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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?

#761

Post by fennecfoxy »

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…

On restart warning, take server state (sign/encrypt if you want to) and dump it to each players' clients.

If both players are still connected once the server comes up and client reconnects, both players can send state to server and if both players' global states match then the game resumes, if not then error out. If only one player reconnects cause the other couldn't wait & closed tab, then you gotta error out anyways.

Then you don't need Redis or any other additional dep at least.

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

#762

Post by wedernoch »

siikanen wrote: post #716
bombcar wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of all the rules you have to apply to a random music player to make it feel random.

What rules you have to add?

https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...

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

#764

Post by rcxdude »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #708
rossant wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are lawyers who have become experts on these cases and whose tireless work have helped hundreds of people. But that doesn't scale, there are tens of thousands of cases. The real solution will come when doctors fully update their knowledge, which may still take a decade or two.

Is is possible they don't want to update on that? It seems this is all some sadistic plot to make people guilty of invented crimes, I can't see what else it could be at this scale.

Nah, it's just the inertia of a bad idea: and a bad idea with big consequences is one of those things which is really hard for people to change their minds on. Just think, if a doctor who has testified in many of these cases were to understand that they were wrong, it would mean they would know they had contributed to the imprisoning of many innocents. It's not at all an easy task emotionally to come to terms with that, so denial is a very common outcome.

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

#766

Post by inkcapmushroom »

ornornor wrote: post #574
rossant wrote: post #224

Well, 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!

To be clear, it is really a thing. The blood in the brain and behind the eyes can be explained with violent shaking. It's just not the only explanation for those symptoms, and some innocent parents/caregivers have had to suffer due to the system regarding violent shaking as the only cause.

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

#767

Post by theragra »

wging wrote: post #467
theragra wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so painful. Kindle still after all these years cannot select a single word without a comma. So, dictionary does not work. Such simple thing could be fixed, but you did all this bullshit work instead.

I’ve used a Kindle since 2012 and I don’t think I have ever seen that kind of dictionary issue. On my Kindle, even though text highlighting behaves as you describe, dictionary lookups still work because punctuation is stripped before searching. For example I just highlighted “doing,” (including the comma) and the dictionary shows the definition of the word “doing”. I wonder if it works differently for languages other…

You are right. This does not happen always, but sometimes. Maybe with Wikipedia, not dictionary? Maybe with my english-russian dictionary.

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

#768

Post by stavros »

siikanen wrote: post #716
bombcar wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of all the rules you have to apply to a random music player to make it feel random.

What rules you have to add?

https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...

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

#769

Post by stavros »

bo1024 wrote: post #554
bombcar wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I came to peace with realizing my job is to enable higher ups to do their job a lot of this came into perspective. Still a complete waste, but something somewhere was enabled.

> my job is to enable higher ups to do their job Ouch, I like to think it's the other way around.

It's definitely the other way around where I work. I regularly ask the CTO (my superior) to do things I need to get work done better, and he does. The reverse is much more rare.

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

#770

Post by 89vision »

talldatethrow wrote: post #709
codingdave wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are underestimating pretty much this entire industry. Picking up codebases that are sketchy and new to us is just part of the job. Finding and fixing bugs is an exercise to get rolling, not an insurmountable challenge. When people keep using software, it is because it solves a problem. They might not like the software but begrudgingly use it anyway because it solves that problem. So sure, pat yours…

While I agree professionals pick up codebases left behind by several iterations of developers, I think picking up a large PHP/Jquery PM tool written by a first time self taught via YouTube and stack overflow developer might be many peoples idea of a bad time. It doesn't really solve a problem. Not really atleast. It's a little better than using 6 Excel sheets via a google drive honestly. The reason it got sold is bec…

are you still selling this?
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