4 ms·

Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?

15 points by typeofnandev 5y ago

Black101 5y ago
Probably Google... just look at the new Android V12
jschroedl 5y ago
The Juicero juice machine. Check out a tear down that AvE did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
codingslave 5y ago
Most microservice architecture
MaheshC 5y ago
Anything Frontend JavaScript Framework since 2010.
pitched 5y ago
All traffic lights but especially the ones set to do rolling green lights. The rolling green lights assume someone’s going the speed limit (which no one does) so it introduces more stop-and-go than if they all switched at the same time! But traffic lights on their own are all optimized for the peak 20 min of traffic instead of the other 24 hours. They really don’t make sense outside of peak.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  We visited some small town when I was a kid. They had rolling green lights. Their signs didn't say "speed limit 25". Instead they said "lights are synchronized for 25". Once you figured out that they were telling the truth, you drove 25.
- marto1 5y ago
  I'd be highly surprised if rolling green lights are implemented the exact same way across geographies. Does anyone have more details on how this works ? It has been an area of curiosity for me for quite a long time.
eucryphia 5y ago
Australia's NBN; taxpayer funded Gigabit capable fibre optic to 90% of homes that only need 50MB/s.
- yesenadam 5y ago
  Last time we had a big rain it didn't work at all for a few days (Sydney here), apparently a lot of people had that problem.
pestatije 5y ago
Compiled dynamic CSS in React. The most outrageous of it all is their reasoning for it: best of both worlds.
vanrysss 5y ago
Kubernetes
fiftyacorn 5y ago
My lecturers used to talk about the over engineering of chemical plants in the USSR. It was something to do with the command economy that meant the engineers over engineered the plants Then there was Chernobyl...
aristofun 5y ago
Kubernetes obviously. The whole industry is feeding solely on attempts to make its original overengineered complexity managable.
- wreath 5y ago
  Do you think k8s is over engineered or it's suited for complex use cases and people misusing it?
  - sethammons 5y ago
    My personal and not-in-the-weeds take is that k8s had some base assumptions that turned out incorrect and things become more convoluted because of it. Originally, state was not included with K8s because state is hard and is antithetical to their goals. Then enough users ended up convincing the project that state was here to stay and then complexity kept growing. People realized they need variables for values like port number to be shared across k8s files and so templating was introduced. But that wasn’t good enough and so another layer of abstraction is added, then another layer, etc. As more surface area is introduced, they didn’t want to appear to be making too much churn, so instead of lots of major and minor version bumps, they introduced beta features that they could break without feeling like they broke backwards compatibility even though it still breaks integrations that use beta features (gRPC package in Go did this too). In summary, I don’t think it is over engineered per se, I think it will be a stepping stone onto what ever is next that solves for these kinds of things in its original design instructions of being tacked on.
  - aristofun 5y ago
    It’s just awful product in terms of UX (devx). That’s partially the reason why people misusing it.
matt_s 5y ago
An IT ticketing system that had a disaster recovery solution inclusive of DB failover, load-balancing, etc. all to another data center in another time zone. Some medium critical business systems didn't have that so if a disaster struck, that stupid ticketing system would fail over and be up. I guess so they could put tickets in for all the other systems that didn't make it? I think this was borne out of one of those "use it or lose it" budget scenarios that happens in big companies at the end of a fiscal year.
sdevonoes 5y ago
Nuxt.js: it's a frontend framework that let's you do server-side rendering using a framework (Vue.js) designed to do client-side rendering.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
HP calculators, back in the day. I've heard stories (perhaps apocryphal) of one that was run over by a car and still worked. Even if that one story isn't true, they were solid.
sloaken 5y ago
US government, (might apply to others). They do so much paperwork and analysis to ensure no nickel is misspent. The cost to protect a nickel seems to be about a dollar.
- trcarney 5y ago
  > They do so much paperwork and analysis to ensure no nickel is misspent. Lol. They aren't making sure a nickel is misspent, they are making sure all of their allotted money is spent. If a government organization doesn't spend all of their money one fiscal year, they won't get as much the next year. In government organizations, growing their budgets is their main goal, it seems.

15 points by typeofnandev 5y ago

Probably Google... just look at the new Android V12

The Juicero juice machine. Check out a tear down that AvE did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

codingslave 5y ago

Most microservice architecture

MaheshC 5y ago

Anything Frontend JavaScript Framework since 2010.

pitched 5y ago

All traffic lights but especially the ones set to do rolling green lights. The rolling green lights assume someone’s going the speed limit (which no one does) so it introduces more stop-and-go than if they all switched at the same time! But traffic lights on their own are all optimized for the peak 20 min of traffic instead of the other 24 hours. They really don’t make sense outside of peak.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
We visited some small town when I was a kid. They had rolling green lights. Their signs didn't say "speed limit 25". Instead they said "lights are synchronized for 25". Once you figured out that they were telling the truth, you drove 25.
marto1 5y ago
I'd be highly surprised if rolling green lights are implemented the exact same way across geographies. Does anyone have more details on how this works ? It has been an area of curiosity for me for quite a long time.

eucryphia 5y ago

Australia's NBN; taxpayer funded Gigabit capable fibre optic to 90% of homes that only need 50MB/s.

yesenadam 5y ago
Last time we had a big rain it didn't work at all for a few days (Sydney here), apparently a lot of people had that problem.

pestatije 5y ago

Compiled dynamic CSS in React. The most outrageous of it all is their reasoning for it: best of both worlds.

vanrysss 5y ago

Kubernetes

fiftyacorn 5y ago

My lecturers used to talk about the over engineering of chemical plants in the USSR. It was something to do with the command economy that meant the engineers over engineered the plants Then there was Chernobyl...

aristofun 5y ago

Kubernetes obviously. The whole industry is feeding solely on attempts to make its original overengineered complexity managable.

wreath 5y ago
Do you think k8s is over engineered or it's suited for complex use cases and people misusing it?
- sethammons 5y ago
  My personal and not-in-the-weeds take is that k8s had some base assumptions that turned out incorrect and things become more convoluted because of it. Originally, state was not included with K8s because state is hard and is antithetical to their goals. Then enough users ended up convincing the project that state was here to stay and then complexity kept growing. People realized they need variables for values like port number to be shared across k8s files and so templating was introduced. But that wasn’t good enough and so another layer of abstraction is added, then another layer, etc. As more surface area is introduced, they didn’t want to appear to be making too much churn, so instead of lots of major and minor version bumps, they introduced beta features that they could break without feeling like they broke backwards compatibility even though it still breaks integrations that use beta features (gRPC package in Go did this too). In summary, I don’t think it is over engineered per se, I think it will be a stepping stone onto what ever is next that solves for these kinds of things in its original design instructions of being tacked on.
- aristofun 5y ago
  It’s just awful product in terms of UX (devx). That’s partially the reason why people misusing it.

matt_s 5y ago

An IT ticketing system that had a disaster recovery solution inclusive of DB failover, load-balancing, etc. all to another data center in another time zone. Some medium critical business systems didn't have that so if a disaster struck, that stupid ticketing system would fail over and be up. I guess so they could put tickets in for all the other systems that didn't make it? I think this was borne out of one of those "use it or lose it" budget scenarios that happens in big companies at the end of a fiscal year.

sdevonoes 5y ago

Nuxt.js: it's a frontend framework that let's you do server-side rendering using a framework (Vue.js) designed to do client-side rendering.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

HP calculators, back in the day. I've heard stories (perhaps apocryphal) of one that was run over by a car and still worked. Even if that one story isn't true, they were solid.

sloaken 5y ago

US government, (might apply to others). They do so much paperwork and analysis to ensure no nickel is misspent. The cost to protect a nickel seems to be about a dollar.

trcarney 5y ago
> They do so much paperwork and analysis to ensure no nickel is misspent. Lol. They aren't making sure a nickel is misspent, they are making sure all of their allotted money is spent. If a government organization doesn't spend all of their money one fiscal year, they won't get as much the next year. In government organizations, growing their budgets is their main goal, it seems.