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Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

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Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

#11

Post by dpifke »

I spent a not-insignificant amount of time a few years back writing poker bots. It's one of those projects that's really easy to do, but really difficult to do well. It didn't help that I dove right into coding without the benefit of having read any of the academic research on the subject (i.e. http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/).

I will say that the time spent made me a better poker player and taught me some nifty things about AI and game theory to which I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed.

Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

#12

Post by martythemaniak »

http://mld.dreamhosters.com/Backup.avi

I actually applied to YC with this some time ago. After I took this screencast, I even re-worked the UI to make it look all slick and web2.0-y. I abandoned it because it was too ambitious for a part-time project.

Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

#14

Post by timmaah »

tkiley wrote: post #3

This: http://votesimple.org/ I would like to see this kind of thing in the USA someday, but there are some pretty significant practical hurdles in the way. I think it's possible to design around the problems, but I just haven't had the time + energy to move forward.

In 2010, votesimple will run for one congressional seat in one district in the United States. If elected, we will establish a website where all Americans can read...

I like the idea, but I don't think you would ever get someone elected as congressional seats are supposed to represent the constituents of the state/district. Why would anyone in elect someone that is going to listen to all citizens vs those who they are stated as representing?

Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

#15

Post by old-gregg »

http://pikluk.com

I consider this crazy because abandoning the development and having it just sit there seemed crazy to a lot of people. Pikluk was a damn great idea with a few paying customers who are absolutely in love with a tiny percentage of what actually got implemented.

But in the end, after exhausting some personal savings, we just could not find the resources to keep working on it and we lacked PR to sell it on eBay for a six-figure sum.

Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

#16

Post by tocomment »

rick2047 wrote: post #7
aarongough wrote: post #2

While going through my old files today I have found 3 already! - A JavaScript framework: Like jQuery wasn't good enough? - A client-side search engine: Used AJAX calls to crawl a website and return results... Can you say slooow? Yuck. - Hoppy: A simple little program that creates several new versions of itself, with names generated by a markov chain, then runs those new versions after a time delay. I never inflicted…

mine was something similar to hoppy.What I basically tried to do was write a ruby script that generated newer ruby scripts.And what did all these ruby scripts do?they scaned the long long equation and then try to put in different values in it and solve them for one variable. All this was so random and vague that I had to abandon it after about 66 minutes into it.

I made a Python script that copied itself and launched the copies (It had the ability to mutate too though by randomly changing the copies). I thought eventually it would evolve into a sentient being. But it would just tie up all my resources and freeze the computer.

One time something interesting happened though. I noticed the latest copies had commented out the mutation part of the code. They had "evolved" to not mutate. I'm guessing that was the best strategy to make viable offspring.

My take away lesson was that mutation has to come from the environment for early life forms to advance.

Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

#17

Post by aarongough »

arohner wrote: post #13

Competing with Visa and Paypal, by using digital certificates, public keys, etc to cut down on fraud. In the right mood, sometimes I think my current project is crazy, but I'm sticking with it!

Yeah I know that feeling...

I've been working on a CMS called Picl for the last 6 months or so, it's already in production with a few client websites. But every so often I look at it and go 'why? wasn't there enough CMS's already?'. I just have to remember to look at the original design goals and remember that it is still a good idea!

Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

#18

Post by dugmartin »

old-gregg wrote: post #15

http://pikluk.com I consider this crazy because abandoning the development and having it just sit there seemed crazy to a lot of people. Pikluk was a damn great idea with a few paying customers who are absolutely in love with a tiny percentage of what actually got implemented. But in the end, after exhausting some personal savings, we just could not find the resources to keep working on it and we lacked PR to sell it…

I used Pikluk for a while with my kids after thinking of an idea around the same area and then finding you did it.

If its any consolation you did a very, very nice job on the interface.

Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

#19

Post by erik »

http://www.imageboard.net/ (possibly NSFW content)

It's sort of a pixel art discussion board. You would have to check it out to really understand it.

It was fun to build, but it would be hard to commercialize. Plus nurturing a community that is more interested in quality art than anonymous penis drawings would be more work than I have motivation for.

Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

#20

Post by apgwoz »

I have a whole directory on my personal laptop of abandoned projects, that I've worked on over the past few years. One that I still would love to see built on is the concept of a Fisheye Editor. I wrote a prototype in Python Tk: http://apgwoz.com/fisheye-edit/

Another idea I had, which I thought was good, was building a Twitter like site to track what you were eating, and marry the concept with Reddit style voting and a collaborative filtering + Bayes classifier to find new things to eat. I had a working demo, but never tried to promote it. The idea of the Bayes classifier was to eliminate ingredients you strongly disliked. Not sure if what I did worked entirely correctly since I didn't amass enough users to get feedback.

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