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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?

#781

Post by clbrmbr »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #164
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…

It was obviously a joke you didn't get

You may very well be right. (TBH this possibility had never crossed my mind till your comment.) I prefer to Assume Positive Intent even at the risk of being the butt of a sardonic joke.

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

#782

Post by green_smoothie »

I worked on a data management system that basically was a very bad very slow filesystem implementation... That lived on a filesystem.

It literally did nothing other than store files on disk and let you access them.. Very slowly. It didn't support subdirectories, so you needed to drop everything into one directory... And an LS on 500 files took about 4 minutes.

Everyone at the company hated it, but it was the baby of the VP in charge of engineering, so it stayed.

To be clear, it added nothing over just dropping files in a directory.

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

#783

Post by stavros »

sfn42 wrote: post #737
delecti wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the ease of avoiding the ads (not logging in, jailbreaking it, or just getting a cover) were all big parts of why I felt like kindle ads were so much less offensive than most online advertising.

I wanted an ebook reader so I looked around and bought a Kobo Forma. It's great. No ads that I've noticed, I can load whatever I want onto it. As I understand it, Kindle is locked to Amazon. I don't know why anyone would pay for that, especially if it also shows ads.

It's not locked to Amazon, I load whatever book I want just fine.

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

#784

Post by stavros »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #81
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't "better than theirs" then mean cheaper while still being sufficient?

Perhaps. This is why specifications should be unambiguous.

The only unambiguous specification is code.

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

#785

Post by throwaway14356 »

talldatethrow wrote: post #527
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #154

Earlier 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…

imagine a software buying consultant. You could sell the service to your existing clients.

Long ago i made a few html websites for businesses then explained basic html and ftp to the owner. It was perfect except from other webdesign shops hammering my clients.

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

#786

Post by talldatethrow »

Fanmade wrote: post #728
talldatethrow wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, I know several experienced software developers with good software ideas, but no clue how to sale them. It sounds like bringing them and you together would basically be a guarantees success. By the way; I am working as a self-employed developer and my favourite project is a software that has initially been written by a self-taught programmer who both started and ended his career with that software. As far as I h…

If it was a real good idea, I'd argue it wouldn't be that hard to sell.

Reality would be that a combo of a good developer and a good salesperson would get into a similar situation that I got myself into, but with a better more manageable code base. Not the worst outcome in the world, that's basically most b2b saas technically.

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

#788

Post by rossant »

rcxdude wrote: post #764
lloydatkinson wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Exactly, that's the major obstacle we're facing: a particular kind of psychological bias (very human...)

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

#789

Post by rossant »

stavros wrote: post #778
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 there a website people can link doctors to?

We've had one in French for a while, and we've been wanting to create an English version for years. It's about time we get started on it. Otherwise, there's already https://shakenbaby.science/, which serves as a landing page for a recent book.

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

#790

Post by rossant »

inkcapmushroom wrote: post #766
ornornor wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, even the question to know whether the blood in the brain and behind the eyes can be explained with violent shaking (without impact) is debated as the scientific evidence is still lacking. I said "without impact" because the answer is clearly yes when there is an impact -- but there will also be additional markers of trauma in those cases.

So, it's not only to know whether it's the only cause, but even more fundamentally, whether it is a cause.

In any case, one can't really say that SBS is "not a thing", because babies are definitely shaken, and some are injured or die -- there's no debate about that, unfortunately.

[1] https://cyrille.rossant.net/introduction-shaken-baby-syndrom...

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