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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?

#701

Post by darknavi »

joshstrange wrote: post #603
calvinmorrison wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to place out of an intro-to-programming course in a back-to-school bout of scholastic achievement. I wasn't allowed to test out of it despite the coursewor being rote and that anyone with 2 seconds looking at my CV could see I did not need it. Anyway - they released the assignments on day 1. I turned them in on day 2. I still had to go to class. Stupid. My "filesystems and database design" class was basically…

I took a database design class in college. I had been using MySQL for years at this point (by no means an expert, but databases weren’t foreign to me). In my first exam I got a 90/100. I got all the queries right (don’t get me started on programming/writing queries on paper and how stupid that is), but I lost 1 point on each of the 10 questions. Why? Because I didn’t put a semicolon at the end of my query. Something…

One of my professors would mark us down for each line of code that is over 80 characters.

What it really was was a forcing function to figure out auto formatting tools, so in the end I didn't mind.

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

#702

Post by Biganon »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #676
Biganon wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a website about Tintin (the Belgian comic) where you can search any cell from any album by its text content. There's also a game where you have to find which album a cell comes from. The owners of the intellectual property wrote to me and just asked that I stop using the domain name I was using (which was the name of a character) and that every cell contains a reference to them ("Tintin is copyrighted to blah…

Great blistering barnacles! That's quite a story. Would you mind posting the link to your site here? I'm very curious to see it.

Sure, it's https://www.ectoplasme.com/

(It's in French, should have mentioned that)

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

#703

Post by kubanczyk »

spit2wind wrote: post #555
d_burfoot wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the weirdest psychological insights, which many people including myself have discovered recently, is that a fake job that doesn't actually require any work can be more stressful and unpleasant than a real job.

This reduces to a belief, which I also hold, that you have inherent worth. It's like Bret Victor's story of Puddles. Imagine you adopt a puppy. You name him Puddles. You take puddles home and you give them a little snack and you stick puddles in the cage and you lock the door forever and never open it again. Most, although not all, would agree this is cruel. We have a notion of what it means to live a full doggy life…

This is quite a humble take on definition of value, I like it.

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

#704

Post by svnt »

windowshopping wrote: post #350
jryb wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It seems they all do, though. Digital ocean was the same.

If that’s the case I’d suggest you probably have a bug in your code somewhere that depends on a timer that resets at midnight. So when it spans midnight everything resets, but this isn’t the server resetting.

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

#705

Post by kubanczyk »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #182
delecti wrote: post #155

It was at Amazon and I don't remember exactly what the service was called, I think it was AdSomething. It was while I worked on the Kindle Special Offers (taking advantage of the "off" screen of an e-ink Kindle to show ads) project. I find that to be one of the less offensive forms of advertising, so I was generally pretty happy on that team for a time. But there was a service, AdWhatever, which let users go onto a s…

Slightly off topic but I never logged in on my kindle so I don't get ads. I just load ebooks on it with my computer.

I've actually put mine into airplane mode in the very first minute and keep it until now. Just to be safe.

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

#706

Post by bmitc »

yhager wrote: post #550
bmitc wrote: post #547

All of them? I do wonder if anything I have ever worked on has actually been useful in a real, honest sense. Yes, people use stuff I've worked on or been a part of and possibly still even do (and there's plenty of stuff that wasn't used at all or canceled similar to your story), but it's hard to know the projects' actual usefulness. Perhaps it depends on the definition of useful. I'd say that if something makes someo…

You've basically summarized David Graeber's book - Bullshit Jobs[1]. Highly recommended. [1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bullshit-Jobs/David-G...

Thanks for the reference. I have heard of Graeber before for his other book Dept, but haven't looked into this book before.

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

#707

Post by doctor_eval »

whstl wrote: post #582
primax wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, basically throw out everything that made them unique and differentiated, and do things like the Germans do.

Not quite. I never worked in those ERP companies, but a few times I've been on the receiving end, working at companies undergoing a large migration. It is very often stuff that doesn't really matter, is highly inefficient, and requires small changes everywhere in the system. Death by thousand papercuts. There is no incentive from both sides to change: the company wants to keep modifying to get $$$, employees don't wa…

Right. I’ve spent weeks creating automations in a business I knew very well, that would most likely save a few minutes per month for a low salary employee.

But the RFP said I had to do it, and the customer insisted that I follow the letter of the RFP, rather than hit the high value parts of the project.

The two problems with this are that the cost of automation far exceeded the possible future cost of the manual process, and working on this automation took oxygen away from the stuff that would help people.

Needless to say, it was a disaster.

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

#708

Post by lloydatkinson »

rossant wrote: post #670
tgv wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inform lawyers? They can cite this as credible doubt, or whatever the correct legal term is.

Yes, there are lawyers who have become experts on these cases and whose tireless work have helped hundreds of people. But that doesn't scale, there are tens of thousands of cases. The real solution will come when doctors fully update their knowledge, which may still take a decade or two.

Is is possible they don't want to update on that? It seems this is all some sadistic plot to make people guilty of invented crimes, I can't see what else it could be at this scale.

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

#709

Post by talldatethrow »

codingdave wrote: post #694
talldatethrow wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's a difference between selling a rough car you detail inside and out and sell for a good deal, versus selling a lemon. Deep down I know the product isn't that well liked, and a lot of the renewals are based on my salesmanship. I know I have a chance at fixing the bugs, because I wrote everything, while someone else would be screwed IMO. It just wouldn't be fair to sell it to someone because I know they'…

It sounds like you are underestimating pretty much this entire industry. Picking up codebases that are sketchy and new to us is just part of the job. Finding and fixing bugs is an exercise to get rolling, not an insurmountable challenge. When people keep using software, it is because it solves a problem. They might not like the software but begrudgingly use it anyway because it solves that problem. So sure, pat yours…

While I agree professionals pick up codebases left behind by several iterations of developers, I think picking up a large PHP/Jquery PM tool written by a first time self taught via YouTube and stack overflow developer might be many peoples idea of a bad time.

It doesn't really solve a problem. Not really atleast. It's a little better than using 6 Excel sheets via a google drive honestly. The reason it got sold is because in theory it sounds a lot better than Google docs. But it's only a little better. And it has its own host of difficulties (can't modify anything for example.. don't even ask me to add a column or rearrange a table for you).

I know it's not great because if I get a company using it, but don't hand hold onboarding to an extreme level, they never even really get going with it.

When selling it, if I don't really lay it on thick and do a spectacular job, they don't buy.

The reason they don't quit once on it isn't that it solves a great problem or is much better than their previous solution (almost always just Excel sheets), but because switching back to their abandoned system is harder than the $300 a month is worth. So they just keep paying.

Also, I've contacted and pitched wayyy more than 34 companies. Many companies are/were smart enough to pass on it.

I'm not writing for a sob story or to talk up MY salesmanship for whatever reason, but I wanted to share my main takeaway from this project.

When doing lean startup and trying to get your first customers, don't think youve struck gold just because you had a great person schmooze a few people into using your MVP. It can be a false start just based on their persuasion. At this point I'd rather tone down salesmanship a lot and see if I can find a product that really strikes a cord with them instead. Less false starts that way IMO. I'd much rather have gotten 1-2 costumers only, not 34, and realized this isn't worth pursuing.

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

#710

Post by brightball »

cutemonster wrote: post #631
brightball wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was actually pretty entertaining. This was almost 20 years ago.

Did you meet the coworkers who were complaining at the coffee brewer or sth like that, and overheard anything they said about it? If so, must have been an odd feeling, and hard to not smile and say something

Not that I remember. It was a company with about 2,000 employees and I generally stayed on the IT floor.
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