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

[castalian]

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!

[thrwycbr27284]

I worked for a startup in the beginning, and we as a team were developing lots of adapters for large scale databases that needed lots of foundational work to be able to correlate those datasets into a graph database. We also developed lots of web scrapers for weird seemingly internal websites of companies that looked like they were not really public.

Think of it as database dump pages similar to how sqlmap works when it pipes/passes through the data with dozens of SQL injection requests on an input field.

Took us a while to realize our tech stack was being used by Palantir Gotham and other high level projects in the end.

Quit my job right after realizing I was working for the personification of the devil by any meaning of implication of the word.

Lavender, the codename of the IDF "AI" that is being used to mass target rocket strikes on guilty-until-proven-otherwise-by-association-only civilians in gaza is literally the system I worked on, and I desperately regret ever working for them through a defense contractor.

If anybody from Palantir reads this: It's possible to get out, if you need help, shelter, migration, or anything, contact me.

[CM30]

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.

[runjake]

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

[eimrine]

Are your programs fighting for Russian or Ukrainian needs?

[LUmBULtERA]

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.

[toast0]

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.

[joshxyz]

MLM web app. I created a membership referral system that works so well it led to hundreds of new members. I was getting paid peanuts, I stopped providing support. Threw a wrench to their biz model. Costed me money but I have better peace of mind now.

[codingdave]

> Throwaways, welcome!

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

[jamil7]

> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information