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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?

#281

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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 got so much mileage out of the DLR they built to support those languages even if things didn't work out afterwards. To this day, I don't think anything as effective exists anywhere in language tech land.

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

#282

Post by duxup »

vlovich123 wrote: post #113
LVB wrote: post #101

Early in my career (late 90s) I worked at a big company that just loved getting patents, had a big patent wall and did plaque presentations, etc. I got swept up in this and patented some "novel" (:eyeroll:) uses of a device that a partner/supplier made. Yay... I got a plaque and a few bucks, but Big Corp was never going to commercialize these uses, that was clear. They just wanted to run up the patent count. But the…

Pretty sure it’s Qualcomm. Not familiar with any other companies that were so proud of their parents to build a wall to them

McData did that when they existed.

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

#283

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

ethanbond wrote: post #146
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would that accomplish?

Amp up the sort of disdain that might, for example, prevent international organizations from granting legitimacy to these regimes. Things like FIFA, as a completely random example.

I think it's clear that FIFA gives anti-fucks about slave labor.

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

#284

Post by chociej »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #280
propogandist wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

You are mistaken: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim... > Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien's status, may apply for asylum in ac…

Seems the distinction wouldn't improve OP's outlook besides.

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

#285

Post by taneq »

scaramanga wrote: post #188
gnat wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Thing is, when the company that pays you actively wants to track everyone, there's little you can do as the person that creates tech form them." You can quit. Literally, there is something you can do. If your boss asks you to write or adapt something to surveil, then you can quit. There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company, perhaps consequences that you won't e…

You can organize. Why shouldn't workers in a factory have a say over how their labour is used by those who appropriate it? Baffled by how obvious solutions appear to have fallen off the radar.

They do have a say. Their labour is being purchased from them, not appropriated. They can say no (individually or together) and ultimately they can walk away.

As you say, collective bargaining is usually going to be more effective than individual.

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

#286

Post by taneq »

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

By the time they got to "just stick a beacon tag inside employee badges and measure the RSSI from the mesh lightbulbs" it's pretty clear that it's one of the features they had in mind, though. You wouldn't "just" re-issue all your employee badges and spend engineering time on integrating it like this if tracking the employees wasn't the goal.

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

#287

Post by xwowsersx »

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…

Glad you regret it. Not trying to rub it in as I don't think anything productive will come from self-flagellation, but this is truly awful and I think the US should have laws that make it a crime for any US corporation to participate in this sort of thing.

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

#288

Post by localhost »

ska wrote: post #279
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…

Was this basically what doomed IronPython also? I remember a conversation ages ago about how you couldn't really get a (common?) lisp running properly, irrc due to limitations in the way CLR modeled classes amongst other things, but FFI came up there too.

Yes. The problem was that the interpreters for both languages did not have a well-defined FFI. From a native library you could reach up into the interpreter and party over the AST to your heart's content. We couldn't in any practical sense emulate those data structures from the CLR which meant that native libraries couldn't run. That meant that existing scripting code that used those libraries would need to be rewritten to use an equivalent .NET library (e.g., regex). We naively thought that was what people would do and that turned out to be a mistake :(

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

#289

Post by analog31 »

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.

Completely an aside, but consider using hand tools.

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

#290

Post by 052c7028e »

xwowsersx wrote: post #287
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…

Glad you regret it. Not trying to rub it in as I don't think anything productive will come from self-flagellation, but this is truly awful and I think the US should have laws that make it a crime for any US corporation to participate in this sort of thing.

I was powerless to stop it. I was just a junior engineer, and it was decided by the CEO to do the project. So, actually, I feel I made the right choice -- I participated in the project but worked hard on making sure it was as limited as possible. I successfully advocated for several categories of logs to not be sent because they were not required by law.

So, yes, I regret I couldn't do more, but I don't regret the choices I made with the information I had and the position I was in.

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