Btw, they got an early version that had a memory leak, and when I went to warn them, they just said: "It's okay! It's just going to run for about 20 seconds!"
Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
191–200 of 539 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#192Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#193ever 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 perfec…
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#194Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#195In some cases, something that I wrote some time earlier, and had "let go of," proved valuable, at a later time (that has been the case for the app that I'm writing now). In other cases, it took years longer for something to "catch fire," than I initially expected.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#196Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Almost all software which is why it's less of a technical problem and more of a social problem people need to realize that with how the technology is today we can't afford to rely on marked self regulation for a lot of things especially wrt. privacy protection it just fundamentally does not work (Or in other words, such usage of employee surveillance should be just plain out forbidden by law not just to be used but…
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#198Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#199I built a crypto invoice system that was originally targeted towards our freelance dev clients, which was soon overrun with drug sellers, weapons sellers, and when it reached a point where some of the invoice descriptions included words like "8yo.mp4" we realized it was time to put it down. We reported the IPs of the people involved and shut down the servers. Luckily I live in a third world country and not somewhere…
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#200The Qatar slave helmet. My company built the smart helmet used to track Qatar’s army of abused workers. The claim is GPS and accelerometer where used to track if a worker stopped moving or fell due to an accident; the geo fencing was supposedly for tracking if they had enough workers in an area for the job. The reality is the helmets where/are used as mass surveillance tech to ensure workers are continuously active a…