A financially debilitating coffee addiction. Basically if I don’t drink caffeine my heart stops.
Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
321–330 of 539 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
This type of China vs US narrative where existential stakes are implied is just dumb. The technological Cold War we’re in is not going to result in the collapse of either nation.
I think you may have misinterpreted the parent comment, (or perhaps I did). China doesn't have a deep libertarian tradition, so overbearing state surveillance, while odious, isn't a strange concept in Chinese culture. Western governments are/will be unable to resits the urge to deploy such measures because they clearly work so well for authoritarian states, but will fatally undermine their own cultural foundation by doing so. It wasn't so long ago that regimes like East Germany were considered the epitome of totalitarianism, with the Stasi (domestic intelligence service) coopting large numbers of informers, listening in on the citizenry etc. Yet today many of us are subject to far more intrusive surveillance, it's just got super-friendly branding and some people are making money out of it so 'freedom' has nominally prevailed.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#323Deep packet inspection hardware/software that was sold to controversial governments/militaries who ended up in a coup and used to track and ** opposition.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#324I 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.
How about have children play a "game" so they help you commit xenocide? [Ender's Game]
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#325The Qatar slave helmet. My company built the smart helmet used to track Qatar’s army of abused workers. The claim is GPS and accelerometer where used to track if a worker stopped moving or fell due to an accident; the geo fencing was supposedly for tracking if they had enough workers in an area for the job. The reality is the helmets where/are used as mass surveillance tech to ensure workers are continuously active a…
This technology may sound bad but it helpes enable events like the world cup that entertain many around the world
The world cup doesn't matter.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#326I 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…
An ex-coworker asked me to do a 3-month contracting stint at his company where he was the head of IT. The task was to "clean up the environment" because the servers were crashing often and performance was poor.
I quickly found the source of the crashes: misconfigured ethernet switch MAC address limits applied to VMware ESXi. I also cleansed the environment by finding the one working server in each cluster and then cloning it out to replace the faulty ones. These were all "pets" on life support, and I tried to make them more like identical "cattle".
I went back a year later and half of the IT support team was gone. I asked what happened and the answer was: me.
Apparently after I fixed up the platform the number of support requests plummeted, and a bunch of the helpdesk staff were made redundant.
Oops.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#327I went to college for a number of years in electrical engineering technology. I started working even before I finished my degree. My first gig was PLC programming material handling systems for the pharmaceutical industry. It made sense, in order to maintain safety and a sterile environment it’s much better to have a stainless steel robot handle pails, jars, drums, etc of pills in a clean room instead of people touchi…
If that happened today you'd be famous online.
Anyway, I think automation and its consequences are much more complex these days and beyond the understanding of any non-technical / "not in the know" person. People used to know that "robots would take our jobs" but now that's not always true. The people writing completely "harmless" software are likely responsible for many, many bad things that would be difficult to even assign the blame for.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#328I regret becoming a software developer. It was a dumb financial decision in the country I live in.
Also, systems knowledge and critical thinking skills have brought me anguish and made me cynical. I see problems and logical contradictions everywhere and it makes everything and everyone unbearably frustrating.
I should have been a lawyer and done software as a hobby. I don't think law rewires your brain like decades of coding does... You're still human. There's something about being constantly corrected by a compiler for over a decade which changes the way your mind works in a fundamental way.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#329Earlier 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.
Agreed; this is gross. If I've signed up for an account on someone's site, all I'm implicitly consenting to are transactional emails related to the service (or product, if there is one). Things like shipping notifications and billing reminders and such.
And if you at least have a checkbox for consent for marketing emails during signup, it should be unchecked by default. I'm so tired of this crap.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#330My main regrets are code for canceled closed source projects that will never see the light of day (waste of effort), and one early-career large scale refactoring which was only ever half-finished due to time pressure - resulting in worse code than if I'd never initiated the refactoring in the first place. Even the bad technical decisions tended to be correctable learning experiences.
Yeah, this weighs on me too sometimes. I've spent man-decades of work time writing proprietary code for companies that will never see life outside of those companies. And many of the products I've written the code for have since been shut down, or never shipped in the first place.
I've recently gotten re-involved with an open source project that I used to work on in the mid-00s, and it's really satisfying to see code I wrote so long ago, still in use, and get to work on it again.