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Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

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21–30 of 97 posts

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

#21
This: http://mentorapp.org/

For me this was a potential solution to one of the fundamental problems with education: it is full of unchallenging, unrelated-to-life, contrived tasks. When any process (creative writing, math, coding) is harnessed to a fascinating, meaningful-to-students goal I believe you get motivation. And creativity.

So this service would just help mentors and apprentices in all sorts of fields find each other.

This idea was originally inspired by Dr. Tae's presentation:

"Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning: Why is skateboarding a better model for education than school?"

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

#22
I'm not sure I like this implementation a lot. For instance if I've some kind of struct inside my application that is allocated a lot of times and is rarely put into a linked list I don't want to have the two pointers overhead in all the instances of this structure.

On the other side it's a win about cache locality, and even mmeory-wise when the object happens to be linked to a linked list most of the times (you win a pointer, 8 bytes in a 64 bit arch).

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

#23

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…

btw, I just read your user bio page. It says "Before web I've been doing fairly low-level high-perf C++/Win32 work for industrial automation". That is my exact background - my case with C/assembly working on the real time OS for GE Fanuc's 90-70 programmable logic controller. What drives real time systems engineers to want to build kid friendly interfaces?

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

#25

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…

btw, I just read your user bio page. It says "Before web I've been doing fairly low-level high-perf C++/Win32 work for industrial automation". That is my exact background - my case with C/assembly working on the real time OS for GE Fanuc's 90-70 programmable logic controller. What drives real time systems engineers to want to build kid friendly interfaces?

Probably the fact that building a service so user-friendly and easy to use that a child can enjoy it is the exact opposite of the crazy stuff that you have to do to build embedded and real-time systems...

I salute you guys! Without you the world as we know it would not turn. Now, I'm off to code in Ruby...

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

#26
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.

There are a couple of reasons I'm not a huge fan of plans like this. I have a friend running for state legislature under a similar goal (though only district residents would vote on his votes, not all state residents), and these are the two big points I made to him.

1. Most people aren't equipped to think about the kind of issues that come up with legislation. There are subtle interactions between laws, small economic provisions can have huge market effects, and many sentences end up meaning the exact opposite of what they seem to say. Ideally (for me, though you may disagree), the person getting voted in is equipped by experience, education, and general smarts. I want someone voting who is studying law, proposed and current, and making informed decisions. I don't always get that, but I'm more likely to get that with one person than with many.

2. Many Americans are terribly prejudiced. Pick any poll you have handy showing that more than 50% of Americans believe in something ridiculous and imagine them voting on a law related to that belief. Historically, perhaps, this vision is dimmer. It's a cultural issue, not an absolute one, so if we get better as a people, this argument against will become less important.

I do like when these kinds of ideas are brought up, however. Lots of interesting talk happens.

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

#28
post #24

http://dfranke.us/pfs.html Though, I've recently been contacted by a high school student who intends to implement a subset of the idea for some sort of school project. I'll be interested to see what he does with it.

Slow to load, but interesting concept.

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

#29
post #24

http://dfranke.us/pfs.html Though, I've recently been contacted by a high school student who intends to implement a subset of the idea for some sort of school project. I'll be interested to see what he does with it.

Slow to load, but interesting concept.

Really? It loads instantly for me, and the server is basically idle.

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

#30
post #26
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.

There are a couple of reasons I'm not a huge fan of plans like this. I have a friend running for state legislature under a similar goal (though only district residents would vote on his votes, not all state residents), and these are the two big points I made to him. 1. Most people aren't equipped to think about the kind of issues that come up with legislation. There are subtle interactions between laws, small economi…

I agree with you on both points. I have had several similar discussion with a political analyst friend of mine.

I think that because of the way things run now we are also predisposed to think that other people will take care of the minutiae. The only problem is that in a direct democracy there is no 'other people'...

I think that a direct democracy is possible, but I think that the transition to it and the period afterward would be very rocky, possibly rocky enough to bring back the old system.

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