from Hacker News

Clever ideas that failed (2010)

by walrus on 12/25/17, 5:19 AM with 24 comments

  • by elvinyung on 12/25/17, 8:54 PM

    "And, behold, I will deliver you up to the programmer tendency to build overelaborate castles of abstractions."

    --- King James Programming (http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/post/136036727910/55-...)

  • by nikita2206 on 12/25/17, 9:09 PM

    The first one is basically the messaging system and a smart broker. I’m not aware of any brokers that would take into account how busy a particular node (they usually just use round robin approach) but surely the concept you outlined is far from being a definition of over-engineering, cron is almost always worse because it is hardly scalable (it is with some crutches and until some point when it becomes unscalabel again, and it introduces a consistent delay).
  • by dankohn1 on 12/25/17, 6:27 PM

    This is superb. YAGNI may have it's own Wikipedia entry, but that doesn't mean that we remember it when a brilliant idea comes to mind.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it

  • by pram on 12/25/17, 9:55 PM

    Most of these sound awful to begin with, except the first maybe. Not to insult this guy, but people who force ego projects like these in a company quickly end up looking like a charlatan.
  • by pier25 on 12/25/17, 7:45 PM

    > "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

    This is brilliant.

  • by n3d1m on 12/25/17, 6:45 PM

    The site responsiveness is questionable. Maybe invest some time in making in nicer looking and more responsive?