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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?

#201

Post by BurningFrog »

toss1 wrote: post #156
Negitivefrags wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is so bad about catching people taking unauthorised breaks?

The same thing that would be bad about using your phone GPS location sensors to automatically send you speeding tickets every time you wander >1mph over the limit. Even without intending to, everyone would go from a ticket or two per decade to dozens of tickets on every commute. "But the law is still the same!?!" Of course it is, but changing from poorly scalable human-required surveillance to always-on, fully-scaled…

It's still up to the manager to choose what to do about it.

A reasonable manager would accept the occasional smoke break, but do something about hour long naps.

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

#202

Post by CodeWriter23 »

Built an e-commerce site in partnership with a close friend and someone he partnered with that sold smoked fish. My friend had actually been paid by his partner in the past and partner claimed to have insider relationships with a Canadian fishery and cannery.

After a couple of months of weekends we launched the site. Third partner was to take care of fulfillment because of their connections.

A couple of months after that, my mother in law contacts me and asks when her shipment will arrive. Turns out she liked what was on offer and wanted to be supportive.

My friend and I got the fish guy on the phone. He said he had to take a day job and was having trouble doing the fulfilling. I said ok, refund my MIL and I’m going to turn all the “add to cart” buttons into “email us” buttons and when you let me know you’ve got a plan to fulfill orders, even if just once a week, let me know and we’ll put the site back online.

My MIL never got her refund. Neither of us have heard from the fish guy again.

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

#203

Post by silisili »

hnanon22 wrote: post #3

The 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…

I think you win :(.

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

#204

Post by lee101 »

I built a web crawling site ring.nz on polymer/web components. Looking at the marketing of the framework it was an easy way to get material design components but in reality the overuse of shadow Dom and shadow CSS meant it was really difficult to use the components or theme them. I'm pretty sure the whole polymer project is abandoned now... The site became too hard/bothersome for me to maintain under its tech debt but is still on my GitHub.

I also regret building some things in C# or Java a long time ago.

The biggest regret money wise is I built a crypto forecasting company that became somewhat profitable BitBank.nz but I built it without enough foresight for cloud costs, was running a forecaster constantly on compute engine as well as filling up a postgres database without offlining data, turned out harder to scale down a database than scale up the memory. Basically things like that and I never had time for it after having kids meant it long term costed more than it made even with paying customers so I shut it down.

Now I run https://text-generator.io still machine learning related but I run it very lean from two GPUs I own at home which is a bit easier

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

#205

Post by miscaccount »

Symbiote wrote: post #92
zinodaur wrote: post #69

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

It would be entirely reasonable to name the company.

Maybe Procera or sandvine

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

#206

Post by jjeaff »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #199
jbirer wrote: post #8

I 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…

Not trying to be snarky here, but did it surprise you that a system built to obfuscate financial transactions would be used for illegal activities?

I don't think most crypto is built to obfuscate. It's built to bypass centrally controlled monetary system. With the exception of some specialty crypto created to obfuscate, it's really not nearly as good at hiding transactions as say, cash.

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

#207

Post by ct0 »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #202

Built an e-commerce site in partnership with a close friend and someone he partnered with that sold smoked fish. My friend had actually been paid by his partner in the past and partner claimed to have insider relationships with a Canadian fishery and cannery. After a couple of months of weekends we launched the site. Third partner was to take care of fulfillment because of their connections. A couple of months after…

Cool lesson. Your MIL took one for the team. Best to test supplier capacity before launching.

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

#208

Post by mlyle »

mhh__ wrote: post #198
AlotOfReading wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as far as I was ever aware. They were intended for guest areas.

So why is the RSSI thing worth having?

Because by measuring multiple RSSI you can trilaterate and track employees relatively accurately. If an employee lingers somewhere unusual, you can have a manager ask them why.

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

#209

Post by ill0gicity »

Once upon a time I wrote a DNS zone sync shell script. It was great, and terrible. Truth is, it should never have been a shell script. I used curl to make API calls to Oracle (then Dyn), awk to turn API output into the local zone format, sorted the local and remote zone data, diff'd them, then more curl'ing to make the updates. It was brilliant then-- now, not so much.

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

#210

Post by int_19h »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #177
lasfter wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company This is why unions are so important, even in a field like software engineering. If you quit on your own, the company may not care. But using the threat of strikes, workers can demand better conditions for themselves and more ethical directions for their company.

Why are tech workers so resistant to organized action? Their owner employers sure are organizing adversarially in a multitude of ways in the open and behind closed doors

Tech workers disproportionally 1) believe in meritocracy, and 2) believe that the existing arrangement in IT is it, or at least closer to it than it would have been with unions in the picture.

Why that is the case is another interesting question.

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