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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?

#531

Post by CRConrad »

gabrielizaias wrote: post #518
roryisok wrote: post #487

I built a distraction free writing app in 2012 to help me write, and it has been the single greatest distraction of all. it was successful, becoming the number one writing app on Windows store for years. I now have thousands of users, and it makes a tiny bit of money each month, and supporting and fixing bugs takes up most of my spare time. I have to date not managed to finish more than a sketchy first draft of a nov…

Do you regret building it because of the effect on your spare time or because you didn't manage to use it for its intended purpose?

Seems like they're the same thing, aren't they?

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

#532

Post by MacroChip »

chrisallenlane wrote: post #477
nikeee wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you post about this previously? I feel like I've read that part with the memory leak before.

I favorited this post some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14233542 The Google Groups page is currently in a redirect loop, but if that gets sorted out, you may find the story that you're remembering.

https://archive.ph/DrDI7

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

#533

Post by pictureofabear »

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…

Many regions offer free community college as a way to handle this. Often, community colleges will partner with local manufacturing companies to develop training plans that give those people new technical skills (win for that person) and training on the systems used at the manufacturing plant (win for the company).

I think this is the best way as its solved at the local levels which means the solution is customized for the local area instead of a one-size fits all solution that the federal government would have to create.

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

#534

Post by dr_barnowl »

pashariger wrote: post #60

An xml parser.

I did a pull-stylee XML parser once.

In VB.

VB ..... 3

It didn't care (much) about well-formed documents.

You could mix it with snippets of RTF. We did. I used it to parse report templates out of hybrid RTF/XML files.

Not really morally evil though.

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

#535

Post by wahnfrieden »

pontifier wrote: post #150

Moving Murfie to Pine Bluff has been a disaster. The entire situation has been bad for Murfie users and myself. I'm coming up on 3 years now with very minimal progress on returning media to users and getting the site fully operational. There are a lot of places where in hindsight I could have made better decisions. At every point the best course seemed to stand out, only to sour with unexpected obstacles. At first I…

You post videos to YouTube showing vile slumlord behaviors. Pretty pathetic

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

#536

Post by turtleyacht »

andix wrote: post #463
turtleyacht wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#.

At least one product was developed in VB.NET. We tried to keep the current conventions when maintaining or extending it. It was mostly a wrapper around stored procs, so just a lot of Response.Writes.

For some reason, to me VBScript feels like I can whip up something really quickly, and VB.NET is "all the power of the CLR, with a bit of sugar to help transition to .NET."

VB.NET does feel a bit weird. Maybe some compromises to transition folks to .NET, and from there to C#.

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

#537

Post by [deleted] »

xwowsersx wrote: post #287
052c7028e wrote: post #253

When 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…

Glad you regret it. Not trying to rub it in as I don't think anything productive will come from self-flagellation, but this is truly awful and I think the US should have laws that make it a crime for any US corporation to participate in this sort of thing.

[deleted]

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

#538

Post by roryisok »

gabrielizaias wrote: post #518
roryisok wrote: post #487

I built a distraction free writing app in 2012 to help me write, and it has been the single greatest distraction of all. it was successful, becoming the number one writing app on Windows store for years. I now have thousands of users, and it makes a tiny bit of money each month, and supporting and fixing bugs takes up most of my spare time. I have to date not managed to finish more than a sketchy first draft of a nov…

Do you regret building it because of the effect on your spare time or because you didn't manage to use it for its intended purpose?

Actually, to be honest, I don't know if I regret building it, really. Sometimes I find it comical that it has been such an enormous distraction, but it's also been very educational and rewarding, and probably much more of a success than my writing would ever have been.

I do regret not managing my time more effectively. I wish I had dedicated more of my time to writing. But in truth, I probably used bug-fixing as an "out" when I had writers block, or was unhappy with what I was working on. Because of that I improved my coding skills, but my writing skill stagnated, and even regressed a little.

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

#539

Post by going_ham »

jongjong wrote: post #505
going_ham wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which country are you from? Just curious..

Australia. As a senior software developer, it's possible to earn a salary of up to $110K USD. That may sound OK until you consider that in Australia, an experienced coal miner earns $130K USD (7 days on, 7 days off lifestyle) and a garbage man earns $80K USD... Also, many builders, plumbers and other tradesmen run their own businesses and are earning much more than average. Because everyone else has high salaries, it…

This scares the shit out of me, when my career hasn't even started yet!
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