I don't have anything to add except this is an awesome thread. One of the best I've read.
Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
351–360 of 539 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#352When 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…
Thank you. This is very informative. And don't feel guilty, nobody will get jailed for visiting a website. This is mostly for censorship.
There was a person in Beijing that was arrested for a post on Twitter. Government surveillance was able to track him down in real life, which I think is deeply troubling
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you like to live in a society where the laws are the same as they are now, but it’s impossible to break them and not be caught? (I know I’m jumping right to where the slippery slope ends.)
Taking the other side - you’d rather live in the society we have today where policies/laws are selectively enforced based on whether cops/supervisors have a good relationship with you, are biased re your race/gender, etc?
Yes, it'd foster good social relationships. Oh wait, engineers don't need no one....
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#354Awesome question, and awesome thread.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#355Worked in monetization and optimized ingame shops for some of the most profitable games at the time. I know there are probably people that really like the game they develop but trust me the monetizers don't care they just want more money.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#356A system for tracking email marketing recipients. That is, bounce rates, open rates, recurrence and deduplication of email addresses. It dawned on me 10-20 hours into the gig that these customers were professional spammers, and that I was helping them avoid being blacklisted. I scrapped everything I’d made and eventually paid back my fee.
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…
> Could very well be that the people you're working with were actually spammers
Let’s see...
1. They purchased lists of emails that they could send to.
2. They made landing pages that lied about the advertised product (e.g. an iPhone version that doesn’t exist yet).
3. There were unsubscribe links, but guess what clicking it did? Increase the open rate.
4. When they hired people and trained them to set up new VPS’es, they asked that they use their own credit cards and reimbursed them through salary.
5. They discussed purchasing fake credit cards.
6. They bribed employees at large email distribution services online tens of thousands of dollars to avoid getting flagged.
I took some time to pay them back because I was broke, and as a result, they put my phone number in their spam lists. I mean, content marketing lists.
Could very well be that the people I was working with were actually spammers.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#357Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#358ever 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…
I'd like to thank you for your work. Without it, I might not have had the motivation to move completely to Linux.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#359I used to work in digital advertising company that had their on DPI technology and had deals with ISPs to tap into their network and some publishers. We profiled each user, by default it was opted in (: after some pressure it was by default opt-out but whoever was opted in and didn't know that remained opted-in. China was just meh, everybody opt-in we don't care about your privacy....
Truly ingenious technology but everything else was shit, truly bad moment in my career that fortunately lead to a better place for me...
(Also this was pre-https everything so it was super-easy to sniff the traffic)
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#360Earlier 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.
China exports narcotics, sold nuclear tech, grabbed China sea, Tibet, hongkong and Taiwan on the menu. Sure nothing to worry about it.