Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing • Hacker News Board

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#61

Post by Apocryphon » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 6:11 PM UTC

jacinda wrote: post #55

1718627440 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse my naivety, but isn't it good if the same results get proofed in slightly different ways? This is effectively a replication, but instead of just the appliance of the experiments, you also replicate the thought process by having a slightly different approach.

It would be good (especially with the replication crisis), but historically to earn a PhD, especially at a top-tier institution, the criteria is conducting original research that produces new knowledge or unique insights. Replicating existing results doesn't meet that criteria so unknowingly repeating someone's work is an existential crisis for PhD students. It can mean that you worked for 4-6 years on something that…

And here we once again see an example of misaligned incentives baked into another one of our most hallowed institutions.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#62

Post by jbellis » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

The newest structural diff tool is RefactoringMiner, there's a paper and a Github repo that works out of the box which is rare for this space. Excellent results but mainline is limited to Java IIRC with a couple ports for other languages.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#63

Post by richardw » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

sidewndr46 wrote: post #14

bennettnate5 wrote: post #5

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…

Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts…

That’s how I do side projects.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#64

Post by nonethewiser » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

tra3 wrote: post #34

In one of his speeches, Obama said "Better is good". I think about this a lot. It feels like better compounds over time, too. Small improvements add up. From experience, nothing new is perfect the first go round, so sitting around trying to come up with a perfect design is counterproductive because there's no such thing. "impediment to action advances action. what stands in the way, becomes the way".

It's perfectionism.

I always thought perfectionism meant extremely high achievements (for too great of a cost). But it can also be quitting without any progress because you can't accept anything less than perfect (which may or may not be achievable). Perfectionism can be someone procrastinating on a large task.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#65

Post by cachius » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

Difftastic can even diff plaintext by treating it as Elvish! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49278577/how-to-improve-...

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#66

Post by sebastianperezr » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

I am a solo builder and one thing that helped me a lot was this: most of what looks like a "necessary abstraction" is actually scope creep with a different name. I was adding a flag for every new feature and I noticed the pattern in my own code, so I made one rule: a feature can not land until its flag-off behavior has a test. That changed how I see flags. The flag is part of the product, not an escape hatch. Three features in my backlog died by themselves when I started thinking like this.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#67

Post by jcelerier » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

1718627440 wrote: post #52

bennettnate5 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual justification is that if you don't do at least a breadth-first literature review, you can get burned by missing a paper that already does substantially what you do in your work. I've heard of extreme case where it happens a week before someone goes to defend their dissertation!

Excuse my naivety, but isn't it good if the same results get proofed in slightly different ways? This is effectively a replication, but instead of just the appliance of the experiments, you also replicate the thought process by having a slightly different approach.

Well, if you don't care about not being able to do your defense after 4 years of work because someone managed to do it just before you..

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#68

Post by eagerpace » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

mcontrac wrote: post #12

I think the author is really just getting at the fact that humans are by nature intelligent and by nature tend to think of similar ideas. So you can either unknowingly complete a project which is inevitably in some sense a replication of another project, or you can do the research first and realize it's partially a replication which is a bit disheartening. I think the solution might lie in realizing that completing a…

We all just need a little more sodium in our diets.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#69

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #53

bluefirebrand wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, that's an incredible amount of progress in just 400 days

That is the power of AI.

[deleted]

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#70

Post by ChromaticPanic » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #41

bennettnate5 wrote: post #5

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…

> You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it This is definitely the wrong way of going about a research project, and I have rarely seen anyone approach research projects this way. You should read two or at most three papers and build upon them. You only do a deep review of the research literature later in the project, once you have some results and you have started writing…

Unless you're already an expert in the topic a literature search is literally step 1 since you have to check if your idea has already been done before.