The Juicero juice machine. Check out a tear down that AvE did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
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Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?
#12Australia's NBN; taxpayer funded Gigabit capable fibre optic to 90% of homes that only need 50MB/s.
Last time we had a big rain it didn't work at all for a few days (Sydney here), apparently a lot of people had that problem.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?
#13Kubernetes obviously.
The whole industry is feeding solely on attempts to make its original overengineered complexity managable.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?
#14An IT ticketing system that had a disaster recovery solution inclusive of DB failover, load-balancing, etc. all to another data center in another time zone.
Some medium critical business systems didn't have that so if a disaster struck, that stupid ticketing system would fail over and be up. I guess so they could put tickets in for all the other systems that didn't make it?
I think this was borne out of one of those "use it or lose it" budget scenarios that happens in big companies at the end of a fiscal year.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?
#15Kubernetes obviously. The whole industry is feeding solely on attempts to make its original overengineered complexity managable.
Do you think k8s is over engineered or it's suited for complex use cases and people misusing it?
Re: Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?
#16Nuxt.js: it's a frontend framework that let's you do server-side rendering using a framework (Vue.js) designed to do client-side rendering.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?
#17HP calculators, back in the day. I've heard stories (perhaps apocryphal) of one that was run over by a car and still worked. Even if that one story isn't true, they were solid.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?
#18All traffic lights but especially the ones set to do rolling green lights. The rolling green lights assume someone’s going the speed limit (which no one does) so it introduces more stop-and-go than if they all switched at the same time! But traffic lights on their own are all optimized for the peak 20 min of traffic instead of the other 24 hours. They really don’t make sense outside of peak.
We visited some small town when I was a kid. They had rolling green lights. Their signs didn't say "speed limit 25". Instead they said "lights are synchronized for 25". Once you figured out that they were telling the truth, you drove 25.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?
#19All traffic lights but especially the ones set to do rolling green lights. The rolling green lights assume someone’s going the speed limit (which no one does) so it introduces more stop-and-go than if they all switched at the same time! But traffic lights on their own are all optimized for the peak 20 min of traffic instead of the other 24 hours. They really don’t make sense outside of peak.
I'd be highly surprised if rolling green lights are implemented the exact same way across geographies. Does anyone have more details on how this works ? It has been an area of curiosity for me for quite a long time.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?
#20US government, (might apply to others). They do so much paperwork and analysis to ensure no nickel is misspent. The cost to protect a nickel seems to be about a dollar.