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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?

#771

Post by etherealG »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #733
quartesixte wrote: post #488

A few years back, I was assigned to a new team and had to run some analysis on a selection of hardware that kept failing quality checks. Was told this was of the utmost importance to the product and that a future production push hinged on solving this problem. I was given a week. The scope of work would entail at least one really late night into the project. On Day 5 of 7 (sleepless night happened on Day 2 and 3), a…

As useless as it feels, how you handled it, diving in with full focus to the point that you stayed up all night- you're working a muscle many engineers don't and you'll be better for it.

The muscle of doing pointless bullshit without understanding that it’s pointless… are you kidding? This has got to be the most troll comment I ever saw in this website.

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

#772

Post by duderific »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #721
duderific wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just ignore it, I don't know why anyone would pay to turn it off. It goes away as soon as you start reading the book.

It annoyed me enough that I've paid twice. And once on a fire tablet when I found my toddler daughter playing a game on the lock screen.

> toddler daughter playing a game on the lock screen

Oh gosh, I didn't realize that was possible!

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

#773

Post by quartesixte »

etherealG wrote: post #771
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As useless as it feels, how you handled it, diving in with full focus to the point that you stayed up all night- you're working a muscle many engineers don't and you'll be better for it.

The muscle of doing pointless bullshit without understanding that it’s pointless… are you kidding? This has got to be the most troll comment I ever saw in this website.

No I get what the response meant.

It’s the muscle of being able to quickly orient yourself in sudden problems and drive towards useful solutions in a focused manner.

And to be fair, if the product line hadn’t been thrown out before I started, the project would have been useful in either A) fixing the product or B) providing justification to scrap the product line (probably the more likely outcome)

And I developed a nice tool that got used somewhere else later useful.

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

#774

Post by mamoulian »

89vision wrote: post #147
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…

> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.

It infuriates me that all of these aren't met with a 'if it turns out you can't, you need to make it right at your cost' clause.

Estimation is hard but it seems it's far too easy for the vendor to blatantly lie with all the risk on the customer.

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

#775

Post by wasteduniverse »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #723
nython wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reading of what laeri wrote is "you seem to be proud of the work you did on that project so I'm not sure what is hindering you from talking about it". Not "you seem to be proud of not talking about it".

I'll be generous, and assume that. I tend to get a lot of young folks, telling me that I'm an empty boaster (spoiler: I'm not). Some of them actually seem to be obsessed, which is sort of flattering (I guess). If that's the case, then I'll certainly apologize. Maybe I'm a cynic. I don't really have a desire to be BMOC. It's just that this is the only place I engage in any kind of social media, and most folks seem to…

[dead]

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

#776

Post by stavros »

morkalork wrote: post #326
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…

I have a terrible urge to build an automated version of this with computer vision and give it the name "EnGuAgEmEnT MeTeR"

Please spell it correctly, though, as it's "engaugement".

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

#778

Post by stavros »

rossant wrote: post #670
tgv wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inform lawyers? They can cite this as credible doubt, or whatever the correct legal term is.

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 there a website people can link doctors to?

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

#779

Post by IIsi50MHz »

internet101010 wrote: post #254
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.

I have this same problem with cars like the Honda Fit, where you can't immediately abort a signal because the minimum number of blinks allowed by the system is greater than 1. Far longer than it takes to realise you were about to turn too soon, or attempt a merge at a wrong exit.

The excessive minimum-blinks usually causes me to try moving the lever farther or jiggle it because "off" didn't seem to mean __off__, with the frequent result that the opposite side's turn signal engages, probably confusing other drivers.

Supposedly, this is a Feature, so that a brief flick of the control allows sending a preset number of blinks to other drivers. Myself, I think "off" should mean OFF.

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

#780

Post by clbrmbr »

WideCharr wrote: post #294
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…

Was this at Stevens Tech? I had a Prof Tewksbury there that would have done something just like this.

The very same! It was the intro to compsci for engineers that paired with the robot project… c 2007.

Another kind of sad Tewks story is, once I went to see him in his office, and I witnessed him giving a grad student and early edition copy of a Claude Shanon tome. Clearly was intended as a nice gift. The grad student didn’t get it, and Tewks had to explain who Shanon was to a EE PhD candidate. I wanted to jump up and down and get his attention but I was just that pesky undergraduate with some scheme to get a free A…

Anyways he was a Bell Labs guy and full of lore and wisdom, but I would have loved to have known him as a younger man. Same with Harold Stalwen.

I did have the great honor of taking courses with Roger Pinkham and Norman J Morgenstein Horing who despite both being in their 80s were possessed of incredible intellect and didactic powers. Pinkham in particular was the closest I’ve ever come to meeting Gandalf.

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