Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? It loads instantly for me, and the server is basically idle.
It's very fast for me too.
It loaded much faster this access. Must have been something on my end temporarily.
Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
71–80 of 97 posts
Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
#72I 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 apa…
You don't need fancy art to make an interesting game.
Who said fancy was desired? Artistic direction, especially in games, refers to much more than just graphics.
Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
#73Thanks to everyone for the great responses, great fun to read them all!
Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
#74This goes back a ways. In the late '80s, when I was in college, I saw a story in the local newspaper about the city school system. They were totally jammed up trying to make schedules for the school bus routes. I'm thinking they might have even delayed the opening of school a few days, but I might be misremembering that. I'd been studying algorithms and this was, to me, obviously a traveling salesman problem taken to the next level. I spent several months researching the problem. I met with the guy at city schools who ran the office that made the routes. I got a friend's brother who was a fireman to give me a whole stack of large extremely high-resolution blueprint street maps. I spent an astonishing number of hours encoding street intersections and soforth into coordinates (using yardstick and multicolor pencils) and entering them into a QBasic program I wrote running on a PC under DOS. I wrote a functioning routing program that, given the map data and a bunch of addresses, would create a reasonable set of routes.
In the course of doing all of that work I really learned the meaning of tree-spanning algorithms, big O notation, and soforth - but I never created a usable SYSTEM. The map data was just too huge; I only encoded a small part of it. Also, the amount of computation required grew so fast that I realized if I ever did succeed in encoding the entire map the amount of computational time to produce usable routes would be impossibly huge.
My grades suffered horribly and I found actual paying work writing software for an insurance company. There were other issues, too. Finally I had to just quit the whole thing.
In hindsight, had I had access to Tiger/Line (I think it existed then but cost far more than I could afford) and been more advanced as a programmer and had more (any) support the problem could have been solved. Tom-Tom, Google Maps', et al route-finding fascinates me. It's obvious that they don't do a complete graph search - I think they use clever tricks like identify arterial roads limiting the graph search to those roads - things like that.
Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
#75A 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 garb…
Is it too inconvenient to keep your (including your cat's) food out of their reach, so they'll just go away?
The problem I want to solve isn't unique to me, and the cat bowl is easy enough to hide from ants (it sits on a plate of shallow water).
I simply hate the idea of chemical warfare to combat ants.
Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
#76I've been very interested in #2 on http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html for a long time. I always thought that a sufficiently simple, unbreakable operating system constitutes a solution to the problem, especially combined with a homepage enabling basic access to 3 or 4 separate tasks.
I am optimistic that Google Chrome OS constitutes an absolutely enormous step towards #2 by building the actual Web OS -- which is more like the Palm Pre's OS than any other existing operating system. But I won't know if it actually works until it actually comes out, probably a few days to 2 weeks before YC apps are due, because Google usually launches about a week before Microsoft and Windows 7 comes out then.
Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it too inconvenient to keep your (including your cat's) food out of their reach, so they'll just go away?
http://xkcd.com/382/
Even cooler, mosquito lasers! http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html
Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
#78http://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…
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Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
#79http://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…
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Re: Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
#80Building a cell simulator -- a biological, in-your-tissues cell, where the lowest simulated elements are exons (E), introns (I), expressed exons (Ee) and protein domains (PD), with cube-wise compartmentalization of membranes and intracellular space which contain chains of E+I, Ee, and PDs, and concentration functions for microelements like phosphates.
I wrote it in C++ and when launched with very downsized dimensions, it ate up 6 Gb of RAM and crashed with out of memory. I may try again when I can afford several hundred Gb of RAM.