Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 794 posts

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

#711

Post by asciii »

LouisSayers wrote: post #183

I joined a startup once where everybody seemed to be working on something completely different. One project was an eBay tool, another was a chat assistant, another was an energy comparison tool... The CEO was never in the office, she was always flying around the world with her daughter (given a made-up C title) visiting CEOs of large companies and throwing out numerous hooks to see who would bite. I very quickly saw…

Was it her only business / source of income?

I know a gentleman who does something similar even though a large portion of his wealth is in the real estate industry. His tech gains are just from a network of friends that gave money to his company and lip service to "acquisition."

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

#712

Post by calvinmorrison »

J_cst wrote: post #677
AllegedAlec wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. This is insane cope. We make technology to assist end users perform the tasks they do. To say "well you're doing the task wrong, the tool is made so you do task X way instead" is to put the cart in front of the horse.

I understand your point, but that's not how things work. If you source the right ERP you will be presented with procedures and processes that have been streamlined and optimized leveraging previous experiences of literally hundreds of businesses. Smaller and larger than yours. It's an error to dismiss the standard solution without deep consideration. Any process into a good ERP (e.g. managing a deposit payment, manag…

Just to add... a lot of processes are very defined. I know HN loves to startups that reinvent the wheel but things like GAAP are pretty much the same workflows in any biz. AP, AR, SO, POs, etc.

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

#713

Post by tomcam »

talldatethrow wrote: post #679
tomcam wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing story. Love your honesty. Is there a world where you hire someone to build a more maintainable replacement?

It really wouldn't solve the main problem which is that the product itself isn't really needed or that great, code quality aside.

But it seems like 34 companies would feel differently?

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

#714

Post by whatusername »

ragnese wrote: post #118
windowshopping wrote: post #90

I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option. I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

Off topic, but I recently looked in to playing MtG again because my son expressed interest. But, I was a bit taken aback by how different the environment is. I last played when they still had numbered "base sets", e.g., "9th Edition", and then rotating "blocks" of three smaller-but-more-advanced sets. I was assuming I would go in and buy a couple of starter decks from the most recent numbered "edition" to start teach…

As someone mentioned - the "Arena Starter Kits" worked for us as an intro to the game.

The basic rules around commander aren't particularly additionally taxing beyond that. (This is your special card that you can play every time. When it dies it goes back to its special spot and it gets more expensive each time you cast it). What I like about the commander format (in the few pre-constructed decks I've bought over the last few years) - they can really lean into a theme/strategy more - and the commander really guides you in how to play this deck.

Start with those arena kits - they are cheap and handle the rules. But if your son sees a commander deck that resonates with him (in theme or mechanics) -- I'd recommend giving it a shot.

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

#715

Post by vsnf »

flutas wrote: post #655
joshstrange wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places. I hate to agree, but yeah. I'm watching my husband go through a CS degree course right now, and the stuff he talks about I'm just like "why are they focusing on this, you literally never use this." His "computer graphics" class was all about using the original GLUT library. The school specifically highlighted M1 Macs as good computers for their CS departmen…

The incompatible library and overly expensive computer recommendations aside, CS is full of things "you literally never use". It's a theoretical discipline more akin to mathematics than anything else, and it certainly isn't software engineering, to the surprise of many students (including me, when I was one).

Outside of my university coursework, I have never used the Pumping Lemma (Theory of Computation), balanced a red-black tree (Algorithms & Data Structures), relational algebra (Databases), and all sorts of other things that someone focused on the software development aspect of computers would literally never use and would wonder why we're focusing so much on these things.

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

#716

Post by siikanen »

bombcar wrote: post #390
drpixie wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different but similar. I once wrote a trivial lotto number selector app, at the request of some colleagues. It just emitted a few unique random numbers. Silly but why not. They hated it. I added moderate, random delays before emitting each number. They loved it, and used it every week for quite some time :)

Reminds me of all the rules you have to apply to a random music player to make it feel random.

What rules you have to add?

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

#717

Post by aitchnyu »

Froedlich wrote: post #359
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…

Someone I knew was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years after taking his child to the ER. The doc there decided it was "shaken baby syndrome" and called the cops. After that, he was on the guilty-until-proven innocent track. The body was cremated with no second opinion. He still has three or four years to go. No parole here for "baby killers."

Was it a cremation forced by the police to hinder the investigation? Happens in India.

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

#718

Post by efreak »

alibarber wrote: post #158

Some years ago, a colleague literally spent all night in the office, on the 31st of March, implementing clippy for another third party commercial application (not MS Office) that was heavily used by the company and across that industry. He inspired me to take April Fool's seriously. I've since changed industries but last year I jumped on the AI bandwagon with https://chatellite.space and this year a nod to a popular…

> when it's gone it's gone

Check out AI Horde, it can do text gen for free. You'd probably be wanting to do occasional generations for everything in advance, though, as it's definitely not fast enough to do this in realtime.

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

#719

Post by efreak »

tdh15 wrote: post #201

I got frustrated with ChatGPT for hallucinating sometimes, and my friend said "could be worse, could hallucinate all the time." And I thought it'd be fun to make that, and then we came up with a few more, and now we have this: https://cap-gpt.onrender.com/

Never loads for me

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

#720

Post by talldatethrow »

tomcam wrote: post #713
talldatethrow wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really wouldn't solve the main problem which is that the product itself isn't really needed or that great, code quality aside.

But it seems like 34 companies would feel differently?

Or maybe they're a bit disappointed it isn't that great, but who wants to onboard off back to hand made Excel sheets? Or spend time learning another tool. I've got very low churn so I guess it's all fine.
Post reply on HN