A WooCommerce shop I built in a couple of days ended up making millions of dollars for the catholic church... I learned to research who I'm working for
oh tell us more details on that story :-)
Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
161–170 of 539 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#162An xml parser.
Did you use regex?
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#163My 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…
Does this mean a version of VB6 (classic ASP) could run on .NET Core (Linux)? That would finally liberate the language from the platform (IIS on Windows).
No. But in theory you could implement a wrapper, sure. But do yourself a favor, and just rewrite your application with a modern framework.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#164I 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…
How could they tell who exactly triggered the system? Also, they didn't already have security cameras?
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, and in the case of technology, it is REALLY EASY to simply sell no technology to any authoritarian regime, for any purpose.
There are dozens of academic and GNOs that track democracy, e.g., [0]. Just select a reasonable cutoff of some level of democracy, and don't sell to anyplace below that.
That does require management and sales to have ethics. Some do.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#166I built an integration from our CRM to a sales team messaging platform. For users that exist in the CRM, it worked great. The problem was the side uses of the messaging platform for users that were not active in the CRM or never in the CRM. It’s a nightmare to keep dealing with all the exceptions related to non-active CRM users. I usually don’t let myself get caught in such a scenario, this one slid by and I regret i…
I'm not sure I understand- if I am not in a CRM then a sales person cannot call/mail me? Or is this some kind of facebook-like thing where you can infer I exist if you also have my colleagues details ?
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#167I 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.
I won't cut parts for beehive frames again. What a pain using 2x4s, and slightly dangerous with such small pieces.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#168ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser on Windows and available to be scripted by javascript? like, instead of Java? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, but sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. though it needed additional infrastructure to prevent abuse and allow global revocation, and that wasn't perfectly thought through or executed. live and learn. :grinning-emoji:
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#169I 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…
> used to track employees moving throughout the building and catch them taking unauthorized breaks
There's probably more illegally unpaid overtime than there's unauthorized (boss doesn't like) breaks. The data can likely prove that, too.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#170I 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).
> Ultimately you are like a kitchen knive maker whose knive was used in a stabbing.
I don't know about this. The difference with knives is that they are an old technology, basically they have always existed. If you are responsible for creating a new technology, especially one that is not certain to exist without your involvement, the calculus is different.