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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?

#251

Post by HoppyHaus »

windowshopping wrote: post #167
sph wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 then hiding it behind a Tor hidden service. Inconvenient to connect to? Yeah. (Probably) safe from the Hasbro demons? Also yeah.

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

#252

Post by williamcotton »

vharuck wrote: post #156
ragnese wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They still do core sets (every Summer, IIRC) that fulfill those basic edition sets. Lately, they've been set in external intellectual properties. Last year's was Lord of the Rings. Might sound bad, but the D&D set rekindled magic in my game group. They had a Jumpstart product, where you could buy two half-decks and mix them together. But it looks like the last printing of that was 2022. If you don't mind spending the…

They don't do core sets any more.

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

#254

Post by internet101010 »

shaftway wrote: post #117

Any time you feel useless, remember that it's someone's job to install turn signals into BMWs.

BMW turn signals used to work differently until I think the mid-2010s. You would press down to turn on the left signal, it would revert back to the middle, then you would press down again to turn it off.

People would turn on the signal and then accidentally turn on the opposite signal when trying to turn it off. So a lot of people stopped using them.

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

#255

Post by calvinmorrison »

rm445 wrote: post #225
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…

That is surprising, the industry of implementing industry-standard ERP systems is pretty established. I'd have expected it to go way over time and budget (they always do) but eventually succeed. Usually success is in proportion to the company's willingness to admit they're not special and can do the same things as other companies instead of having everything bespoke.

I manage a team of Consultants at a small ERP firm focused on mostly manufacturing and distribution

the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out of Shopify (or x system) daily, and you are not that special. You will spend 10x as much trying to NOT use the system rather than trying to use it".

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

#256

Post by notatoad »

ZiiS wrote: post #243
notatoad wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat the key thing to understand about ERP systems is that this is their primary purpose. anything else they claim to do is secondary.

Which is why they are vastly better whilst in the middle of a tricky migration, especially if it is going badly, and especially especially if it is being done by the most expensive contractors.

yes, the key is to always have some sort of migration happening so every problem can be addressed by saying "this will be resolved after the new ERP is rolled out"

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

#258

Post by hathawsh »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #233

Define "Useless." My team worked on a project for about 18 months. I won't go into detail about what it was, but it was (and still is) badly-needed. We worked with the top interaction and graphic design folks in the world for the aesthetics and interaction. We had many meetings, flying the whole team to San Francisco, several times a year. When the project was in its final testing, the company got cold feet, and canc…

That sounds fascinating. Have you considered starting your own company around re-creating it?

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

#259

Post by snoopsnopp »

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.

I don’t mean to be the morality police, but that seems illegal.

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

#260

Post by exccenture »

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"

I used to work at Accenture back when they paid workers overtime. As engagement managers got into overage (underestimated projects, often fixed fee), they would put pressure on their workers to work overtime but not log the hours. Two law firms were already reaching out to workers ~2002 trying to form a class for a class action lawsuit.

My boss came by one Friday morning and informed me i'd be onsite working all weekend and told me to "ensure not work over 40hrs" this week. This is an impossibility, I had been working late all week and was already at 45 or 50hrs for the week, and I still had Friday/Saturday/Sunday to go.

So after the discussion, I sent him an email, casual, saying I've cancelled my flight back home for the weekend, confirming i'll be onsite all weekend and that I'd ensure to "only log 40hrs this week".

He came by my desk furious and said if I "ever pulled a stunt like that again there would be consequences"

So I re-plied to the original email, took him off, put on my personal gmail and just recounted the entire episode and sent the email again.

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