Ask HN: Is there any software you regret making?

3 points·trevcanhuman··4 comments

After watching the new Oppenheimer movie, it got me thinking how vast science and technology is. A lot of things can be used for evil. Maybe the question is not about complete regret or not developing the software at all but about changing how it was developed or for who.

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Way back in the early 80s, when printed meant line-printed, I was asked to modify a huge list produced by our client. The change was to multiply the total values by a factor they would provide, and then print the original totals on the following page. You may be ahead of me here, but I wasn't! They were tearing off the last page for their own records, and using my modified totals to defraud another company. They ended up in court. Glad to say I didn't.

No.... once upon a time, I was called upon to write a program that zapped the boot sector (and thus partition table) of a hard drive.

I wrote it, and it required a password, which was "how can it miss?", and did it's work in less than a second. Boom, non-bootable disk.

Why don't I regret it? It XORed the boot sector by FFs, so you could just run it again, and be back to normal.

Yes. Every temporary work-around I have ever created, still in use today at companies I no longer work for. My name is still in that hot mess in production.

"No" — Tejay Fletcher

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