Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you ever make that typed lisp compiler? Asking for a friend.
What are you saying? Making another lisp is useless?!
No I'm looking for a small lisp to embed in a useless project of my own
Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
571–580 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#572I was a new hire at a game development company. My first task was to optimize a function that was consuming more cycles than all the other ones. The function was responsible for dispatching Objective-C++ method calls. After a quick debug session, the problem was clear: the methods to call was being searched using a linear search. I changed the search to use a hashtable and the function disappeared from the list of mo…
Objective-C++ already is a system for dispatching calls with a hashtable. Did they need another one?
Objective C is a system for that; Objective C++ is at least three systems for dispatching calls in ways that don't involve linear search. Not sure why they'd try to make another one.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#573Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#574Well, 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…
I’m one of these people who, until reading your comment, thought shaken baby syndrome really was a thing… Thanks for spreading the info!
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#575Earlier 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,…
Morality wise isn’t it the opposite? If you own the business, it’s your money to waste If you work for the business you are wasting others money.
If you work for someone else and carry out your tasks as instructed, and have tried to bring up the absurdity of it all as specced but they insist you do it anyway then I don’t see what would be unethical about it? Only talking about brain dead/useless endeavors, not bad/evil projects.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#576In the late 90s I had a short stint doing freelance work for a "stupid money" investor who funded the work of this weirdo post-modernist programmer/philosopher claiming to be developing something akin, I guess, to what we would now call a deep learning system.
The claim was that the system this person was developing, when introduced to a lot of information, would emerge with "interesting" behaviour and insight. The problem was that nobody except for the author knew how to interface with that system, which was just a dense and highly idiosyncratic codebase in C manipulating data structures. And so my role was to learn about that system and build a UI that will allow mere mortals to use it.
After a few frustrating and very confusing weeks not really managing to understand what that system actually does (and therefore what an appropriate user interface would be) I finally got to read through the code (taking advantage of the main author, who normally guarded his creation and didn't allow anyone to look at it too closely, being absent for a few days). It quickly became clear to me that this system doesn't really do anything useful at all. It was more post-modern poetry than code.
When I tried to talk to the investor about the situation I was made to understand that this is not something we're going to be discussing openly. I guess he sort of knew but for whatever reasons liked keeping things ambiguous. In order to be able to deliver _something_ for my fees, I prepared a cute little Windows UI that technically connected to that system but really only used it as a random number generator, had some buttons and sliders, and presented all kinds of cool graphics. They were very happy with the result and I soon moved on to other works.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#577Not for work but for fun. I made a notebook that could be saved as a bookmark. So when you run the bookmark it would reopen the notebook where you left off. The bookmark was basically a JavaScript executable that saved data to itself and printed its own contents to the screen. A cross device Quine without a server
Browsers don't have a bookmark API that lets you rewrite the contents of bookmarklets et al. How did it rewrite itself? Also, are you referring to something like a Jupyter notebook?
Here’s a link to it to try yourself :) https://github.com/con-dog/serverless-architecture
I should Have added more context. As you write in the notebook/notepad, it updates a visual link at the bottom of the note. The link says “Drag me to the bookmarks bar”. You can drag it and it re-saves the executable including its data and timestamps the bookmark.
From memory it rewrites itself because the link itself is self-hosting state and executable of the page itself. That’s the Quine part, so when you save that link you’re saving the entire notebook “engine” + the state. Was really fun to make in an evening
Nah it’s just a plain notebook/notepad, but I was also thinking of making something similar as a JavaScript scratch pad too that works in the same way, but would be an IDE + runnable snippets. Same concept, a Quine + bookmarklet that can sync between devices without a server
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's inevitable that Sales will put Product in a bad spot because they're too good at selling their own innocence.
I was a top 0.1% salesperson nationwide in car sales. I read a bunch of lean startup stuff, learned to make a minimum viable product, and then started selling to companies with 20-80 employees. I'm likable and good at selling, so I got 34 companies using this garbage I made. It's the worst nightmare ever to keep people motivated to use it, keep fixing things I made as a rookie developer, keep adding or saying no to f…
Amazing story. Love your honesty.
Is there a world where you hire someone to build a more maintainable replacement?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You cannot legally do 1 or 2. They'd both belong to the company because ip work laws
That purely depends on jurisdiction (country, there is no world universal law) and your contract. A lot of companies smuggle that in a contract, often they’re happy to drop these kind of clauses.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#580I had a boss at one of my last gigs who would cook up the most impossibly over-engineered (and badly designed and rarely worked) projects ever. The worst one ever was he wanted to build a kubernetes observability platform from scratch. Specifically, we wanted to filter our application logs for errors and be able to find them. There's a million out of the box ways to do this with free and enterprise tooling, like EFK/…
Well, this sounds like the opposite of overengineered, but definitely terrible