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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?

#221

Post by lee101 »

lee101 wrote: post #204

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 bu…

On the ethical side I built a paywall for a billion dollar news company and stoped people from bypassing it, then they change the cancel button for a call customer support button to effectively steal money from the elderly etc who signed up but don't want to go through the long cancel process

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

#222

Post by plasticchris »

jjj123 wrote: post #172
kleinsch wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the other side - you’d rather live in the society we have today where policies/laws are selectively enforced based on whether cops/supervisors have a good relationship with you, are biased re your race/gender, etc?

Perfectly executed laws would also have biased outcomes, likely worse than the current system. There’s a good quote that goes something like “the law treats all men equally: the rich man and the poor man are punished the same for stealing bread to feed their family.”

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. Anatole France

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

#223

Post by jimmydean12 »

Thank goodness none of us have the burden in our lives of have programmed this machine, that literally killed people with overdoses of radiation. About the most awful way to die aside from full body fire or chemical burns

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

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

#224

Post by scaramanga »

colecut wrote: post #85
TeMPOraL wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this realization in stages. 1. Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes. 2. Some software comes already designed for surveillance purposes up front . 2a. This includes plenty of well-known mass appeal software; importantly, the customer-facing marketing copy and the investor pitch can present a completely different value proposition. 3. Software doesn't become used for surveillanc…

The problem is that "bad" is subjective and I'm sure most of the people making these decisions don't agree that they are being "bad"

Why would anybody care what they think?

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

#225

Post by rablackburn »

pontifier wrote: post #150

Moving Murfie to Pine Bluff has been a disaster. The entire situation has been bad for Murfie users and myself. I'm coming up on 3 years now with very minimal progress on returning media to users and getting the site fully operational. There are a lot of places where in hindsight I could have made better decisions. At every point the best course seemed to stand out, only to sour with unexpected obstacles. At first I…

I’ve followed a few of your posts on this and I’m sorry that things have worked out this way.

I think there were always some nay-sayers around in replies, but I appreciated what you were trying to do and despite the negative outcome am glad you at least gave it a shot.

Thanks for sharing your story on hn, I feel like I got to learn a lot vicariously.

There is a fantastic Australian film called “The Castle” (that you won’t regret watching!), but there’s a line from it where the main character is facing failure (and about to lose his entire neighbourhood)

“I don’t know what the opposite of letting someone down is. But you’ve done the opposite.” T Thanks for fighting to do the right thing. The world needs more people like you.

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

#227

Post by creakingstairs »

natbro wrote: post #168

ever 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…

ActiveX had been EVERYWHERE in South Korea and it was the main reason behind IE being used even into early 2010s.

It feels surreal to come across someone who was responsible for something I hated so much back then. But now I’m just fascinated for some reason. I’d buy you a drink if I could :p

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

#228

Post by tossaway0 »

eCa wrote: post #151
Negitivefrags wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is so bad about catching people taking unauthorised breaks?

Would you like to live in a society where the laws are the same as they are now, but it’s impossible to break them and not be caught? (I know I’m jumping right to where the slippery slope ends.)

That's the difference between living in Munich or São Paulo, or New York and Miami. Different societies have different tolerances for what's on the books and what gets enforced.

Personally, I prefer less on the books and proper enforcement, but many people like a lot on the books and just as many loopholes.

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

#229

Post by lee101 »

ill0gicity wrote: post #209

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.

That's funny it reminds me a lot of an awk script we used to use to push zone files... when I worked at domain name registry in New Zealand. It was wrapped in a lot of pearl for extra job safety, lots of weird issues with special characters, working in the DNS space is very interesting, lots of security overlap and problems like trying to stop people using the system for botnet command and control centres.

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

#230

Post by scaramanga »

int_19h wrote: post #210
wahnfrieden wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is to say that even very intelligent people can be very vulnerable to believing in things which are patently false provided that the end result is the ability to continue to live in a state of complete denial, and a world of pure imagination, where no action is required on one's own part and you can just continue to hope that all of this is a temporary aberration that will get better on its own :)
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