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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?

#291

Post by bravetraveler »

bravetraveler wrote: post #145

Tons and tons of technical things! I've seen (and caused/fixed) so many horrific things that I feel compelled to improve my expression skills... so that I can write them up more formally. Most recently, I moved some of our Ubuntu systems away from network-scripts to systemd-networkd I didn't realize the gravity of this change. Be warned, systemd-networkd will significantly change how forwarding works. Due to things o…

Some replies over snipes would be nice, folks. Is systemd that upsetting, or is this not venture capitalist enough for the thread?

Not that I care about votes, but I can see at least three people have disagreed but said nothing.

I'm genuinely confused - this is a blunder I created/regret by implementation

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

#292

Post by sunjester »

tldr; I regret making bots in the early 2000's.

Sometimes we make things in our youth that end up getting people arrested. Sometimes nobody knows you even participated in coding and releasing some of the worst bots that are still used today in variants for banking theft software. Sometimes you just have to keep it to yourself and be the hacker you were when you built those evil things. Above all else you were/are a hacker and you should never claim your evil hacking deeds for yourself and should always do it for the love of the game.

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

#293

Post by djbusby »

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #140
vlovich123 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure it’s Qualcomm. Not familiar with any other companies that were so proud of their parents to build a wall to them

There are certainly others. Micron has a patent wall. For a period of time under CEO Steve Appleton, meetings with engineers were prohibited [Fridays or half of Friday?] because the engineers should be working on parents during that time. My understanding is their strong patent portfolio was a good part of why they are still around after the massive consolidation of DRAM manufacturers through the 80's and 90's.

Both of your comments were victims of auto-uncorrect.

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

#294

Post by password4321 »

turtleyacht wrote: post #115
localhost wrote: post #77

My 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…

Does this mean a version of VB6 (classic ASP) could run on .NET Core (Linux)? That would finally liberate the language from the platform (IIS on Windows).

I would start looking here: https://github.com/aspcompiler/aspclassiccompiler

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

#295

Post by turtleyacht »

int_19h wrote: post #244
turtleyacht wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean a version of VB6 (classic ASP) could run on .NET Core (Linux)? That would finally liberate the language from the platform (IIS on Windows).

Classic ASP used VBScript, not VB6. These two are closely related but not quite the same. And the answer really depends on what you mean by "run on". .NET already supports two-way COM interop, and it does work with DLR to handle stuff like IDispatch. But the COM code in that scenario is still native (or, in case of VBScript, intepreted by its Active Scripting provider). Implementing VBScript, or even VB6, as a langua…

You're right. It's mostly nostalgia value :) Although I have been a hosting customer for a while now.

ES3 is nice, and short of prayer or sacrifice one was able to import Crockford's JSON library and Ramda. Server-side Node.js without npm (for better or worse).

With Babel, the idea was to use ES6 constructs and transpile it down to something IIS could run. Or Ruby, or anything else, and VBScript becomes kind of like the "machine language" description of the program.

VBScript is less painful with aspunit [1] and plenty of comisseration/resources with drian bamaged [2], aXe, and even [3].

It was amazing how much could get done with Microsoft SQL Server, a loop, and Response.Write(). Enough to build a company and to get acquired, even. Could have been a right place/right time thing for the owner.

  [1] https://github.com/rpeterclark/aspunit
  [2] blogsite
  [3] the person with the classic ASP book

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

#296

Post by mod »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #202

Built an e-commerce site in partnership with a close friend and someone he partnered with that sold smoked fish. My friend had actually been paid by his partner in the past and partner claimed to have insider relationships with a Canadian fishery and cannery. After a couple of months of weekends we launched the site. Third partner was to take care of fulfillment because of their connections. A couple of months after…

> My MIL never got her refund

Sorry man, but that one's on you.

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

#298

Post by rl3 »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #202

Built an e-commerce site in partnership with a close friend and someone he partnered with that sold smoked fish. My friend had actually been paid by his partner in the past and partner claimed to have insider relationships with a Canadian fishery and cannery. After a couple of months of weekends we launched the site. Third partner was to take care of fulfillment because of their connections. A couple of months after…

Seems fishy in retrospect.

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

#299

Post by AlotOfReading »

taneq wrote: post #286
mhh__ wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't what the system was notionally designed to do

By the time they got to "just stick a beacon tag inside employee badges and measure the RSSI from the mesh lightbulbs" it's pretty clear that it's one of the features they had in mind, though. You wouldn't "just" re-issue all your employee badges and spend engineering time on integrating it like this if tracking the employees wasn't the goal.

For some additional context, the original feature genuinely was energy efficiency. was trying to get some green certifications for a flagship and went looking for partners to do the actual efficiency stuff. That company found a sub, and so on until I was contracted to do the actual firmware. Everything got done and it was installed in a test hotel in Vegas.

After that initial success, one of the intermediary contractors came up with the surveillance idea (among others) to try and find reasons for to roll the system out to more facilities.

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

#300

Post by morpheuskafka »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #280
propogandist wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

You are mistaken: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim... > Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien's status, may apply for asylum in ac…

That says you can apply for asylum regardless of entering illegally (or to use the term of art, EWI/entered without inspection). You can also apply if you are in removal proceedings for some other reason, ex. illegal work or false statements.

In and of itself, nothing in that statue allows or removes criminal or monetary penalties for the act of crossing illegally itself. There are cases where people were convicted of the same despite a successful grant of defensive asylum. (https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...)

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