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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?

#441

Post by mkl »

valicord wrote: post #413
shireboy wrote: post #250

This 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…

Is "guage" some sort of joke that I don't get or just a misspelling?

It's a misspelling of "gauge", judging by "on a car dashboard style guage". Was pretty confused up to that point.

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

#442

Post by pryelluw »

shireboy wrote: post #317
AlexDragusin wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Lumbergh approves of this!

Very much so. Also Michael Scott. This was a period of my life when I wanted to like The Office, but it was just too realistic for me.

Why watch office when life same.

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

#443

Post by Jeremy1026 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #45
999900000999 wrote: post #43

I developed a small bankroll/gambling simulator in Golang. Ended up thinking I "figured out" roulette and I'm down about 2k. This isn't a lot of money for me, but I think I'm done with gambling for a while. Ultimately just take whatever you feel like gambling, bet it on black and leave regardless of the outcome. That'll yield you better results than any system. I'm not open sourcing the code since I don't want someon…

Unless you're calculating your actuals vs expected variance you don't know if you're right or just unlucky. I've known pro poker players who were down $80k and new from their hands they were just unlucky and to keep going. Eventually made more as a player than many FAANG SWEs do.

Roulette is a losing game no matter how you play it. There was a time when you could increase your odds by the last few percent to take an advantage by playing old and unbalanced wheels. As you could bet based on the state of the wheel and there were greater odds of a section of the wheel hitting. Casinos are aware of this now though and have upgraded to self-leveling wheels and replace them sooner before they have a chance to wear down.

Here is an interesting read about it: https://thehustle.co/professor-who-beat-roulette

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

#445

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

zilti wrote: post #341
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…

And you really leave us hanging here with so little information

Sadly, I really can’t be more specific than that. Much as I disagreed with their decision, it was theirs to make, and I respected it.

It probably would not have been a money-maker (which was a big reason for the cancellation), and it cost a lot to make. Those top people don’t come cheap.

I am not doing the same kind of thing, these days, but I have yet to see any software, from anyone, to this day, that can do what it did. I know that the interaction people requested a final copy of it, for themselves, as they had done so much work on it, and loved the result so much. It was basically at beta quality, when the project was killed.

It’s not a total loss, though. That project was probably the best learning experience of my career.

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

#446

Post by callwhendone »

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…

>I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers.

I read this and immediately became sick to my stomach. I despise working in corporate america.

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

#447

Post by xoxxala »

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…

Magic has changed drastically the last few years. I tried to get back into it and the best set I found was Jump Start 2022.

Alternatively, Star Wars Unlimited just released their first set. The starter set has two balanced decks (Vader vs Luke) with some staple cards that can be used in a bunch of different decks with boosters. Gameplay is Magic-esque, but smoothed out (no land issues since any card can be turned into a resource, no instants/stack shenanigans, and actions pass back and forth so constant engagement).

There's a free to play version at https://www.forcetable.net/swu using the starter decks.

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

#448

Post by exikyut »

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…

I would second the recommendation to move off Heroku. They're essentially the smallest scale version of vendor lock-in out there nowadays, especially considering they're no longer free.

An open-sourced codedump will survive best if people (which effectively means "average technically-minded MTG player" in this case) can run it wherever they're most comfortable - which will almost certainly be something that smells like a VPS. Mayyybe a container.

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

#449

Post by smcameron »

20 something years ago I spent the better part of a year writing a 3rd party RAID controller driver for Project Monterey (IBM and SCO's ill-fated unix collab) only for the entire project to get canceled literally the day after I finally got the machine to successfully boot up off the storage controlled by my driver. I like to think I got to do all the fun parts of driver development unbothered by any of the boring, troublesome maintenance.

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

#450

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

hathawsh wrote: post #258
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?

Not really. It wasn’t the kind of software that could make money. Probably a big reason that this kind of software never improved, over all these years.

It might have been the best of the stuff no one wants to pay for.

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