Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects? • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by falsestprophet » Fri, Sep 18, 2009, 9:11 PM UTC

After I learned Java (huge upgrade from QBasic btw) when I was a sophomore in high school in 2003, I built an online storefront application. Cute maybe? But, after infinite feature creep (not that I knew what that was at the time), I ended up trying to build what was effectively Viaweb (not that I knew what that was at the time).

Predictably, this was a disaster.

In retrospect, I do not recommend Viaweb as an introductory Hello World web app. (I also do not recommend Java web programming in general.)

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

#42

Post by dangrover » Fri, Sep 18, 2009, 9:18 PM UTC

A domain-specific language for describing music at a higher level of abstraction.

http://svn.wonderwarp.com/tuplet/

Decided to work on something profitable instead.

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

#43

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Sep 18, 2009, 9:21 PM UTC

- a rating system for ex husbands and ex wives (exs4all)

- a search engine (noseo)

- an operating system called younite (unix + dynamite ;) )

I'm not proud of any of these but they were fun to build at the time, even if the projects went nowhere I learned a lot from them. The search engine was done using 'leo', a literate programming editor. That alone was worth the experience.

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

#44

Post by ErrantX » Fri, Sep 18, 2009, 9:50 PM UTC

I have a couple.

Biggest one was a social networking site (which technically is still in my mind, but pretty dead) to compete with the big boys. In the end I was offered enough money for the work I had done on caching and some other bits that it was silly not to take it. :)

I'd love to have another go some day.

There was Qoppa which was intended to be an extensible Browser game server written in Python. That fell apart when there was no one much to work on the artistic side. http://hg.errant.me.uk/errant/qoppa (dont smirk :D)

What else. A quite-advanced attempt to write a distributed file store for really large write-once/read many files (2GB+) in Python. I got as far as implementing a REST interface and then got bored of the tedious work on the replication side.

A CMS/Blog tool specifically for magazines. Gave up when it turned into a massive amount of work and the magazine who tentatively were my first client decided not to "go online".

I could list a few more. My theory is just to keep plugging away at a few projects till one makes it. I was nearly there with the social network.

Currently Im planning to try and assault the blogging empire with a Wordpress competitor.

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

#45

Post by 8plot » Fri, Sep 18, 2009, 9:57 PM UTC

A mechanical ant trap/killer to be the only "conventional weapon" for my war on ants.

I attract a line of ants to eat the bait (in my case, cat food), then periodically suck (or blow) ants into an un-escapable garbage bag, but only a few at a time to keep the line of ants stable. (or until the entire colony is exhausted)

Compared to the traditional poison method, it is much more satisfying for me to dispose of a garbage bags full of ants which I might make good use of. The mass of corpses could be good fertilizer, or bird feed.

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

#46

Post by jeroen » Fri, Sep 18, 2009, 9:59 PM UTC

dfranke wrote: post #29

zeckalpha wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow to load, but interesting concept.

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

It's very fast for me too.

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

#47

Post by polvi » Fri, Sep 18, 2009, 10:03 PM UTC

Sexual Assault Facebook app.

Allow people to report when they are victims of sexual assault. I started discussions with the local sexual assault center, but after hearing feedback, it seemed like people did not want stuff like "3 of your friends were inappropriately touched last night" popping up on Facebook. Although, I do still think part of the problem with sexual assault on college campuses is that nobody talks about it.

Has a possible business model too: rev share with legal teams.

Feel free to run with the idea!

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

#48

Post by kidko » Fri, Sep 18, 2009, 10:18 PM UTC

apgwoz wrote: post #20

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 an…

This seems like it could go places, but I can't seem to grab a copy of the file. The server keeps running it!

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

#49

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 18, 2009, 10:22 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by geuis » Fri, Sep 18, 2009, 10:53 PM UTC

dugmartin wrote: post #32

An AJAX api library where you specify types and RESTful actions and it builds an object with type-checked methods. The code looks like: var api = new AjaxAPI( "page = /testapi.php \n" + "mydate= (^\\d\\d-\\d\\d-\\d\\d\\d\\d$) \n" + "int=(^\\d?+$) \n" + "text = (^.+$) \n" + "get_messages : GET /messages/project={int}/date={mydate}/ \n" + "get_comments: GET /comments/project={int} \n" + "save_comment:POST /save_comment…

Why not post that up somewhere. I want to take a look at this.