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Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
431–440 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#432I once worked for a VP who needed to sunset an old internal tool that people were unwilling to part with, so he asked me to make it suck intentionally. Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird. EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.
I don’t mean to be the morality police, but that seems illegal.
but you can't seem to name which crime.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#433Pinterest
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#434This is old, but my most pointless project: The CEO wanted a screen in every hall that showed the company "EnGUAGEment meter". Users would have to go to the app, choose from 10 or so canned messages like "Feeling productive", "Ready to conquer the day", and other such HR speak the CEO (or rather the HR committee he put on the important business of picking the list) felt was motivational. This would update a page that…
Oh my god, it isn't the same product but I was the user of a similar thing at an old job I had for 2 years only it was a slider from 1-10. I always chose 1 no matter how productive, happy or driven I felt. I remember that HR called me in because of this and in a round-about way said I can't just keep doing that as it was bringing the whole purpose of the system down. If I didn't want to interact with the system then…
Probably unpopular opinion: Silly excercises like this are a good way to see who bends the knee and who is a maverick, and projects only work when most people are docile enough to go with the flow and follow orders. Identifying people that make waves and evaluating if they're worth the hassle is an important part of running a successful business.
This is often sad and depressing, but sometimes it's just about doing your job, and getting some good food after work to counterbalance the bullshit.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may indeed do this. There is an outstanding issue I have to address that I've never quite worked up the motivation to deal with: Heroku restarts their servers once every 24 hours with only thirty seconds' warning. Since the games are in-memory, this of course kicks everyone out of whatever games they may be in the middle of. I guess the solution is to have the games be on Redis instead of in-memory? I'm a bit more…
The quickest win would to move off of Heroku. Either rent your own server that you can control (to a reasonable degree), or find an alternative that doesn't suffer that issue. Redis would work but I'd be afraid of race conditions. There probably wouldn't be any, but it's something to be aware of. If you wanted to test the waters with at least the relative public, I'd consider doing step 1 of renting a server, but the…
Linode is super cheap. I pay 6 or 7 bucks a month for a bottom tier VM.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they don't try to "buck the system" just for the sake of it. Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole division or organization inevitavly costs some multiple of that budget…
I'm in small and medium business. A lot of homegrown and unique processes that are just dandy. I mean it they're fine. But when faced by things like standard GAAP accounting processes, or even EDI. You can't argue with it. You can't tell walmart oh no well actually I didn't mean to send that 850. It costs you money. You can't willy nilly charge credit cards anymore. Its just life. It makes it hard for them not just i…
I work specifically with small and medium businesses too, and can echo that sentiment! I'd love to know more about what you do. Love working with SMBs but don't know a lot of other people in that space.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#437I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option. I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
OK listen up dude. > I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. No you didn't! You built the best site out there for playing trading card games . It just so happens that it's very easy to point to your own local card/rule sets, share them with peers, and play together online. And if the cards/rules being used by the clients happen to be MTG cards/rules, oh well! That's out of your hands.…
If it doesn't handle the card rules automatically for you, then it's way worse than MTG Arena or MTGO. I've played with free MTG software (cockatrice) and it's not close to the same thing, even though it has all the art and buttons for doing all the effects manually (I use this shortcut to draw 3 cards, this shortcut to put 2 back, this shortcut to exile someone's graveyard, etc).
If they really built the best site for playing MTG, even over paid versions, then there's no real way to hide the fact that it's magic-specific.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#438I once made a microwave purely in software. It works and yet it doesn’t.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#439I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. It was the engine of the entire company, everything passed through it. The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat. When new management took charge, an initiative was started to replace the system with an industry standard solution. Both myself and the…
Damned. I'd be tempted to write down in my resume "Company would've saved N million dollars and 5 years of their time had they listened to me" were it not such a double edged sword.
No one gets credit for "I told you so" - look at it this way, you didn't have the skill at the time to make the company listen to you.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#440Woof AlertTM converts dog barks to email. https://github.com/FoxDotBuild/woof-alert
Nice. How does it send the mail? Do you need a local mailserver running?
I wrote this like five years ago so memory is fuzzy, but if I remember correctly I was using PHP send mail and every time Barry would bark it would do an HTTP post to a PHP endpoint.