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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?

#311

Post by rl3 »

doomslice wrote: post #130
zinodaur wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did the BLE beacons track people? A phone app?

Yes the ticketing app that people were required to use to get into the events.

>Yes the ticketing app that people were required to use to get into the events.

Well, at least Android 12 has granular Bluetooth permissions.

While the majority of tickets at LA Live are sold by one company currently, there are others, so it's impossible to know which specific company you're talking about.

On a completely unrelated note, there was a big thing surrounding privacy concerns with AXS' app a couple years ago.[0][1]

Clearly those claims were overblown. Surely AXS would never blanket an area with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and invade users' privacy like that. I refuse to believe AXS would make an app virtually mandatory and then violate users' privacy using physical Bluetooth beacons. Say it ain't so.

Oh, almost forgot: fuck AXS.

[0] https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/axs-spyware-claim-de...

[1] https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/axs-isnt-spywa...

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

#313

Post by xxEightyxx »

I built software to track our traders. This was at one of the largest investment banks in the world and at the time they had a rudimentary system for tracking and recording their in-house traders activities - orders, trades, and other order/trade related information. At the time, the rudimentary system was built mostly to comply with government regulations, and was later modified by someone else to capture and report a larger scope of information about the traders to a higher-up department.

My system was built entirely from scratch because the existing system was antiquated, poorly structured, and really not conducive to future expansions.

After testing and implementing my system, a handful of traders lost their jobs as a result. One criteria often looked at was their number and reasons for failure to delivers (FTD's).

Other than that, it's mostly automating things that I almost sort of regret. A lot of folks in the bank were fired after I wrote a series of apps that could do the work they do. Mostly repetitive tasks. Still feel bad about that but if I didn't do it, they would have hired someone else and at the time I was really, really in dire need for a paycheck.

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

#314

Post by liketochill »

Scoundreller wrote: post #213
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

And limiting torrent speeds to 40k/s during "peak" hours. Which I kinda understand, but not when its unilaterally launched against the 3rd party providers leasing the lines too! (I guess Bell Canada, which also sells TV services, lost too many customers over this policy to their unthrottled competitors) https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/small-isps-fight-ruling-that... Canadian telecom regulators are gutless. Though I k…

In my memory Napster was before torrents? Did the idea for torrents, receiving pieces of the same file from multiple peers, come from Napster?

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

#315

Post by podunkPDX »

djbusby wrote: post #293
DavidPeiffer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly others. Micron has a patent wall. For a period of time under CEO Steve Appleton, meetings with engineers were prohibited [Fridays or half of Friday?] because the engineers should be working on parents during that time. My understanding is their strong patent portfolio was a good part of why they are still around after the massive consolidation of DRAM manufacturers through the 80's and 90's.

Both of your comments were victims of auto-uncorrect.

I know a life of typing has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame autocarrot.

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

#316

Post by singularity2001 »

localhost wrote: post #288
ska wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rewrit…

What do you mean by well defined FFI? Why couldn't calls to native libraries be marshaled?

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

#317

Post by rosywoozlechan »

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

> Why are tech workers so resistant to organized action?

If you mean software engineers when saying "tech workers" because unions make it harder to fire people. There's not much that makes a software engineer's job harder than a bad engineer who isn't getting fired and is destroying the quality of the product and the code and creating work for everyone else to fix, all the time.

Unions also result in gaining seniority by time spent in a job instead of competency, and that's also a miserable experience, when someone incompetent is dictating the engineering work. In software engineering you want people who are technically proficient and capable of mentoring to assume leadership positions and positions of increased responsibility, not people who've been there the longest.

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

#318

Post by habibur »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #124
Symbiote wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the requirement? My apartment building has lights in the hallways that are only on when needed, but they just use a basic infrared sensor.

* Minimize BOM cost. Only 1 in N lights would actually have the full sensor complement, so they needed to communicate. * Minimize installation cost. They just wanted to plug into a light socket, not run network cabling. * Push data logs to a central server. They didn't want to send a tech physically to each lightbulb to get data for e.g. energy usage certifications. plus other obvious requirements. All of that made i…

Guess you used wireless communication to avoid cables even though you are "pushing logs and communicate with other lights".

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

#319

Post by baxtr »

everdrive wrote: post #231
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…

If it helps, you guys are still way more popular than the folks who work on Teams.

I hate Teams so so much. It’s by far the worst piece of software on my Mac.
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