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Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#471

Post by yazzku »

bombcar wrote: post #398
psnehanshu wrote: post #95

Worked for a client via freelancing. Built 3 projects, all failed. He likes to follow the trends, first SaaS, then crypto/blockchain, and now AI. He apparently raises money, pays himself and builds bullshit projects. That's it. But while doing so, he does everything to look like a legit startup. Ngl, he was my first major client with whom I gained a lot of experience, but it doesn't change the fact that he is a hype…

He’s selling a product! Investors want bullshit, and he’s providing the bill.

It's a bull market.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#472

Post by Izkata »

ragnese wrote: post #118
windowshopping wrote: post #90

I 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.

Off topic, but I recently looked in to playing MtG again because my son expressed interest. But, I was a bit taken aback by how different the environment is. I last played when they still had numbered "base sets", e.g., "9th Edition", and then rotating "blocks" of three smaller-but-more-advanced sets. I was assuming I would go in and buy a couple of starter decks from the most recent numbered "edition" to start teach…

Fun fact, Commander was a fan-made format that WotC eventually adopted and made official. It existed (even under that name despite what people online say now) in the mid/late 2000s when I learned of it during college.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#473

Post by komali2 »

icedchai wrote: post #226
ryandrake wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right attitude. Unless you own the business, you have no moral responsibility to ensure the projects you work on have a purpose. You can, of course, optionally choose to not work on projects you believe have a bad or evil purpose. I've quit jobs where I though the project was evil. You're writing the code, or producing the documentation, managing the project, performing QA, or whatever else your role is,…

I hate useless, pointless work, even if I'm getting paid for it. Don't you want to build things that actually get used?

For me, yes of course! I do that in my spare time on FOSS projects.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#474

Post by invalidlogin »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #373
LaserDiscMan wrote: post #124

I 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…

Change this from ERP to POS and you've scripted 9/10ths of the pains for many quick service restaurant chains. Story time: people are dense as hell. This one idiot put in his personal SSN to open $XX/m a year POS account. This account currently manages just over a hundred locations, and this fool's TIN has just been raking in millions for a few years all because 'I needed to get us signed up!' And what's better!? The…

Would you mind breaking down the situation in a little more detail? Not my field and I find your story interesting.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#475

Post by rgmerk »

brightball wrote: post #228

I 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.

There may have been very good reasons to sunset the internal tool, and underhanded as this was it may have made a necessary process a lot less painful that it might otherwise have been.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#476

Post by coryrc »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #164
clbrmbr wrote: post #141

After the first lecture of my first programming course in college, I went to the Professor Tewksbury and started to tell him about a simulator I was writing to help other students check their work. He holds up his hand to stop me speaking, says “you have an A. Don’t come to class anymore.” So, I never went to class or did any of the assigned work, instead working on the simulator in my dormroom. At the end of the ter…

It was obviously a joke you didn't get

Not so concise, but I've done this (kinda). I did give a presentation to the class later in the semester about a practical implementation of things they worked on all semester though.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#477

Post by bruce511 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #318
0xBDB wrote: post #73

I was hired to implement and operate a specific product for a specific customer who paid for four years of onsite support. I do other things too, but that's my one contractually obligated responsibility and my primary one. Turns out the customer didn't read the (enormously expensive) SOW. They don't want the product, can't ingest its output, don't want to do the work necessary to implement it, and on a recent roadmap…

I have had this job before. You have two choices. 1. Start a side gig. Be busy at work make extra money. 2. Work on open source. Find a project you like or want to work on and do that. PS: set up a home lab and learn to love SSH tunnels.

Another alternative is to become actually useful in that spare time.

Doing what depends on the business - it can take some detective work to figure it out.

Then again, the detective work could quickly show this is someplace you don't want to be long-term.

In which case yeah, find something productive to do, or treat this as that paid learning time to build some new skills.

Best part of learning is test it's defensible ... "oh, I'm busy doing an assessment on the pros and cons of rewriting the system using node.js. "

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#478

Post by A1kmm »

kej wrote: post #150
windowshopping wrote: post #90

I 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.

Just brainstorming, but would it be possible to pull out the MTG-specific portions and make it just an online card game framework where people can make their own cards and rules? If people choose to use it to copy MTG that's on them (see Tabletop Simulator, for example) but they might also use it to create their own new games.

Obviously not legal advice for anyone, but the general consensus seems to be that in many countries (including the United States where WotC are based) game mechanics are not copyrightable. This interpretation has been stated publicly by the US Copyright Office: https://web.archive.org/web/20161122174519/http://www.copyri...

Obviously the name can be trademarked, and text (e.g. the names / descriptions of things, the specific expression of the rules) and images (e.g. card art) can be copyrighted.

There is a long history of clones of games with the exact same mechanics, but with everything renamed and the artwork changed.

Occasionally, there are attempts to patent mechanics.

So it wouldn't necessarily be a problem if GP was to rename the game, change all the card artwork, make sure no instructions from the original game are used in the new game, and rename all the cards and concepts in an isomorphic way (i.e. a 1:1 mapping between MtG and whatever the new game is called). That way, it could be a completely new game which happens to have the same mechanics as MtG, but isn't a derivative of it legally.

It would be possible to speculate what WoTC would do in that case, but hard to know for sure. Most likely, they'd probably just ignore it if it isn't using their trademark, artwork, descriptions and so on. They could send a blusterous C&D letter to try their luck if they were particularly worried. If the GP got such a letter and ignored it, or replied explaining that their game does not reuse any copyrightable elements, they'd probably just back down. If they really decided to take it to court, they could try to hope it goes more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spry_Fox%2C_LLC_v._Lolapps%2C_.... than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_East_USA,_Inc._v._Epyx,_I.... (although they'd probably have a harder road given Spry Fox was largely based on the visual look-and-feel, which would be a longer bow to draw when saying a computer game infringes on a card game).

Obviously, none of this is legal advice, and the circumstances could differ depending on facts like where it is hosted / where GP lives, and the exact details of the game engine or how similar artwork was.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#480

Post by jiggawatts »

rossant wrote: post #224

Well, this has nothing to do with programming and goes way beyond being merely "useless"; yet it might offer some perspective on your question and perhaps help you relativise things. There's a global industry involving thousands of healthcare professionals, lawyers, judges, police officers, and child protection workers who have spent 50 years prosecuting tens of thousands of parents and caregivers for allegedly shaki…

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