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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?

#241

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

I built a utility to help plant personnel get up date to job information and documents on a tablet instead of having to refer to printouts from up to a few weeks before that may or may not have up to date information.

It was co-opted as a time tracking system. A bad one that, as far as I can tell, produces no actionable data while simultaneously being a pain in the ass for the poor bastards using it.

It is the last time I will ever go out of my way to improve a non-IT aspect of the company.

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

#242

Post by giraffe_lady »

agumonkey wrote: post #78
nonrandomstring wrote: post #12

I won't say much more here but this second question caught my eye, because the answer is the same as for your earlier question. Some impactful work I am intensely proud of also became a thing that haunts me (or at least challenged my idea of "doing good"). Think about dual-use. You may never really know quite how your creations pan out. Not quite in the league of Mikhail Kalashnikov, but it piqued my now intense inte…

Got me curious how often firms will purposefully disguise a military project as an innocent challenge solving their problem they'll repurpose later on.

I once saw a very good talk on this exact subject, by someone who was in an incredibly similar situation as that commenter was. IIRC their bit of tech was a tool to triangulate a fairly specific location of a device connected to a wifi network (this was at least a decade ago).

As I remember it the point was basically: there are a lot of valid applications for this concept, but ultimately only one that a defense contractor is really going to care about. If that's who you're making it for they will use it to kill people eventually, even if that's not the plan right now. But also that probably is the plan right now, don't be naive.

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

#243

Post by eyelidlessness »

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.

I disagree. I think most tech workers identify more with their employers and their class than their own status and that of their colleagues. They’re moving up, fast, and they’re satisfied with their prospects more than anything they might get from solidarity.

In Marxist terms, lumpenproletariat is a close approximation, but a weird accident of history.

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

#244

Post by int_19h »

turtleyacht wrote: post #115
localhost wrote: post #77

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…

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).

Classic ASP used VBScript, not VB6. These two are closely related but not quite the same.

And the answer really depends on what you mean by "run on". .NET already supports two-way COM interop, and it does work with DLR to handle stuff like IDispatch. But the COM code in that scenario is still native (or, in case of VBScript, intepreted by its Active Scripting provider).

Implementing VBScript, or even VB6, as a language running entirely on top of .NET, is certainly possible, although it would be somewhat awkward because the object model in VB pre-.NET was specifically designed around COM. You can port the templating engine, as well. But the real hurdle is not the language - it's all the APIs. ASP itself was pretty basic, but most web apps would also need to talk to the database - so now you need ADO. And then there are all the third-party components, most of which were proprietary binary blobs compiled for 32-bit Windows.

And, well, why? There are many better languages running on top of .NET these days, starting with VB.NET.

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

#245

Post by mhh__ »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #211
mhh__ wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why is the RSSI thing worth having?

RSSI is just signal strength. Tracking it allows you to approximately triangulate where people are so you can say "ID #xxxx was closest to the first floor east stairwell at 10:02am". Maybe nothing is done with that data, but it's ultimately a surveillance system and enables all the potential abuses that can entail.

I know what RSSI is, it seems like complete nonsense even pretending this is for energy efficiency if you have to keep track of where the non-staff are anyway - or is the people-tracking just an optional extra?

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

#246

Post by int_19h »

ShredKazoo wrote: post #64
sshine wrote: post #55

A system for tracking email marketing recipients. That is, bounce rates, open rates, recurrence and deduplication of email addresses. It dawned on me 10-20 hours into the gig that these customers were professional spammers, and that I was helping them avoid being blacklisted. I scrapped everything I’d made and eventually paid back my fee.

I'm biased as someone who used to work in email marketing, but I'd say there are some important differences between respectable email marketing and spam: * Respectable email marketing = you have a pre-existing relationship (e.g. account on their website); spam = they found your address somewhere * Respectable email marketing = there's an unsubscribe link that works; spam = no unsubscribe link or it doesn't work (Coul…

Spam is any unsolicited and unwanted email. A pre-existing relationship does not automatically mean that I want your emails.

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

#247

Post by mhh__ »

mlyle wrote: post #208
mhh__ wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That isn't what the system was notionally designed to do

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

#248

Post by mikewarot »

I wrote a system called OverSeer that was intended to record inspections of Fire Extinguishers. The system itself had positive effects in that it forced the maintenance and availability of things that otherwise were slacked off on (though the paperwork was always signed, regardless of reality)

It's the little * on the report, when someone manually entered a barcode instead of scanning it, that I felt a bit squeamish about.

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

#249

Post by mlyle »

mhh__ wrote: post #247
mlyle wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That isn't what the system was notionally designed to do

Yes. The commenter is upset because a mesh network that he helped build for another purpose also provides a convenient dense network of radios that can be used to track staff, and that this is now the primary use case.

"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)."

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