Ask HN: What is the most harmful project you've worked on?

#1

Post by castalian » Thu, Apr 11, 2024, 2:29 PM UTC

Following the recent "What is the most useless project you have worked on?" thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942397 - let's talk about projects that actually caused real damage, either accidentally or on purpose, that you've been a part of.

Throwaways, welcome!

Re: Ask HN: What is the most harmful project you've worked on?

#2

Post by codingdave » Thu, Apr 11, 2024, 2:34 PM UTC

> Throwaways, welcome!

Maybe not: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ask HN: What is the most harmful project you've worked on?

#3

Post by jamil7 » Thu, Apr 11, 2024, 3:16 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #2

> Throwaways, welcome! Maybe not: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information

Re: Ask HN: What is the most harmful project you've worked on?

#4

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 11, 2024, 3:21 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is the most harmful project you've worked on?

#5

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 11, 2024, 5:42 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is the most harmful project you've worked on?

#6

Post by runjake » Thu, Apr 11, 2024, 8:31 PM UTC

Weapons programs involving aerial delivery. Nothing more needs to be said, I presume.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most harmful project you've worked on?

#7

Post by LUmBULtERA » Thu, Apr 11, 2024, 8:52 PM UTC

I work for fossil fuel energy companies. We as a civilization can and must do better to get ourselves off of these fuels and it frustrates me to no end the resistance this faces both in and out of the industry.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most harmful project you've worked on?

#8

Post by CM30 » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 12:41 AM UTC

Hmm, I guess working on the website for a company that turned out to be a boiler room scam. They were a client of the agency I worked for, and sadly it seems like no one at said agency had really vetted them too well before accepting them as a client, since they got dropped pretty quickly once the legal issues started.

Second worst would probably be one of the clients that was in the medical industry. Not because they were a scam or sold bad products or anything like that. More because the company itself was apparently toxic to work for, our contact ended up getting royally screwed over by them, and customer reviews were often not particularly positive.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most harmful project you've worked on?

#9

Post by toast0 » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 3:30 AM UTC

I wrote a script to scrape whois, and then send mail to hostmaster@internic spoofing the admin address to change nameserver addresses.

I only used it for legitimate customers due to a hostname rename (in retrospect, we should have just kept the old hostname...), but it worked on like 95% of our customer domains and probably would have worked for lots more. You could setup authentication for internic, but it was optional, and clumsy, so most people didn't.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most harmful project you've worked on?

#10

Post by eimrine » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 10:56 AM UTC

runjake wrote: post #6

Weapons programs involving aerial delivery. Nothing more needs to be said, I presume.

Are your programs fighting for Russian or Ukrainian needs?