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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?

#181

Post by 7thaccount »

angarg12 wrote: post #111

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 wa…

Almost assuredly he knew it was a bad idea, but had a goal of "implement machine learning" from his VP or just wanted it in his resume.

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

#182

Post by jokethrowaway »

delecti wrote: post #155

It was at Amazon and I don't remember exactly what the service was called, I think it was AdSomething. It was while I worked on the Kindle Special Offers (taking advantage of the "off" screen of an e-ink Kindle to show ads) project. I find that to be one of the less offensive forms of advertising, so I was generally pretty happy on that team for a time. But there was a service, AdWhatever, which let users go onto a s…

Slightly off topic but I never logged in on my kindle so I don't get ads. I just load ebooks on it with my computer.

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

#183

Post by LouisSayers »

I joined a startup once where everybody seemed to be working on something completely different.

One project was an eBay tool, another was a chat assistant, another was an energy comparison tool...

The CEO was never in the office, she was always flying around the world with her daughter (given a made-up C title) visiting CEOs of large companies and throwing out numerous hooks to see who would bite.

I very quickly saw through this whole charade and quit a month after joining.

Some years later she managed to wangle a sale via a well known tech company she was previously a C level for. Who knows what it was that she ended up selling ...

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

#184

Post by 2600guy »

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…

During my tenure in college, had a professor that would write 10s or 100s of line of code to do things that could literally be done in one or two. Pointed this out to him a couple of times, not that I had been a dev for 15 years at this point. Everytime he squashed anything I said. Comes to end of semester project. Within 24 hours of him handing it out, myself and team handed in final solution, which absolutely worked and fulfilled all requirements. We all got a not completed at final grade. Found out later that only 3 people in the class got an A, and they were the only females in the class, everyone else got a not completed. Immediately after having a convo with the "professor" and the threat of convo with dean of students, suddenly everyone got a passing grade. What a piece of human garbage.

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

#185

Post by fsniper »

FartinMowler wrote: post #159

Kiosk Banking. Back in the 1990's, just before the web became a thing, it was an idea to bring banking to consumers without the bank buildking, which they called "brickless banking". Kiosks would be placed in public locations like malls. Customers would enter the kiosk, close the curtain or door, then connect via video-call with one of the agent in the call centres. Depending what product the customer wanted (mortgag…

This kiosk thing, exactly as you describe was built by A Turkish bank, way after mobile banking was in everyone's pocket.

The bank's customers are mostly aging so they thought this would be great help to them.

I recall the kiosk got into a few locations, worked for brief period of time and then got deprecated all together.

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

#186

Post by jdswain »

sage76 wrote: post #162

I am writing a solution manual to this textbook, by solving EVERY DAMN exercise and writing it up in latex. It is EXTREMELY time consuming. The actual solution manual is already available online. I might gain an understanding of this field, but I doubt I will ever get an interesting job because of this effort. Unless I revise this stuff, I will forget most of it in a few years. Why am I doing this? Idk. Vanity perhap…

That reminds me of a story about a friend of mine from high school. In fourth form (age 14) he did every exercise in our maths textbook and sent the author a list of corrections to the printed answers. I don't think this was very well received by the author. That friend went on to miss 7th form year, got preferential entry into a maths degree, and had his degree by the time I finished year 1.

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

ttymck wrote: post #151
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…

Awesome story, and a good lesson in "always get it in writing"

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by alibarber »

whstl wrote: post #176
alibarber wrote: post #158

Some years ago, a colleague literally spent all night in the office, on the 31st of March, implementing clippy for another third party commercial application (not MS Office) that was heavily used by the company and across that industry. He inspired me to take April Fool's seriously. I've since changed industries but last year I jumped on the AI bandwagon with https://chatellite.space and this year a nod to a popular…

Wow, I once added clippy to a website I worked on too :) It wasn't an all-nighter, though! I used clippy.js, so it was just a few lines!

Ahh that was it, yes it was clippy.js!

It was a desktop app though (with a C++ & Python API) that we had built a lot of integrations around, so there were a lot of Qt schenanigans going on, and I think he had attempted to get it to actually try and search some internal DB too for witty remarks.

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

#189

Post by karaterobot »

I've worked on two different startups that built products until our runway ended—over a year of work in both cases—and then pulled the plug before getting our first customer.

Maybe that doesn't count?

I've also worked on a multi-year product for a large company in Redmond that I was really proud of when building it. It doesn't matter what the product was supposed to do, just imagine it sounding kind of sexy and being very complex and brainy. It was for scientists. When I told someone who wasn't dumb but was outside the software industry about what I'd built, he looked confused and said "well, why wouldn't you just use [a free piece of software that is well understood and runs on every device] instead?" and I had no good answer, because he was right.

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

#190

Post by datascienced »

INTPenis wrote: post #125

Not a project, and a second hand story that I'm sure a lot of people can recognize. But I knew a sysadmin at a large european educational institution whose only job it was to hit up-arrow and enter a few times a day when a server crashed. They knew how to fix this too, they just didn't care. And nobody else had enough experience to understand.

A bit like Lost (TV Series)
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