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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?

#331

Post by damagednoob »

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…

> That meant that existing scripting code that used those libraries would need to be rewritten to use an equivalent .NET library. We naively thought that was what people would do...

AFAIK, that's what JRuby does but Java had (has?) a bigger community and is more platform independent. Microsoft was a different company back then and wasn't supported on Linux. Betting on IronRuby/IronPython meant you had to use Windows as your platform.

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

#333

Post by masklinn »

jongjong wrote: post #328

I 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 o…

> Also, systems knowledge and critical thinking skills have brought me mostly anguish; it has made me cynical. […] I should have been a lawyer

If software made you cynical and miserable I don’t think you’d have survived law.

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

#334

Post by terminal_d »

hunterhod wrote: post #226

Using styled components for the Reddit redesign and littering the DOM with nodes.

You monster.

\s

Why did reddit use such a shitty design, anyway? To maximize clicks / number of pages visited?

old.reddit.com is the only sensible reddit interface, the mobile app sucks. Even the old m.reddit.com was pretty great..

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

#335

Post by 052c7028e »

notRobot wrote: post #309
052c7028e wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

Just a stranger on the internet, but FWIW I'm proud of you. You did what you could, and you're cognizant of your actions.

Thank you.

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

#336

Post by bengalister »

I built a web SPA "crypto" calculator that performed basic and generic tasks such as symmetric ciphering with block padding, hashing with different algorithms at the same time, pkcs7 messages ciphering/deciphering, and utilities like base64 to hex to ascii, etc encoding/decoding, etc.

I did at the time Angular was hot and I wanted to learn it. Also because it made my life easier at my job. I developed it fully at home outside office hours (I did not work remotely at that time), published it on github and deployed it on a personal public VM, and I told one or two direct colleagues about it.

A few months later, some people in the company who I did not know started using it (from the public site, not running it locally) and then later even manual validation plans or troubleshooting guides referred to it (its url).

I noticed through the server logs that it was used from many different countries, it was barely active but still got between 2 to 5 visits per day. And from the location I knew that it was very likely people from my company (no zscaler at that time).

One day I wanted to upgrade the VM and also cut down old sites that I maintained. So I shut down the website. A few days later I received a complaint in my company from 2 guys asking me to put it back on. I had to explain them that no way, I would not put it back on, it was a personal project fully developed outside business hour on my personal laptop, hosted on a personal VM that I paid for, etc.

This could have got me fired maybe, even though the cryptographic functions were really generic, I could have been accused to have stolen company time or whatever. The company was really not the kind to give 20% of our time to work on personal ideas.

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

#337

Post by cobertos »

corytheboyd wrote: post #303

I regret a "let's just rebuild the entire UI" project I proposed, fought for, and implemented. It's been many years since then. I was very much the zealot armed with many opinions and few facts. Good lesson learned, but I feel bad about how much fucking time it wasted.

Not time wasted if it was a lesson learned. And tbh, I don't think there's any other way to learn this lesson other than do it and reflect, I think anyone passionate for making things _actually_ better will do it at least once.

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

#338

Post by foepys »

baxtr wrote: post #319
everdrive wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Teams started hogging my keyboard media keys last week just to play the ring tone twice when pressing play/pause. The media player won't react to these inputs anymore and I have to click with my mouse. Nice going, Teams devs.

It's the worst software in my PC by far. The only reason it is used by my company is because it's free with Office 365. Even ICQ was a better chat client in 2002.

I wonder if the Teams guys feel guilty about all the unnecessarily burned CPU time. Every time I'm compiling code my Teams experience degrades to a point where I wonder if I'm using a 133 MHz PC again and forgot to press the Turbo button.

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

#339

Post by kelnos »

jiggawatts wrote: post #326
xxEightyxx wrote: post #313

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…

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 cl…

I'm so torn about stuff like this. On one hand, yeah, it absolutely sucks that people lost their job based on a thing you did. But on the other hand, their jobs existed only because things were broken that didn't need to be. Essentially, bullshit jobs: it sorta feels related to the trope of someone going around a neighborhood breaking people's windows to drum up business for the local window-installation company, without the nefarious bits.

I feel similarly about the rise of automation. At a global/society level, I think it's great that there are jobs humans don't have to do anymore. That leaves more people to be able to pursue "higher" things. But the reality is that some people who had jobs now don't, and might be suffering financial insecurity because of that. Our society should be helping people retrain, and keep them on their feet financially while they do so, but many places just don't have a good enough safety net for that, let alone specific programs for retraining when jobs become unnecessary.

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

#340

Post by cobertos »

azhenley wrote: post #105

At my first internship I built a program that generated reports with a ranking of call center agents based on their daily time on the phone and calls taken. It was used to fire the bottom X% periodically. Not nefarious, but wasn’t how I want to spend my energy.

Once a metric exists, it will become a target to live/die by and bend all sorts of human behavior to make it regardless of secondary factors.

Feels like this is more of a human problem that hasn't become common knowledge yet, if it is capable of becoming that.

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