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

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361–370 of 539 posts

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

#361
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO it'd be nice if you donated some of your earnings to a human rights focused NGO operating in the area. Is there somehow a difference in impact depending on who does this? Maybe if you chipped in, the Qatar slave workers would be even better off. Or is this just about guilt-tripping strangers for their past? :-)

My free funds are currently 100% dedicated to helping Ukraine and will be until Russia falls back to 1991 borders.

Sounds like you’ll never have free funds again.

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

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

What exactly is the monster you’re talking about here?

In the first novel written by Ernesto Sabato, The tunnel [1], in one of the novel's tangents, there is a twist on the common fairy tale of the knight, the princess, and the dragon. For Sabato, the moment of clarity, of truth, is to realize the princess is the dragon.

The monster, the technological golem foreseen in the works of Lev Shestov, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul and more, is that because our tool-making inclination is both our salvation from nature's whim and our damnation (environmental mayhem and others), the princess is the dragon, we are not able to purify the technological pursuit in order build a bridge between intelligence (how to achieve a goal) and wisdom (why to pursue a goal).

A historical factoid: John von Neumann, whose ideas we exploit every day by turning these very devices on, has a quote "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" [2] Apparently, von Neumann wanted to nuke the Soviets in 1945 or soon after, before they had the nuke themselves, in order to establish dominance. The Soviets collapsed themselves, half a century later, in the meanwhile and in the aftermath torturing and maiming the lifepaths of hundreds of millions of people. Who's to say what course would have been better.

[1] Sabato wrote only two more novels, On Heroes and Tombs and Abaddón, The Exterminator, all three are masterpieces of universal literature.

[2] "The Passing of a Great Mind" by Clay Blair, Jr., in LIFE Magazine (25 February 1957), p. 96.

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

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nice. Hold on a sec while I uninstall all the random apps I have left over on my phone...

On Android, the apps won't track you through bluetooth if they don't ask for the location permission.

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

#364
post #3

The 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…

To add something related someone I know worked for a firm that was tasked with identifying regime critics for a gulf state. It wasn't clear what they were going to do with the list until they started disappearing.

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

#366
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to be snarky here, but did it surprise you that a system built to obfuscate financial transactions would be used for illegal activities?

I don't think most crypto is built to obfuscate. It's built to bypass centrally controlled monetary system. With the exception of some specialty crypto created to obfuscate, it's really not nearly as good at hiding transactions as say, cash.

BTC->XMR->BTC

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

#367
post #104

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

Ultimately you are like a kitchen knive maker whose knive was used in a stabbing. It was entirely the stabbers fault and does not diminish the utility of your product. In a corporate setting, mitm'ing TLS and blocking sites by category is routine practice (better ways to stop bad stuff but expensive firewals are a waste when most traffic is TLS).

It's bad practice.

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

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seniorit…

Software engineers in my first hand experience have been able to organize around coordinated action to get their employer to improve their conditions and pay without unions necessarily. One simple example of that is to coordinate around pay transparency

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

#369

I built a lighting system for to save energy by turning off hallway lights when not in use. The environmental aspect was great and saved hundreds of thousands in electricity. Someone eventually realized that the mesh network I built to connect all the lights together and report usage statistics could also be used to track employees moving throughout the building and catch them taking unauthorized breaks in the stairw…

Wow. Well at least it was 100% good faith your side. Can’t really help it that some tools can be dual used

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

#370

I worked in an Ad-tech start-up in Berlin run by two of the most evil f*kers I've ever encountered. I built out their principal ad auction algorithm and a lot of the back-end to support it, and all they did with it was target vulnerable groups of people at particular times of the week when they thought they were at their lowest ebb. One meeting in particular really stands out still, a social media giant that everyone…

Name and shame.
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