't think my shitty little pieces of C code written on a Windows box ever made it into any US Gov't system parsing Internet mails/chats/etc, but it could have.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#124

I 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…

What was the requirement? My apartment building has lights in the hallways that are only on when needed, but they just use a basic infrared sensor.

* Minimize BOM cost. Only 1 in N lights would actually have the full sensor complement, so they needed to communicate.

* Minimize installation cost. They just wanted to plug into a light socket, not run network cabling.

* Push data logs to a central server. They didn't want to send a tech physically to each lightbulb to get data for e.g. energy usage certifications.

plus other obvious requirements.

All of that made it really easy to just stick a beacon tag inside employee badges and measure the RSSI from the mesh lightbulbs (since they already tracked that to discover who their physical neighbors were). Instant employee monitoring.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#125
an Android watchface creator app...

I regret building it, but not for any ethical reasons, except for maybe that it's become nothing but corporate ads.

My real reason for regret is just the entire process that happened after it became successful. It took off and was over 50k DAUs ~5 months after I launched it. I tried supporting it the best I could, and had aspirations for the future of it, but I was young and dumb. I got caught up on feedback, took it too personally and started having trouble in my personal life due to it.

I ended up selling it to another company for far less than what it was worth, even while I had 2 competing bids because I let one of them get to me emotionally at the time. I also agreed to continue working with them on it, at what I found out later was vastly underpaid, to the tune of being ~10k below the CA minimum for a salaried SWE. Our time together lasted less than 9 months for a myriad of reasons.

I regret it, mainly because I always look back and think of what could have become if I had the strength to continue it solo, or had spent the time to look for a better partner to carry my vision forward. Instead now, you can get your latest [insert corporate media here] watchface from it for a mere $4.99/mo.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#126

My 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…

FWIW I remember IronRuby quite fondly. If not the outcome, the effort.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#127

At 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 built a tool for an influencer marketing agency that would log which instagram pages they visited. This info could be used for machine learning and discovering new influencers which was a major problem for the agency.

The first changes I made to the poc was making the ability to identify which employees did what and when so hard that if they asked us to do it, it would either not be possible or cost so much that it wouldn’t be feasible.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#128

I decided to build my own kitchen cabinets from scratch. I only had my small townhouse in which to build them. They eventually came out great, but it took 2 years to complete them. The lesson I learned is to make it easier to abort large projects. Even if it delayed me by 6 months, I should have found a rentable workshop.

Yes, having built a ton of cabinet doors before for a similar project, I realized the allure of the cost savings (the raw materials are so cheap!) blinds you to the massive amounts of labor involved.

(One of) the old woodworking mottos; why buy it when you can build it for 3x the cost and 10x the time?

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#130

A ticketing company was experimenting with BLE beacons to trigger things like seat upgrades and coupons when people walked by certain things in a venue… or at least that’s what they said it would be used for. Instead they covered LA Live and surrounding area with them and then just sold that data to… well I’m not sure who since I left shortly after they did that. The justification was “but we put it in the TOS and Pr…

How did the BLE beacons track people? A phone app?

Yes the ticketing app that people were required to use to get into the events.
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