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Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#241

Post by blantonl »

richardw wrote: post #171

I was forced to orchestrate the replacement of Kafka with IBM MQ in a running financial institution because new execs understood it better from previous roles in other companies. Crazy newfangled micro services and event driven architecture freaked them out. Change was across about 50 microservices, maybe 5/6 different tech stacks (SAP, Java, .net, python etc). Had to write the MQ scripts to build up the topic and qu…

That will connect right up with DB/2 probably, no problemo.

You'll just need the right Java JRE - exact version.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#242

Post by sandreas »

I currently work on building an open PCB for translating Android headphone remote signaling to Apple remote signaling resuming the awesome work of David Carne[1].

Basically it is a circuit where you could use any Android inear Headphone with remote buttons on any Apple device with Audio Jack - a TRRS Plug - TRRS Jack translation layer between the 220Ω/660Ω vol+ and vol- signaling on Android to the proprietary Apple ultrasonic chirp protocol.

Probably nobody (besides me) will ever require this, because everyone just uses Bluetooth these days and noone else uses the iPod Nano 7g :-)

1: https://tinymicros.com/wiki/Apple_iPod_Remote_Protocol

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#243

Post by ZiiS »

notatoad wrote: post #177
LaserDiscMan wrote: post #124

I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. It was the engine of the entire company, everything passed through it. The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat. When new management took charge, an initiative was started to replace the system with an industry standard solution. Both myself and the…

>The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat the key thing to understand about ERP systems is that this is their primary purpose. anything else they claim to do is secondary.

Which is why they are vastly better whilst in the middle of a tricky migration, especially if it is going badly, and especially especially if it is being done by the most expensive contractors.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#244

Post by rightbyte »

rossant wrote: post #224

Well, this has nothing to do with programming and goes way beyond being merely "useless"; yet it might offer some perspective on your question and perhaps help you relativise things. There's a global industry involving thousands of healthcare professionals, lawyers, judges, police officers, and child protection workers who have spent 50 years prosecuting tens of thousands of parents and caregivers for allegedly shaki…

The guy that realized that washing your hand prevents mother and babies from dying in child birth was ignored and he got insane. I dunno what my point is. Maybe that these things are some sort of grind?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#246

Post by EdwardDiego »

Our parent company had had an amazing idea, we'd license this great relevant video content, make it available for you to put on your website, and it would show our adverts around it.

We licenced a Flash based video player, and I had to make it a) work in general and b) show video adverts before after during the content.

I spent six months learning Actionscript 3, getting the goddamn player code to build and run, (the Ant build script came with the dev's homedir baked in everywhere) came up with a way to unit test it via some monkey patching etc. etc. Files called 'blank-single-frame.flv' were created to work around concurrency bugs deep in the player, etc etc.

We released it and then I saw the "content". Pure garbage. Our content partner had scraped together a desperate collection of free videos like "Frankfurt Airport shareholder update", not the stuff like "Germany's Next Top Model" we'd been promised by the excited executive.

I'm not sure who fucked over who here, but I'm pretty sure there was a very boozy dinner and possibly some cocaine involved in forming this "partnership".

So yeah, six months making a videoplayer work to show adverts around videos no-one wanted.

Can't even justify it based on what I learned cos Flash lol.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#247

Post by Aloha »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #205

I worked on a six-month contract project for a large US retailer; the fact that everybody else I worked with was laid off the second week probably should have told me something was wrong, but they kept paying me so I kept showing up. Anyway, the only task they ever gave me was to build Cisco router ACLs to match existing traffic in the stores; they needed to implement access control but wanted to make sure they weren…

If the retailer is still in business that data has probably been lovingly migrated twice, and is now in a sharepoint somewhere.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#248

Post by jhallenworld »

999900000999 wrote: post #43

I developed a small bankroll/gambling simulator in Golang. Ended up thinking I "figured out" roulette and I'm down about 2k. This isn't a lot of money for me, but I think I'm done with gambling for a while. Ultimately just take whatever you feel like gambling, bet it on black and leave regardless of the outcome. That'll yield you better results than any system. I'm not open sourcing the code since I don't want someon…

Billionair Jeffrey Yass is famous for getting his start from gambling: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/06/how-trad...

He's invested in TikTok, recently visited Mar-a-Lago, now suddenly Trump is against the TikTok ban. Getting off tanget, but the Palentir billionairs are anti-TikTok for some reason.. we'll see how the fight goes..

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#249

Post by jryb »

windowshopping wrote: post #167
sph wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go out with a bang. Release it, enjoy your 15 minutes in the spotlight, and when the lawyers come a-knocking, shut it down. Or make it open source and let the community take the wheel and the responsibility. You never know what opportunities this adventure might bring, but certainly more than just keeping it on your hard drive. Go for it mate.

I may indeed do this. There is an outstanding issue I have to address that I've never quite worked up the motivation to deal with: Heroku restarts their servers once every 24 hours with only thirty seconds' warning. Since the games are in-memory, this of course kicks everyone out of whatever games they may be in the middle of. I guess the solution is to have the games be on Redis instead of in-memory? I'm a bit more…

Is using a host that doesn't do this not a possibility?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#250

Post by shireboy »

This is old, but my most pointless project: The CEO wanted a screen in every hall that showed the company "EnGUAGEment meter". Users would have to go to the app, choose from 10 or so canned messages like "Feeling productive", "Ready to conquer the day", and other such HR speak the CEO (or rather the HR committee he put on the important business of picking the list) felt was motivational. This would update a page that scrolled their photos and chosen message, and showed the "EnGUAGEment" as a percent of total employees responding on a car dashboard style guage. It hovered around 30-40% every day. On the CEO's birthday they'd drive that baby up to 70 to 80%
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