I did some hobby work with a commoncrawl dataset. A year or so later I got contacted by a startup to see if I could do something similar for them. They basically wanted to collect phone numbers and email addresses of businesses from the couple of TB of data. I gave them some disclaimer like: you can use this for good and bad things, I trust it's good and also it is your responsibility to comply with privacy regulations. They ran my code in their own AWS account and probably collected millions of addresses. I think the startup didn't make it. No idea what they did with it but I still feel a bit bad.
Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
401–410 of 539 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#402ever 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…
Mozilla hated ActiveX so much they cloned it with XP/COM.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#403My first job at Microsoft was to build IronRuby, which was an implementation of Ruby on top of the Common Language Runtime. I got the job because I had built a bridge that connected MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter) to the CLR before I joined the company. This project ultimately failed because of a principle that we learned from the school of hard knocks: respect developers' existing code investments. Developers couldn't…
IronRuby may not have succeeded but it and the DLR were inspirational, and I don’t think I’d have been working on JVM based language implementations for the last decade and a bit without initially being to point at things like IronRuby and say, “We know it’s possible.”
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#404I've coded the firmware for a CAN-based communication bus for a medical device with lots of different boards talking to each other. This same company had a war industry department and they used this code in a missile project. It left a weird taste in my mouth. Btw, they got an early version that had a memory leak, and when I went to warn them, they just said: "It's okay! It's just going to run for about 20 seconds!"
Did you post about this previously?
I feel like I've read that part with the memory leak before.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#405Worked in a medical start-up in one of the country's biggest incubators, but eventually uncovered that the whole thing was a scam. All what management did is launder the money to themselves with no actual product in sight. I was responsible for the pilots and demos to the municipal hospitals and government officials, and i regret i've spent ~year to help them cover their crimes.
The management guys are not in prison and i think will never be.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#406Nested HTML tables in Microsoft's web site in 1995. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#407I 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…
This is like something from a movie. You write really well, by the way. You could easily write a book if you wanted to.
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#408I worked at Ashley Madison, enough said.
How many users (women) were actually real?
Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#409I 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).
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Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
#410Not from an ethical perspective, but from a personal one - I do regret putting so much effort into a past project that to me looked like it had a lot of potential to move things.
There were lots of open questions, not only tech-wise, but also business-wise that made me really anxious (in both senses) to get to work on them. So I pushed the stakeholders to discover what they wanted. I asked for definitions of terms, clarification on business language, workshops to figure out what it is my software was supposed to improve, what problems it was supposed to solve.
I sat down with them and explained Agile from A to Z while also writing code, reviewing code, writing CI/CD pipelines, talking to other teams about architecture, and generally putting in work wherever it was useful - and that was everywhere.
Then a week before my 3 month trial period was up, I was told to clear my desk until the end of the day because that was not what the company was looking for. End of story.
I don't regret doing everything I did, but I do regret not playing it smart politically and doing it out in the open.