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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I've been in that position, which is one of the reasons why I'm asking. When I came up with 'live streaming video on the www' I never for one second sat down to think about the abuse potential. Color me hopelessly naive. And when confronted with the various abuses over the years I've always had a problem with that, this was the direct consequence of me just 'scratching my itch' and it caused a huge amount of misery. Oh, say the defenders, but if you had not done it then somebody else would have. This is true, but then that moral weight would be on their shoulders and not on mine.

Hence my question. Because I do feel that weight and it has caused me to carefully consider the abuse potential of the stuff that I've released since then and I've only released those things that I feel have none that I can (easily) discern.

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One thing I learned early in my career, and numerous times during it: For every ethical stand you take against writing a bit of software you consider questionable, there's a line of other software engineers out the door willing to do it. I remember when as a junior engineer, I worked up the courage to tell my boss I had a moral problem with writing some code that would help the product cheat at a benchmark. He totally understood, and I didn't get fired or anything--just moved on to a different project. Bob, two cubicles down, was more than happy to write the benchmark-cheating code.

Software engineers and other technology creators don't take a "Do No Harm" oath like doctors. Many of them have never even taken a single Ethics In Technology course at university (it was an optional class when I was in undergrad decades ago). And, even in the alternate universe where ethics was baked into engineering training, all it takes is a single rogue willing to ignore them, and now the world has to deal with it.

May I ask, what proportion of the stuff you did not release on moral grounds were subsequently re-invented in short order?

everything!

Which is one of the reasons I'm so completely against software patents and a large number of patents in general. Quite a few of them are simply things that the time is right for.

Here is one of my idea dump lists, you can check for yourself which ones are not yet done (which is probably a really small number by now) and which ones have turned out to be homeruns (and in some cases billion dollar+ companies).

https://jacquesmattheij.com/my-list-of-ideas-for-when-you-ar...

One that wasn't on there eventually led to https://pianojacq.com/, which I'm happy to report to date has not led to any kind of abuse. And no, it did not put any piano teachers out of business either.

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