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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?

#461

Post by t-3 »

NoGravitas wrote: post #458
t-3 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That well has been poisoned in the US. It's tough to find any extant union which isn't a corrupt sellout organization leeching off the workers they're supposed to represent. It's hard to change, because laws around unions are designed to lead to the current situation. Cross-industry/informal/extra-organizational action and coordination using the internet is probably a far more workable idea than traditional unions.

Have you considered that that's what Porky wants you to think about unions?

Yes. I've also worked in a few union shops and experienced it myself. I'm a socialist through and through, but what is called a union in the US is not an organization of and for the workers, it is a co-opted parasitic extension of corporate and government policy. Workers can and should organize, but restricting ourselves to following the controlled opposition is stupid and self-defeating.

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

#462

Post by NoGravitas »

toss1 wrote: post #444
code51 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming only authoritarian regimes are capable of doing bad things. You can have a perfectly democratic country without a sense of ethics when it comes to homeland security and/or espionage. So that line of thinking provides a false sense of virtue really.

No, I know full well that even democratic nation-states occasionally do bad things. But if you cannot tell the difference between how democratic countries vs autocratic regimes deploy security & espionage technology, you are deeply ignorant. I'd suggest you go live in Russia or Myanmar for a while and report back. Of course there are instances of overreach in democracies. They typically get reported and corrected. In…

Im not sure if you're arguing in bad faith or just naive about how your own country operates.

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

#463

Post by andix »

turtleyacht wrote: post #305
andix wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. But in theory you could implement a wrapper, sure. But do yourself a favor, and just rewrite your application with a modern framework.

I agree, many benefits would be realized in a modern framework. With so much functionality stored in stored procs, VBScript was essentially just looping records and writing things out to tables. But there was lots of business logic there too. It felt like I had a purpose liberating "old database" logic into application code--the sky castles of Brooks, as it were--where it could be changed "more easily." Given the app…

The business logic you may be able to convert to VB.net. It’s a bit weird but not worse than C#.

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

#464

Post by haolez »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #256
haolez wrote: post #191

I'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!"

A missile needing to dynamically allocate memory is already a ridiculous idea.

There was computer vision stuff in the missile's head (for target tracking), which is where the code was used.

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

#465

Post by haolez »

nikeee wrote: post #404
haolez wrote: post #191

I'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.

Can't remember, so if I did, it was a long time ago. This story happened around 2010.

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

#466

Post by mod »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #301
mod wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My MIL never got her refund Sorry man, but that one's on you.

Is it? OP acted in good faith, had reason to believe the things were on the level, and reacted when given new information. What fault do you lay at their feet?

If the business I start takes money from my mother in law for an order, and someone within the business steals the money, I'm paying her back out of my own pocket if necessary.

I'm not saying it's his fault that it got stolen, I'm saying it's his fault that his MIL never got reimbursed.

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

#467

Post by fknorangesite »

inglor_cz wrote: post #460
fknorangesite wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is so bad about catching people taking unauthorised breaks? Your profile indicates that you've commented on HN on a weekday. Don't worry - this behavior has already been reported to the authorities.

Not the OP, but a lot depends on the context. If both pilots left the cockpit mid-flight in order to chill with the stewardesses, I would be fine with them being barred from working as pilots ever again. I couldn't care less if a receptionist catches a quick smoking break during a slow hour.

In a discussion that started with "hotel staff in the stairwell", which of your two examples do you think is more representative?

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

#468

Post by bravetraveler »

someweirdperson wrote: post #399
bravetraveler wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Is systemd that upsetting Yes. And unkike the other confessions in this thread about surveillence here or there, it has a practical impact on many. Of course, I'm now going to get down-voted by its fans. It's a love or hate thing. And where something breaks, it's easily the latter.

Thank you for confirming!

I find myself closer to the 'fan' side of systemd, but I'm under no illusions either - there are several detriments.

I find some of the heavier responses to it strange, either for or against. It's like developing a personality around a preference of sporks over forks/spoons.

Use what you like, help those who have trouble... but neither needs proselytizing

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

#469

Post by _8j50 »

toss1 wrote: post #165
wheybags wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between selling knives to the general public, vs seeking out violent criminals and specifically marketing your knives to them.

Yes, and in the case of technology, it is REALLY EASY to simply sell no technology to any authoritarian regime, for any purpose. There are dozens of academic and GNOs that track democracy, e.g., [0]. Just select a reasonable cutoff of some level of democracy, and don't sell to anyplace below that. That does require management and sales to have ethics. Some do. [0] https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking

Some call that nei-colonialism, you use economic/business opportunities as a way to undermine a country's sovreignity and enforce your puppet regime. Democracy is neither morally superior or a your manifest destiny to export against the will of foreign governments.

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

#470

Post by NoGravitas »

kelnos wrote: post #344
jimmydean12 wrote: post #178

I went to college for a number of years in electrical engineering technology. I started working even before I finished my degree. My first gig was PLC programming material handling systems for the pharmaceutical industry. It made sense, in order to maintain safety and a sterile environment it’s much better to have a stainless steel robot handle pails, jars, drums, etc of pills in a clean room instead of people touchi…

I think I'd feel a lot better about job-taking automation if governments would require that companies adopting automation pay to retrain workers, including salary (since you still have to go on living while you're learning a new job skill). I expect this would basically kill any company's desire to automate (unless it's financially worth it in a relatively short amount of time, which I suspect wouldn't be often), so…

> My version of utopia is one where there's so much abundance and automation that no one has to work at all if they don't want to, but can still live incredibly comfortable -- extravagant, even -- lives.

Or, as we call it, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, or FALGSC.

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