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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?

#111

Post by angarg12 »

Working for big tech, our Director wanted to add "ML" to one of our workflows no matter what. He identified a "problematic step" and a team of scientist spent 1 year coming up with a ML model to replace this step. I was asked to deploy this solution in production.

When we tested the model (which somehow hadn't happened before) we found that the workflow was 5% quicker, but the results were more than 10% worse, and was more expensive to run. Everyone hated the idea, but the director kept pushing to do it, "or I'll find someone else to do it". I ran away and never looked back.

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

#113

Post by sph »

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.

Go out with a bang. Release it, enjoy your 15 minutes in the spotlight, and when the lawyers come a-knocking, shut it down. Or make it open source and let the community take the wheel and the responsibility.

You never know what opportunities this adventure might bring, but certainly more than just keeping it on your hard drive. Go for it mate.

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

#115

Post by bornfreddy »

mvdtnz wrote: post #75

Every time I'm asked to do "sales engineering" (a term I hate). What I mean is the sales people are going to demo the product to a prospect and they know there is a feature gap that this particular prospect will depend on. So exec asks us to design a build a bullshit feature that will never actually be launched, as quickly as possible. Nine times out of ten the prospect never eventuates and the effort is wasted. I un…

It could have been worse. You could have been told to then merge it and support it. "It already works, almost, so why do you need extra time on it? Now for the next feature,..."

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

#116

Post by robofanatic »

> The thing is, after I finished the adjustments, my pull requests are not getting approved due to adjustments meticulously requested by this guy in my team. Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even more resilient in complete unlikely scenarios.

IMO only this part is useless. I have been through this and it feels horrible. sometimes its waste of time arguing with people so I just do what the reviewer says even though it doesn't make any sense.

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

#118

Post by ragnese »

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 teaching him, but it appears that they don't do this anymore, and everything I saw was focused around the "Commander" format, which has even more mechanics and rules. The game was already complex enough that I was worried about teaching it to someone new (Plus, the commander mechanic didn't appeal to me, personally, anyway).

Is there no longer the concept of a "simple base set" with just the basic mechanics? Or is everything just theme-heavy sets now?

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

#119

Post by darepublic »

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.

Better to go for it then completely shelve it would think. You could also r skin it in some fashion, like make it more generic and have users provide their own decks (which happen to be MTG) etc

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

#120

Post by dns_snek »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #61

I’m a programmer. All my work is ultimately, at best, useless. That’s one of the most important lessons any good programmer learns at some point. We aren’t building monuments in software, everything we do is disposable and will eventually be someone else’s curse in the future.

Our work products are disposable, but there's still a difference in what our projects do over the course of their life. They could be a net positive, neutral, or harmful to society, or they might just be dead on arrival and never see the light of day after months of work.
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