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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?

#261

Post by kelnos »

BurningFrog wrote: post #201
toss1 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In line with what a sibling comment says, it stops being about the person themselves, and what their actual performance is, but about adherence to arbitrary rules. The computer says you took X number of unauthorized breaks this past year, so no raise/promotion for you. Employee has still been getting their assigned job done, and has been doing it perfectly well, and has stellar feedback from customers? So what! It's the rules that matter more.

Often a manager will not have any say over these things. "The metrics speak for themselves!"

Regardless, I don't think we should design systems with the assumption that the people in charge of them will be compassionate and reasonable. There are a lot of petty, corrupt (in the moral sense, not financial) people out there in positions of power over others.

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

#262

Post by SoftTalker »

int_19h wrote: post #246
ShredKazoo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It also doesn't mean that I consented to receiving marketing emails when I overlooked a checkbox at the bottom of your order/checkout page when I purchased something. Ethical companies will make this an opt-in choice, not opt-out.

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

#263

Post by haneefmubarak »

mhh__ wrote: post #259
mlyle wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neighbor…

I assumed the rssi thing was there from the start, apparently mistakenly. If it's any consolation to the original engineer it feels like a non-trivial thing to add

Most nodes in a radio based system will do rssi measurements to any other nodes that they need to communicate with directly, as part of deciding appropriate tx/rx amplification levels / when nodes are unavailable / etc. These functionalities are often easy to access to enable easier debugging, so it's a relatively straightforward change to start using them to scan other things on the same protocol etc.

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

#264

Post by mlyle »

mhh__ wrote: post #259
mlyle wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neighbor…

I assumed the rssi thing was there from the start, apparently mistakenly. If it's any consolation to the original engineer it feels like a non-trivial thing to add

The original engineer states the RSSI thing from the start because it was an input to the meshing algorithm.

Using it for location of employees was the new part.

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

#265

Post by propogandist »

ryandrake wrote: post #255

Built an aircraft-mounted camera gimbal pointing system that I thought was supposed to be used by energy companies to look for power poles but was also sold to US Border Patrol to hunt down immigrants. Not my finest hour.

No post body was provided.

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

#266

Post by manfre »

giantg2 wrote: post #167
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #21

I 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.

It's an easy decision also by being cheaper to buy the precut from places like brushy mountain.

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

#267

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

SoftTalker wrote: post #35
AlotOfReading wrote: post #32

I 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…

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.

>"can be abused or co-opted"

I tend to believe it, "will be."

All tech will eventually be used to try to gain an advantage in war and surveillance. I don't think there's a way to prevent it.

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

#268

Post by stevewatson301 »

052c7028e wrote: post #253

When I was at Akamai about 5 years ago, I was involved in building the system for making their CDN compliant in China. There were two main features, and they were activated on all servers running inside mainland china (not HK, macau or Taiwan) 1. Logs of the CDN were sent in real time to the ministry of technology -- there was about a 15 minute delay if I remember correctly, and they could impose fines if they were d…

While I wouldn't put any authoritarian moves beyond China's reach, the ICP recordal mechanism already requires government approval.

In that case, isn't it better for user privacy (not that anyone cares about it in China) to receive an ICP recordal but then wait for an actual request from law enforcement to turn over the logs?

Also, while you wouldn't see anyone from Amazon or Cloudflare comment on your thread, both have the ability to stream logs to a destination, and that is also exposed to customers, so I don't think they needed to build anything else.

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

#269

Post by 052c7028e »

stevewatson301 wrote: post #268
052c7028e wrote: post #253

When I was at Akamai about 5 years ago, I was involved in building the system for making their CDN compliant in China. There were two main features, and they were activated on all servers running inside mainland china (not HK, macau or Taiwan) 1. Logs of the CDN were sent in real time to the ministry of technology -- there was about a 15 minute delay if I remember correctly, and they could impose fines if they were d…

While I wouldn't put any authoritarian moves beyond China's reach, the ICP recordal mechanism already requires government approval. In that case, isn't it better for user privacy (not that anyone cares about it in China) to receive an ICP recordal but then wait for an actual request from law enforcement to turn over the logs? Also, while you wouldn't see anyone from Amazon or Cloudflare comment on your thread, both h…

All of the sites served had an ICP license. This is separate, and the CDNs in China have regulations specific to CDNs they need to comply with.

At the time, Akamai also had the capability to stream logs, but the ministry of technology required a specific, custom interface to receive them, which required engineering work, especially to do it for an entire country without the customers configuring it themselves. I would be extremely surprised if it required no engineering work at Amazon or Cloudflare to deliver the logs in the way they requested.

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

#270

Post by localhost »

int_19h wrote: post #238
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…

I think it was in part because in 2010, Microsoft was already switching gears to Windows 8. A part of that was DevDiv getting sidelined by Windows. Windows was not a fan of .NET in general since Longhorn/Vista, but more importantly, the grand plan for Win8 involved the brand new application framework, WinRT. So when it came to VS 2012 and .NET 4.5, the emphasis was on WinRT interop - which is not a scenario where DLR…

Our funding was gone by April 2009 IIRC, which was before Windows 7 shipped. Jim Hugunin and I shopped the team around and eventually landed in the Technical Computing org. The only thing that survived from that era was Python Tools for Visual Studio.
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