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When should you give up on a project that doesn't work?

255 points by xmprt 3y ago

ernstgnzlz 3y ago
When it stops being fun
daxfohl 3y ago
I gave up on mine when I learned it was equivalent to type inferencing an F_omega language, and that such a task was Turing unsolvable. It was a bit of a relief because after three years I wasn't getting anywhere on it (unsurprisingly).
JohnCClarke 3y ago
All artists experience this: https://www.patreon.com/posts/project-impasse-97259484 https://www.patreon.com/posts/project-impasse-97259484
Balgair 3y ago
Aside: I know the post was partly an emotional exploration. But, as this is HN, I figure I can step into the pedantic. This is related to a 'Stopping Problem', correct? The trouble I'm having is I'm not all that sure which one he's in, so I don't know what the optimal solution is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping I think he's in a case of the 'Opera Parking Lot', but then the solution for that isn't really all that easy to find and I'm not about to try to derive it. Does anyone know the optimal solution for parking at the Opera? Also, am I totally wrong about what stopping problem he's in?
RecycledEle 3y ago
When you give up on it, please archive it and release it into the public domain. Without Xerox doing that, we would not have PCs.
intrasight 3y ago
We spend our lifetimes on projects that won't work in the long-term.
effnorwood 3y ago
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AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
Personally, I don't ever give up on projects like this (the one he discussed in the article is a cool idea also). I work on small projects like this, I get them to a point, I pause. I come back a day or a week or a year later when I need it again (and find it broken) or want to add some feature. Sometimes I hate my code and want to rewrite it from scratch but I try to avoid that impulse as much as I can. For me the key is to just never think of it as "giving up", I'm just not working on a particular project right now.
- WaxProlix 3y ago
  I agree, and I think the author does too. Note that they said they were "putting it back on the shelf" and were willing to come back to it. I think distance and time can help with perspective, too. In a number of projects, stepping away (especially during the rat-holing on useless cruft features or w/e sections) and coming back later can help bring some good clarity.
  - xmprt 3y ago
    Author here. I think all the buzz that this is getting make me want to give it another shot. I'll probably throw away most of the code and start from scratch though - one thing I learned from programmers much smarter than me is that the first solution is never the best one.
    - fuzzfactor 3y ago
      Can't read the artice but I do have some generic observations. Most projects aren't going to work, so that can be one of the primary goals, mainly to find out whether or not that's the case, without too many compromises. So most of the time to be realistic you have to try real hard for it not to work quite early on, or that could be something where you end up wasting too much time on a hopeless effort. Some people never quit, and it can be difficult to know when to mothball something or give up altogether. Mothballs can be your friend, especially when there are a greater number of promising projects than could ever be fully completed anyway. Progress can surprise you though, but more often than not many things will take an unexpected downturn before you ever see a case of an unexpected upturn.
abricq 3y ago
Writing small, unfinished projects is great ! At least I think so. It's what keeps me passionate. It's a way to learn new things (language, framework, etc...). I don't like much the phrasing "I give up". How about "I had fun, learned while enjoying it, and now move on to my next unfinished project". Great article though !
- loceng 3y ago
  I've always wondered about this mindset. For me, due to life circumstances of severe chronic pain, until relatively recently my life and projects were mostly on hold. To cope with my projects "dying" 10+ years ago from no longer being able to work on them, aside from the grief of going through my entrepreneurial baby "dying" - the main project I was working on and putting all of my effort on, and was going well - I began to tell myself that things were simply on hold, on the backburner, and I will revisit them again in the future. My ideas and understanding and strategy since evolved, and so even though I wasn't actively working on projects - they and myself were still evolving.
- orangevelcro 3y ago
  Totally agree! I have so many unfinished projects, but I also find that I end up using bits and pieces from those unfinished projects in new stuff. I always learn something from them.
- xmprt 3y ago
  Thanks for reading! I came to the same conclusion. I don't see people post about their "failures" enough (although true failures are rare because you can always learn something from them) so I figured this would be a good thing to share.
  - abricq 3y ago
    That's true, I guess we see a lot of "success project" and feel ashamed to share our projects with half-started README. But what a great coffee-with-colleague-topic it makes !
- codegeek 3y ago
zitterbewegung 3y ago
Well before giving up try to pivot it into something but having one unfinished projects are a really good way to learn something new.
encoderer 3y ago
I’ll be blunt. You were being a perfectionist. That is a guaranteed way to kill momentum and ensure you never have any fun. So the algorithm wasn’t great and the map was slow. Rome wasn’t built in a day. I get it, you have a vision in your head for how you want it to work and it wasn’t there yet. But this is actually a psychology problem and not a project problem.
- dangus 3y ago
  I think it’s more like lack of focus and priority. The author identified all the things they needed to do, and described the process of doing everything but those things despite seemingly knowing exactly what was needed contemporaneously. Obviously it’s no fun to try and force a non-fun project through to the end, and I agree with the author’s analysis that they should have stopped sooner. I’m guessing it wasn’t fun which is why the author did what I often do when I sit down at my computer to work and want to blow it off: I spend a bunch of irrelevant time physically close to where work happens, but I don’t do any work.
- cellularmitosis 3y ago
  I was about to say, it loaded pretty quickly and I found two interesting places right around the corner from where I live. If this is a "failure", I'd hate to hear how he classifies my personal projects...
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on it being a "psychology problem" please? I agree with your perfectionism point; but how to test the hypothesis that it would be "fun"? A rough prototype can easily not be fun, even if the hypothesis is true! User experience seems hard... Perhaps this is the reason for Mark Cerny's Method in game dev: to complete a slice of a AAA game to shippable standard, to tell if it's worth completing. Because players can't evaluate the experience of a game without the finished game. It's a hell of a lot of work, like $3 million; but doing just a slice makes it less than the $30 million for the whole game. Whereas, for some reason, for Zelda: Breath of the Wild, they developed a cheap 2D prototype to test out their "physics" and "chemistry" ideas. How were they able to test their hypothesis so cheaply? What makes a hypothesis cheap to test? Is it a bit like unit tests versus functional tests?
303uru 3y ago
In this instance, I'm not sure why the author is giving up. That said, I do find in industry it's worth knowing how and when to kill a project. I always push for the creation of a kill list when ideation begins.
deleted 3y ago
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precommunicator 3y ago
OsmAnd has this feature
sackfield 3y ago
I think its usually when the project becomes a burden (the author notes as such in the conclusion), this is a bit simplistic as sometimes you just have to push past this to get somewhere, but if its a hobby project it should bring you some joy. When you see yourself doing fake productivity its bad news. I also find that sometimes I will scope tasks too big, take too long to finish them and get demotivated, if I break them up further I can keep momentum (even if the breakup is during the original task). Having said that I don't think giving up is necessarily a failure case that people think it is, I often take a lot of learnings after attempting to do very ambitious projects that I eventually scrap, but the learnings stay with me.
velcrovan 3y ago
OK so they gave up after one month of tinkering because “the hypothesis was wrong”. Was it though? The hypothesis was “if you could drag around a map to search for articles nearby and sort them by pageviews it would be more fun and could potentially help with vacation planning.” After one month they realized it would be harder than they thought. They had a clear idea of how to proceed, but just didn’t want to do it. That's totally fine, but the original hypothesis was not really tested here.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  You don’t even need a map UI to test the ranking algorithm. At least, simply sorting by page views is probably not ideal. Some recency bias would be useful.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I did skim, but I got the impression it was tested as a NO because of all the irrelevant articles (whole city pages, death of Epstein etc. ) This is the scraping tarpit! And why I avoid scraping projects. Even if there is a nice api it is still like a scraping project as there is tonnes of raw crap to deal with and categorise. Machine learning might help. Not necessarily a LLM but could just use attention architecture to predict yes/no relevant or irrelevant, maybe.
  - benreesman 3y ago
    If anyone wants to try something like this I recommend looking at: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/45573.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... I ran across it trying to solve a (regime of) a problem in proteomics, but it’s got old-school P(click | impression) style problems written all over it.
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    > there is tonnes of raw crap to deal with and categorise This is a fair use case for LLMs. "Read this article and decide if it meets this criteria". There will be some false positives and some false negatives but it will probably have a 95%+ success rate out of the box, which is more than good enough for a project like this.
jncfhnb 3y ago
> I think the biggest takeaway from this is that if something is worth building, you'll know right away. A barely functional prototype from another project I worked on almost 4 years ago got over 1000 upvotes on Reddit in a day just based off of a gif. I like the rest but I think this is very wrong. It’s very easy to simply imagine your idea is good and will be good if well executed. This is especially true in games.
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  Please elaborate. A well-executed game can be fun, when a poorly-executed version of the same idea is not. But if execution is everything, how can you experiment to test the hypothesis without making the whole thing?
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Execution is not everything. A well executed concept of a bad vision is still not great. People love to pretend that game dev is just a matter of prototyping to find a fun mechanic, and while that can be true for a few things (mostly niche movement), it’s generally not true of most games. It’s important to identify where the player consciousness is within a game. Binding of Isaac, to pick something somewhat random. It probably wouldn’t be that fun doing random rooms to prototype. It probably wouldn’t be fun doing random items. It has to be a whole sequence of runs before you get the feeling that it works.
  - Madmallard 3y ago
    This is the point of prototyping. You implement important game mechanics and interactions with just enough fidelity for it to be believable. If it’s fun, you’re on the right track.
    - hyperthesis 3y ago
      So, important game mechanics and interactions, not the entire game. If it's fun even without full-fidelity, it's fun. But if it's not fun, it might just be the lack of fidelity - not believable enough. I guess one needs an opinion for how much fidelity is enough to know, for the specific mechanics/interactions. EDIT can always increase fidelity. Through this discussion, I realize I'm more interested in "feel" than fun as such - e.g. a sense of place, being somewhere, in a walking simulator; or the feel of guns in COD. Not a mechanic; but perhaps a kind of interaction. Not necessarily "cinematic", but probably more akin to issues in cinema than game mechanics. I suppose one can still isolate an aspect and iterate on it; but it seems fidelity is important here...
semireg 3y ago
When learning why it’s gone wrong has gone cold.
- csours 3y ago
  I agree: when you've stopped learning.
darkclouds 3y ago
> the fact that the popups often don't load until all the page views are fetched (I'm assuming because of some rate limiting on Wikipedia's side), Its a nice idea, but the Wiki backend might be the reason why they abandoned their own geolocating website efforts, which might be what you are now experiencing. I think it would be nice for Wiki, to have an option which includes geolocated wiki articles in the surrounding area, just like they have the "see also" at the bottom of the page sometimes. Problem with this though, is this feature might also not exist to prevent article stuffing in tourist areas, or area's where realtors/estate agents might be trying to sell expensive property. Nice effort and article.
janalsncm 3y ago
For OP, maybe he could’ve simplified the problem to test it. Limit your articles to ones about one city only. Cache all of the links on your machine. There’s only 6 million English articles on Wikipedia anyways, and you can download a dump to play with. If the limiting factor becomes your radius of articles, you know you’re on the right track. Sometimes a prototype takes longer than a couple of days to build out. That's ok too. I’ve been working on a prototype for the last 6 months but I enjoy the problem.
kakaz 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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y04nn 3y ago
> and many of the prominent articles that showed up were things like YouTube headquarters shooting" and "Death of Jeffrey Epstein" while more interesting places like "Pittock Mansion" and "Ghirardelli Square" were hard to come by. I had a very similar project idea few years ago, but I was going to use wikitravel.org as the source of data.
m3kw9 3y ago
There’s no answer to “when you should give up” even in the case where you say you are gonna make the next Facebook, who’s to say you should give up? You give up when you give up and you learn about yourself so the next time you can make better judgement. I do think sometimes it helps to finish a project and ship, you can be surprised that your internal dialog is different than what others think when they use it
mittermayr 3y ago
As someone who also makes these kinds of things all the time (sometimes it works, most of the time it does not) — let me just thank you for the "fake productivity" angle you highlighted. I am right in the middle of one of those, pushing the launch further out, yet again, and reading your article made that crisp and clear (in my case: changing from SQlite back to MySQL, from JWT via Auth Header to JWT via Cookies, etc.). I also wanted to mention that clearly knowing the hypothesis to test for at the very beginning isn't all that easy, in my opinion. A lot of the time, you need to walk down the path, even walk it for a good long while, until you hit the right angle or context to truly see where the project could land. You (hopefully) start these things with a "good enough" reason, but it often needs a lot of shaping and refining to get it all back into the light, for a wider audience. Curiosity in learning new things will (should) always be a good part of what fuels the effort, it's a safety net (for me as a developer anyway), shielding me a bit from ending up with purely wasted time once it's clear that it didn't lead anywhere. At least I learned something new along the way.
MPlus88 3y ago
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dmitrybrant 3y ago
Very cool prototype, and a very interesting idea to sort nearby Wikipedia articles by number of pageviews. Just a note that the Wikipedia app for iOS does in fact have a map with nearby articles, and we will soon bring the feature (back) to the Android version.
santoshalper 3y ago
As soon as you know it won't work. Of course, that's the hard part. The level of near-delusion required to get something off the ground makes it very difficult to know when to let go.
yuppiepuppie 3y ago
I must be missing something… wikipedias app on my iPhone does have search by location feature. Is the author talking about this missing feature on android perhaps?
jll29 3y ago
You may just call it "put on hold indefinitely until I feel picking it up again."
- arminiusreturns 3y ago
  Or as I do it: "This is now part of my uber-mega-big catch-all project" Which is the same thing really, but now my uber-mega-big catch all project has more junk to sift through when I do eventually get to revisiting that sector.
cmgriffing 3y ago
CommitStrip has an awesome comic about this exact process. https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/25/west-side-project-story/ https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/25/west-side-project-...? Shameless plug, I made a YouTube video that points out a bit of nuance that the comic doesn't explicitly point out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L37U81MunM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L37U81MunM
Animats 3y ago
This isn't a project that doesn't work. It's a project that doesn't attract users. Different problem.
deleted 3y ago
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garrickvanburen 3y ago
I just wrote about this in for my Substack "For Starters". https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-14-when-do-we-stop https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-14-when-do-w... TLDR; If you're asking the question - you should probably stop. If you're still unsure, set some specific, short-term measures of success and stop immediately when you don't achieve them.
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  For vague, nebulous, frog-boiling decision-points, it's good to decide on a threshold, for what would it take, for you to decide to stop.
GoodUser77 3y ago
Just transform your project to something new and better good luck
stevage 3y ago
Seems like a lot of unnecessary self flagellation for a side project that mostly worked.
whartung 3y ago
Arguably, all I have are a bunch of unfinished projects. Some are just "on hold", the subject still interests me, though the passion has dwindled. Some are just dead, they served their purpose. Some are "in production", in that I use them but don't "work on them". They're good enough. Back in the day, we were using a tool that facilitated rapid iteration and development. The premise (way before any of this stuff became really fad-ish) was to get the customer involved. Fast results, early demonstrations, fast feedback. You know the drill. But the key take away was the analogy he promoted. Simply "it's one thing to have sheet music, it's another to hear it". The premise being you can write the music all you want with notes and staves and what not, but it's not real until you hear it. And, I don't know anything about music, so I can't speak to how actually writing music works for folks. But the point was made. You can make all the slide shows you want, but running code, hands on experience speaks volumes more than shouting at each other in a room with a whiteboard. Of course, like everything, it's nuanced. But the point is made. Recently, my friend had a need, and we came up with a pretty cool database type of system. No reason to go into details, but it was pretty cool, we came up with some great concepts, we thought through some hard problems, we started pounding out code, wrote up a nice rough draft of the query language. In the end though, we felt that we were working on a trap with no mouse. The need wasn't that great. So we shelved it. We were close, but not quite to the most minimal MVP. To prove the core tenet. But, even close we felt it wasn't worth pursuing. So, we stopped, and really haven't looked back. And there's nothing wrong with that. Learn, move on. That said, it behooves to make honest appraisal of why something is being stopped. Sometimes, and it's hard to tell when, but sometimes it's worth pushing through whatever barrier has come up and push on. Maybe with a little more work, you'll find that whatever was stopping you was surpassed and is no longer holding you back. Perhaps some new wind will fill your sails.
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  I like the sheet music vs hearing analogy. I think the standard trick for testing hypotheses of user experience is to fake it. e.g. a GUI with no literally backend. It feels real. (Perhaps a "sizzle reel" in pitching movies is similar)
kibitzor 3y ago
A similar project to what the author worked on is "WikiShootMe" [0] that finds Wikipedia photos near you (green/yellow/blue), and needed (red) on a map. This was discussed here 2 years ago [1]. [0] https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/ https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31575909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31575909
- robbomacrae 3y ago
  Also: Summer AI [0] which uses mostly wikipedia but also ties in other content. [0]: https://summer.ai/app https://summer.ai/app
lstodd 3y ago
Can we have a minesweeper on a Penrose P5 tiling while we're at it?
mfrye0 3y ago
I think it depends on what you're trying to do. For any given project, what's the goal? Who are you building it for? Are you trying to build a business around it? There's a big difference in working on a project for fun, and building something to solve a problem for users. In the article, I do not see any mention about talking to users, customers, etc. and asking what they want. It's a lot more motivating to continue working on a project when you're building something people want and solves real problems.
yieldcrv 3y ago
Don’t get married to a position This philosophy has allowed me to rapidly iterate towards short lived opportunities that drove 8 figures of revenue, no dilution, low overhead costs and so ultimately for me I would reserve passion and pride for 9+ figure bets
jongjong 3y ago
The thing which frustrates me the most is that consumers today have too many options; more than they need. Every genuine problem which humans had, has been solved decades ago. The problems which people are solving today are things that people want but don't need. What the majority of people need is: - Financial independence. - Genuine social relationships. - A sense of community. Disturbingly, our political and economic system works against all of these things by using our monetary system to artificially create poverty. We've reached a stage in human development where it doesn't make sense to solve any problem until we've solved the problems above for the majority of people. That's why I never know what to build. Every project which will attract any money is going to be some band-aid patch. A drug which gives users a temporary high but doesn't benefit them at all in the medium or long term... Or if the project is a b2b solution, it's just going to be some gimmick to further enslave humanity away from the things they need. I got into cryptocurrencies because the kinds of communities that it could facilitate are exactly what people need. It was working in the early days, but the powers-that-be wouldn't allow it to continue and they monopolized the sector and now it's all 100% about making quick cash and nothing else.
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  "artificially create poverty" - don't like this being imposed either, but I find the real survival motivation in a wilderness situation very enjoyable. I think their concern is that people won't work without it - they may be right: many people want direction/purpose in video games; only a small proportion are happy to create their own fun. Why not build something to help solve "finanicial independence"? It would attract money.
  - jongjong 3y ago
    I did. I built a cryptocurrency and a decentralized exchange but it did not attract any money. They're both still operational but very low volume. I'm now working on a no-code platform which will follow a franchise model that way anyone can buy a cryptocurrency and earn some percentage of the profits of the platform as semi-passive income. So far, no traction. When I show people what I've done, they're usually quite surprised that it doesn't attract users. It feels like like none of my projects are allowed to get any exposure. As if Google and social media algorithms are not allowing any traffic at all to my projects, even for niche relevant keywords. I can't even test to see if my target audience wants my product or not because I can't get it in front of any eyeballs to conduct that test. Over the past 5 years, my best project only got 50 visitors per day from Google. Many people who use it have told me that they love it and have been long term users but Google has a different opinion. I can't reach the necessary scale to make it profitable.
paulorlando 3y ago
"Doesn't work" for me has had different meanings. Most of the time I start because I feel initial passion for the project. Then, positive user feedback fuels me to keep going. Things go well (more users, good feedback, sales), it's easy. Things don't go well (no user growth, no feedback which can actually be worse than bad feedback, declining sales), I feel terrible. Do I want to keep pushing through the tough times? That's the test for when to give up.
crawfordcomeaux 3y ago
When it begins killing against your wishes?
radley 3y ago
Life tip: you can give up on projects that do work, too. The only mistakes are planning a long-term commitment prematurely, and framing it as "giving up" instead of "moving on." Have fun, try things.
sam0x17 3y ago
I honestly haven't had a single instance yet where I didn't regret abandoning it ~5 years later when something similar took off
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  Just to be clear, you've regretted abandoning projects every single time? Or just when a similar project took off? How often has the latter happened?
  - sam0x17 3y ago
    Every (startup) project I've ever abandoned I've eventually regretted abandoning, over the course of my life 5 times if I'm counting right, things like "there actually was a market for that", "with what I know now [insert limitation here] wouldn't have mattered", "thing I did for someone else instead of X eventually bore no fruit but I never went back to X" etc etc etc, going all the way back to the first one in 8th/9th grade where I spent two years working on a product and gave up when I only had one sale two weeks after launch (just needed time to gain momentum, there was lots of demand but I wouldn't realize this until many years later, at which point that whole vertical wasn't really a thing anymore and it was way too late). Github projects on the other hand, some of mine I'm definitely fine with them rotting, like my crystal lang ORM for monogo db.
    - hyperthesis 3y ago
      Thanks! Seems like you had excellent ideas, for all to end up being workable. I did similar at about 15yo, wrote a game, exhausted myself actually completing it. A game store agreed to stock it, I just needed to supply the game on media and packaging. I looked into it... runs of 100 copies... but didn't do it. Eventually made a pity-sale of 1 (one!) copy to a hobbiest. The lesson I took was that the business side was as important as the technical side. I noticed many startups had two guys, one in each role, since they require incompatible value-systems. Despite all the talk of "testing hypotheses", I think many of these things about the market are simply impossible to deliberately find out - just have to keep trying and learning about it: research, discovery. It requires faith/hopefulness/optimism - unreasonable, unjustifiable. With my later business that did work, I remember imagining/visualizing customers that were assessing my product and soon would buy (plausible, because the product was good; the market just needed to realize it!).
tdstein 3y ago
Thanks for sharing!
Kayodedcreative 3y ago
Hey guys I built a directory website with No-code, where I'm curating over 5000 No-code tools and resources - kindly check it out and add yours https://Nevacode.framer.website https://Nevacode.framer.website
iamleppert 3y ago
I think the killer feature it’s missing is a better map, not just 2D orthographic but something that can pan and tilt, and show more info about the actual articles when you select one. I miss the interactive Encarta-like exploration encyclopedia features of the late 90’s and 2000’s. Other than that can take some inspiration from what Google has done recently with integrating an LLM into their map searches: ex: “What are some interesting civil war landmarks around Pennsylvania?”
chrisallick 3y ago
When you care more about it working or what others think, stop. "Always get out of the saddle smiling, or you won't get back on."
demondemidi 3y ago
When something more exciting tickles your fancy. Don’t punish yourself when doing hobbies. That’s what hobbies are for: to be ephemeral and transient and glib.
rpmisms 3y ago
When it's 95/5. Giving up at 90/10 is dumb, but 95/5 is where things tend to stall out. Alternatively, just don't give up. Make it work. Completionism is vanishing, many amazing things have been garage projects for 15 years. Be determined and create your own advantage.
twodave 3y ago
I learned while building Nap[0] that sometimes ideas just need to simmer. It’s like cooking. Sometimes there’s that one step that makes the meal work, like adding wine to a hot skillet. I had the initial idea for Nap over a Christmas break and built a working prototype. It took another 2 years for me to see a good opportunity to even use it for myself! But that was a catalyst that helped turn it into a more mature tool. It still has very few users, but I’m very happy with it, and that’s enough for me. [0] https://naprun.dev https://naprun.dev
martindbp 3y ago
I've come to conclude a rule of thumb for (side) projects: if the project includes any form of web app, that part will take 90% of the development time and energy. Since I work in ML and not web stuff (which I don't really enjoy), this is not really how I'd like to spend my time. Unfortunately, almost every idea I have, even if it deep down has to do with AI or ML, includes some form of web app, because you need some way to interact with the interesting thing. In the end, maybe that means just doing nothing, because with kids and a busy life I just don't have the energy to spend on npm dependency management, front-end frameworks and JS build systems.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  I 'fixed' this but having a standard Go project that I clone, which allows me to do typed endpoints by describing them in s-expressions. All the user, perms and session mgmt are there already. Now I just need something similar for front end stuff...
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mattvr 3y ago
Wait. This is amazing. I think there are plenty of potential users. I've already found a bunch of cool stuff near me, and could see using this for any new area I go to. The list of locations could have their thumbnail image as a low hanging fruit improvement. Another consideration is not throwing in the towel after posting once. I've had the same link get 3 upvotes on subreddit A, and 300 on smaller subreddit B. The HN traction goes to show – it's context/timing/audience dependent. Take more shots on goal.

255 points by xmprt 3y ago

When it stops being fun

I gave up on mine when I learned it was equivalent to type inferencing an F_omega language, and that such a task was Turing unsolvable. It was a bit of a relief because after three years I wasn't getting anywhere on it (unsurprisingly).

JohnCClarke 3y ago

All artists experience this: https://www.patreon.com/posts/project-impasse-97259484 https://www.patreon.com/posts/project-impasse-97259484

Balgair 3y ago

Aside: I know the post was partly an emotional exploration. But, as this is HN, I figure I can step into the pedantic. This is related to a 'Stopping Problem', correct? The trouble I'm having is I'm not all that sure which one he's in, so I don't know what the optimal solution is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping I think he's in a case of the 'Opera Parking Lot', but then the solution for that isn't really all that easy to find and I'm not about to try to derive it. Does anyone know the optimal solution for parking at the Opera? Also, am I totally wrong about what stopping problem he's in?

RecycledEle 3y ago

When you give up on it, please archive it and release it into the public domain. Without Xerox doing that, we would not have PCs.

intrasight 3y ago

We spend our lifetimes on projects that won't work in the long-term.

effnorwood 3y ago

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AdamJacobMuller 3y ago

Personally, I don't ever give up on projects like this (the one he discussed in the article is a cool idea also). I work on small projects like this, I get them to a point, I pause. I come back a day or a week or a year later when I need it again (and find it broken) or want to add some feature. Sometimes I hate my code and want to rewrite it from scratch but I try to avoid that impulse as much as I can. For me the key is to just never think of it as "giving up", I'm just not working on a particular project right now.

WaxProlix 3y ago
I agree, and I think the author does too. Note that they said they were "putting it back on the shelf" and were willing to come back to it. I think distance and time can help with perspective, too. In a number of projects, stepping away (especially during the rat-holing on useless cruft features or w/e sections) and coming back later can help bring some good clarity.
- xmprt 3y ago
  Author here. I think all the buzz that this is getting make me want to give it another shot. I'll probably throw away most of the code and start from scratch though - one thing I learned from programmers much smarter than me is that the first solution is never the best one.
  - fuzzfactor 3y ago
    Can't read the artice but I do have some generic observations. Most projects aren't going to work, so that can be one of the primary goals, mainly to find out whether or not that's the case, without too many compromises. So most of the time to be realistic you have to try real hard for it not to work quite early on, or that could be something where you end up wasting too much time on a hopeless effort. Some people never quit, and it can be difficult to know when to mothball something or give up altogether. Mothballs can be your friend, especially when there are a greater number of promising projects than could ever be fully completed anyway. Progress can surprise you though, but more often than not many things will take an unexpected downturn before you ever see a case of an unexpected upturn.

abricq 3y ago

Writing small, unfinished projects is great ! At least I think so. It's what keeps me passionate. It's a way to learn new things (language, framework, etc...). I don't like much the phrasing "I give up". How about "I had fun, learned while enjoying it, and now move on to my next unfinished project". Great article though !

loceng 3y ago
I've always wondered about this mindset. For me, due to life circumstances of severe chronic pain, until relatively recently my life and projects were mostly on hold. To cope with my projects "dying" 10+ years ago from no longer being able to work on them, aside from the grief of going through my entrepreneurial baby "dying" - the main project I was working on and putting all of my effort on, and was going well - I began to tell myself that things were simply on hold, on the backburner, and I will revisit them again in the future. My ideas and understanding and strategy since evolved, and so even though I wasn't actively working on projects - they and myself were still evolving.
orangevelcro 3y ago
Totally agree! I have so many unfinished projects, but I also find that I end up using bits and pieces from those unfinished projects in new stuff. I always learn something from them.
xmprt 3y ago
Thanks for reading! I came to the same conclusion. I don't see people post about their "failures" enough (although true failures are rare because you can always learn something from them) so I figured this would be a good thing to share.
- abricq 3y ago
  That's true, I guess we see a lot of "success project" and feel ashamed to share our projects with half-started README. But what a great coffee-with-colleague-topic it makes !
codegeek 3y ago

zitterbewegung 3y ago

Well before giving up try to pivot it into something but having one unfinished projects are a really good way to learn something new.

encoderer 3y ago

I’ll be blunt. You were being a perfectionist. That is a guaranteed way to kill momentum and ensure you never have any fun. So the algorithm wasn’t great and the map was slow. Rome wasn’t built in a day. I get it, you have a vision in your head for how you want it to work and it wasn’t there yet. But this is actually a psychology problem and not a project problem.

dangus 3y ago
I think it’s more like lack of focus and priority. The author identified all the things they needed to do, and described the process of doing everything but those things despite seemingly knowing exactly what was needed contemporaneously. Obviously it’s no fun to try and force a non-fun project through to the end, and I agree with the author’s analysis that they should have stopped sooner. I’m guessing it wasn’t fun which is why the author did what I often do when I sit down at my computer to work and want to blow it off: I spend a bunch of irrelevant time physically close to where work happens, but I don’t do any work.
cellularmitosis 3y ago
I was about to say, it loaded pretty quickly and I found two interesting places right around the corner from where I live. If this is a "failure", I'd hate to hear how he classifies my personal projects...
hyperthesis 3y ago
Could you elaborate on it being a "psychology problem" please? I agree with your perfectionism point; but how to test the hypothesis that it would be "fun"? A rough prototype can easily not be fun, even if the hypothesis is true! User experience seems hard... Perhaps this is the reason for Mark Cerny's Method in game dev: to complete a slice of a AAA game to shippable standard, to tell if it's worth completing. Because players can't evaluate the experience of a game without the finished game. It's a hell of a lot of work, like $3 million; but doing just a slice makes it less than the $30 million for the whole game. Whereas, for some reason, for Zelda: Breath of the Wild, they developed a cheap 2D prototype to test out their "physics" and "chemistry" ideas. How were they able to test their hypothesis so cheaply? What makes a hypothesis cheap to test? Is it a bit like unit tests versus functional tests?

303uru 3y ago

In this instance, I'm not sure why the author is giving up. That said, I do find in industry it's worth knowing how and when to kill a project. I always push for the creation of a kill list when ideation begins.

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precommunicator 3y ago

OsmAnd has this feature

sackfield 3y ago

I think its usually when the project becomes a burden (the author notes as such in the conclusion), this is a bit simplistic as sometimes you just have to push past this to get somewhere, but if its a hobby project it should bring you some joy. When you see yourself doing fake productivity its bad news. I also find that sometimes I will scope tasks too big, take too long to finish them and get demotivated, if I break them up further I can keep momentum (even if the breakup is during the original task). Having said that I don't think giving up is necessarily a failure case that people think it is, I often take a lot of learnings after attempting to do very ambitious projects that I eventually scrap, but the learnings stay with me.

velcrovan 3y ago

OK so they gave up after one month of tinkering because “the hypothesis was wrong”. Was it though? The hypothesis was “if you could drag around a map to search for articles nearby and sort them by pageviews it would be more fun and could potentially help with vacation planning.” After one month they realized it would be harder than they thought. They had a clear idea of how to proceed, but just didn’t want to do it. That's totally fine, but the original hypothesis was not really tested here.

janalsncm 3y ago
You don’t even need a map UI to test the ranking algorithm. At least, simply sorting by page views is probably not ideal. Some recency bias would be useful.
quickthrower2 3y ago
I did skim, but I got the impression it was tested as a NO because of all the irrelevant articles (whole city pages, death of Epstein etc. ) This is the scraping tarpit! And why I avoid scraping projects. Even if there is a nice api it is still like a scraping project as there is tonnes of raw crap to deal with and categorise. Machine learning might help. Not necessarily a LLM but could just use attention architecture to predict yes/no relevant or irrelevant, maybe.
- benreesman 3y ago
  If anyone wants to try something like this I recommend looking at: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/45573.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... I ran across it trying to solve a (regime of) a problem in proteomics, but it’s got old-school P(click | impression) style problems written all over it.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  > there is tonnes of raw crap to deal with and categorise This is a fair use case for LLMs. "Read this article and decide if it meets this criteria". There will be some false positives and some false negatives but it will probably have a 95%+ success rate out of the box, which is more than good enough for a project like this.

jncfhnb 3y ago

> I think the biggest takeaway from this is that if something is worth building, you'll know right away. A barely functional prototype from another project I worked on almost 4 years ago got over 1000 upvotes on Reddit in a day just based off of a gif. I like the rest but I think this is very wrong. It’s very easy to simply imagine your idea is good and will be good if well executed. This is especially true in games.

hyperthesis 3y ago
Please elaborate. A well-executed game can be fun, when a poorly-executed version of the same idea is not. But if execution is everything, how can you experiment to test the hypothesis without making the whole thing?
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Execution is not everything. A well executed concept of a bad vision is still not great. People love to pretend that game dev is just a matter of prototyping to find a fun mechanic, and while that can be true for a few things (mostly niche movement), it’s generally not true of most games. It’s important to identify where the player consciousness is within a game. Binding of Isaac, to pick something somewhat random. It probably wouldn’t be that fun doing random rooms to prototype. It probably wouldn’t be fun doing random items. It has to be a whole sequence of runs before you get the feeling that it works.
- Madmallard 3y ago
  This is the point of prototyping. You implement important game mechanics and interactions with just enough fidelity for it to be believable. If it’s fun, you’re on the right track.
  - hyperthesis 3y ago
    So, important game mechanics and interactions, not the entire game. If it's fun even without full-fidelity, it's fun. But if it's not fun, it might just be the lack of fidelity - not believable enough. I guess one needs an opinion for how much fidelity is enough to know, for the specific mechanics/interactions. EDIT can always increase fidelity. Through this discussion, I realize I'm more interested in "feel" than fun as such - e.g. a sense of place, being somewhere, in a walking simulator; or the feel of guns in COD. Not a mechanic; but perhaps a kind of interaction. Not necessarily "cinematic", but probably more akin to issues in cinema than game mechanics. I suppose one can still isolate an aspect and iterate on it; but it seems fidelity is important here...

semireg 3y ago

When learning why it’s gone wrong has gone cold.

csours 3y ago
I agree: when you've stopped learning.

darkclouds 3y ago

> the fact that the popups often don't load until all the page views are fetched (I'm assuming because of some rate limiting on Wikipedia's side), Its a nice idea, but the Wiki backend might be the reason why they abandoned their own geolocating website efforts, which might be what you are now experiencing. I think it would be nice for Wiki, to have an option which includes geolocated wiki articles in the surrounding area, just like they have the "see also" at the bottom of the page sometimes. Problem with this though, is this feature might also not exist to prevent article stuffing in tourist areas, or area's where realtors/estate agents might be trying to sell expensive property. Nice effort and article.

janalsncm 3y ago

For OP, maybe he could’ve simplified the problem to test it. Limit your articles to ones about one city only. Cache all of the links on your machine. There’s only 6 million English articles on Wikipedia anyways, and you can download a dump to play with. If the limiting factor becomes your radius of articles, you know you’re on the right track. Sometimes a prototype takes longer than a couple of days to build out. That's ok too. I’ve been working on a prototype for the last 6 months but I enjoy the problem.

kakaz 3y ago

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y04nn 3y ago

> and many of the prominent articles that showed up were things like YouTube headquarters shooting" and "Death of Jeffrey Epstein" while more interesting places like "Pittock Mansion" and "Ghirardelli Square" were hard to come by. I had a very similar project idea few years ago, but I was going to use wikitravel.org as the source of data.

m3kw9 3y ago

There’s no answer to “when you should give up” even in the case where you say you are gonna make the next Facebook, who’s to say you should give up? You give up when you give up and you learn about yourself so the next time you can make better judgement. I do think sometimes it helps to finish a project and ship, you can be surprised that your internal dialog is different than what others think when they use it

mittermayr 3y ago

As someone who also makes these kinds of things all the time (sometimes it works, most of the time it does not) — let me just thank you for the "fake productivity" angle you highlighted. I am right in the middle of one of those, pushing the launch further out, yet again, and reading your article made that crisp and clear (in my case: changing from SQlite back to MySQL, from JWT via Auth Header to JWT via Cookies, etc.). I also wanted to mention that clearly knowing the hypothesis to test for at the very beginning isn't all that easy, in my opinion. A lot of the time, you need to walk down the path, even walk it for a good long while, until you hit the right angle or context to truly see where the project could land. You (hopefully) start these things with a "good enough" reason, but it often needs a lot of shaping and refining to get it all back into the light, for a wider audience. Curiosity in learning new things will (should) always be a good part of what fuels the effort, it's a safety net (for me as a developer anyway), shielding me a bit from ending up with purely wasted time once it's clear that it didn't lead anywhere. At least I learned something new along the way.

MPlus88 3y ago

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dmitrybrant 3y ago

Very cool prototype, and a very interesting idea to sort nearby Wikipedia articles by number of pageviews. Just a note that the Wikipedia app for iOS does in fact have a map with nearby articles, and we will soon bring the feature (back) to the Android version.

santoshalper 3y ago

As soon as you know it won't work. Of course, that's the hard part. The level of near-delusion required to get something off the ground makes it very difficult to know when to let go.

yuppiepuppie 3y ago

I must be missing something… wikipedias app on my iPhone does have search by location feature. Is the author talking about this missing feature on android perhaps?

jll29 3y ago

You may just call it "put on hold indefinitely until I feel picking it up again."

arminiusreturns 3y ago
Or as I do it: "This is now part of my uber-mega-big catch-all project" Which is the same thing really, but now my uber-mega-big catch all project has more junk to sift through when I do eventually get to revisiting that sector.

cmgriffing 3y ago

CommitStrip has an awesome comic about this exact process. https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/25/west-side-project-story/ https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/25/west-side-project-...? Shameless plug, I made a YouTube video that points out a bit of nuance that the comic doesn't explicitly point out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L37U81MunM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L37U81MunM

Animats 3y ago

This isn't a project that doesn't work. It's a project that doesn't attract users. Different problem.

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garrickvanburen 3y ago

I just wrote about this in for my Substack "For Starters". https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-14-when-do-we-stop https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-14-when-do-w... TLDR; If you're asking the question - you should probably stop. If you're still unsure, set some specific, short-term measures of success and stop immediately when you don't achieve them.

hyperthesis 3y ago
For vague, nebulous, frog-boiling decision-points, it's good to decide on a threshold, for what would it take, for you to decide to stop.

GoodUser77 3y ago

Just transform your project to something new and better good luck

stevage 3y ago

Seems like a lot of unnecessary self flagellation for a side project that mostly worked.

whartung 3y ago

Arguably, all I have are a bunch of unfinished projects. Some are just "on hold", the subject still interests me, though the passion has dwindled. Some are just dead, they served their purpose. Some are "in production", in that I use them but don't "work on them". They're good enough. Back in the day, we were using a tool that facilitated rapid iteration and development. The premise (way before any of this stuff became really fad-ish) was to get the customer involved. Fast results, early demonstrations, fast feedback. You know the drill. But the key take away was the analogy he promoted. Simply "it's one thing to have sheet music, it's another to hear it". The premise being you can write the music all you want with notes and staves and what not, but it's not real until you hear it. And, I don't know anything about music, so I can't speak to how actually writing music works for folks. But the point was made. You can make all the slide shows you want, but running code, hands on experience speaks volumes more than shouting at each other in a room with a whiteboard. Of course, like everything, it's nuanced. But the point is made. Recently, my friend had a need, and we came up with a pretty cool database type of system. No reason to go into details, but it was pretty cool, we came up with some great concepts, we thought through some hard problems, we started pounding out code, wrote up a nice rough draft of the query language. In the end though, we felt that we were working on a trap with no mouse. The need wasn't that great. So we shelved it. We were close, but not quite to the most minimal MVP. To prove the core tenet. But, even close we felt it wasn't worth pursuing. So, we stopped, and really haven't looked back. And there's nothing wrong with that. Learn, move on. That said, it behooves to make honest appraisal of why something is being stopped. Sometimes, and it's hard to tell when, but sometimes it's worth pushing through whatever barrier has come up and push on. Maybe with a little more work, you'll find that whatever was stopping you was surpassed and is no longer holding you back. Perhaps some new wind will fill your sails.

hyperthesis 3y ago
I like the sheet music vs hearing analogy. I think the standard trick for testing hypotheses of user experience is to fake it. e.g. a GUI with no literally backend. It feels real. (Perhaps a "sizzle reel" in pitching movies is similar)

kibitzor 3y ago

A similar project to what the author worked on is "WikiShootMe" [0] that finds Wikipedia photos near you (green/yellow/blue), and needed (red) on a map. This was discussed here 2 years ago [1]. [0] https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/ https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31575909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31575909

robbomacrae 3y ago
Also: Summer AI [0] which uses mostly wikipedia but also ties in other content. [0]: https://summer.ai/app https://summer.ai/app

lstodd 3y ago

Can we have a minesweeper on a Penrose P5 tiling while we're at it?

mfrye0 3y ago

I think it depends on what you're trying to do. For any given project, what's the goal? Who are you building it for? Are you trying to build a business around it? There's a big difference in working on a project for fun, and building something to solve a problem for users. In the article, I do not see any mention about talking to users, customers, etc. and asking what they want. It's a lot more motivating to continue working on a project when you're building something people want and solves real problems.

yieldcrv 3y ago

Don’t get married to a position This philosophy has allowed me to rapidly iterate towards short lived opportunities that drove 8 figures of revenue, no dilution, low overhead costs and so ultimately for me I would reserve passion and pride for 9+ figure bets

jongjong 3y ago

The thing which frustrates me the most is that consumers today have too many options; more than they need. Every genuine problem which humans had, has been solved decades ago. The problems which people are solving today are things that people want but don't need. What the majority of people need is: - Financial independence. - Genuine social relationships. - A sense of community. Disturbingly, our political and economic system works against all of these things by using our monetary system to artificially create poverty. We've reached a stage in human development where it doesn't make sense to solve any problem until we've solved the problems above for the majority of people. That's why I never know what to build. Every project which will attract any money is going to be some band-aid patch. A drug which gives users a temporary high but doesn't benefit them at all in the medium or long term... Or if the project is a b2b solution, it's just going to be some gimmick to further enslave humanity away from the things they need. I got into cryptocurrencies because the kinds of communities that it could facilitate are exactly what people need. It was working in the early days, but the powers-that-be wouldn't allow it to continue and they monopolized the sector and now it's all 100% about making quick cash and nothing else.

hyperthesis 3y ago
"artificially create poverty" - don't like this being imposed either, but I find the real survival motivation in a wilderness situation very enjoyable. I think their concern is that people won't work without it - they may be right: many people want direction/purpose in video games; only a small proportion are happy to create their own fun. Why not build something to help solve "finanicial independence"? It would attract money.
- jongjong 3y ago
  I did. I built a cryptocurrency and a decentralized exchange but it did not attract any money. They're both still operational but very low volume. I'm now working on a no-code platform which will follow a franchise model that way anyone can buy a cryptocurrency and earn some percentage of the profits of the platform as semi-passive income. So far, no traction. When I show people what I've done, they're usually quite surprised that it doesn't attract users. It feels like like none of my projects are allowed to get any exposure. As if Google and social media algorithms are not allowing any traffic at all to my projects, even for niche relevant keywords. I can't even test to see if my target audience wants my product or not because I can't get it in front of any eyeballs to conduct that test. Over the past 5 years, my best project only got 50 visitors per day from Google. Many people who use it have told me that they love it and have been long term users but Google has a different opinion. I can't reach the necessary scale to make it profitable.

paulorlando 3y ago

"Doesn't work" for me has had different meanings. Most of the time I start because I feel initial passion for the project. Then, positive user feedback fuels me to keep going. Things go well (more users, good feedback, sales), it's easy. Things don't go well (no user growth, no feedback which can actually be worse than bad feedback, declining sales), I feel terrible. Do I want to keep pushing through the tough times? That's the test for when to give up.

crawfordcomeaux 3y ago

When it begins killing against your wishes?

radley 3y ago

Life tip: you can give up on projects that do work, too. The only mistakes are planning a long-term commitment prematurely, and framing it as "giving up" instead of "moving on." Have fun, try things.

sam0x17 3y ago

I honestly haven't had a single instance yet where I didn't regret abandoning it ~5 years later when something similar took off

hyperthesis 3y ago
Just to be clear, you've regretted abandoning projects every single time? Or just when a similar project took off? How often has the latter happened?
- sam0x17 3y ago
  Every (startup) project I've ever abandoned I've eventually regretted abandoning, over the course of my life 5 times if I'm counting right, things like "there actually was a market for that", "with what I know now [insert limitation here] wouldn't have mattered", "thing I did for someone else instead of X eventually bore no fruit but I never went back to X" etc etc etc, going all the way back to the first one in 8th/9th grade where I spent two years working on a product and gave up when I only had one sale two weeks after launch (just needed time to gain momentum, there was lots of demand but I wouldn't realize this until many years later, at which point that whole vertical wasn't really a thing anymore and it was way too late). Github projects on the other hand, some of mine I'm definitely fine with them rotting, like my crystal lang ORM for monogo db.
  - hyperthesis 3y ago
    Thanks! Seems like you had excellent ideas, for all to end up being workable. I did similar at about 15yo, wrote a game, exhausted myself actually completing it. A game store agreed to stock it, I just needed to supply the game on media and packaging. I looked into it... runs of 100 copies... but didn't do it. Eventually made a pity-sale of 1 (one!) copy to a hobbiest. The lesson I took was that the business side was as important as the technical side. I noticed many startups had two guys, one in each role, since they require incompatible value-systems. Despite all the talk of "testing hypotheses", I think many of these things about the market are simply impossible to deliberately find out - just have to keep trying and learning about it: research, discovery. It requires faith/hopefulness/optimism - unreasonable, unjustifiable. With my later business that did work, I remember imagining/visualizing customers that were assessing my product and soon would buy (plausible, because the product was good; the market just needed to realize it!).

tdstein 3y ago

Thanks for sharing!

Kayodedcreative 3y ago

Hey guys I built a directory website with No-code, where I'm curating over 5000 No-code tools and resources - kindly check it out and add yours https://Nevacode.framer.website https://Nevacode.framer.website

iamleppert 3y ago

I think the killer feature it’s missing is a better map, not just 2D orthographic but something that can pan and tilt, and show more info about the actual articles when you select one. I miss the interactive Encarta-like exploration encyclopedia features of the late 90’s and 2000’s. Other than that can take some inspiration from what Google has done recently with integrating an LLM into their map searches: ex: “What are some interesting civil war landmarks around Pennsylvania?”

chrisallick 3y ago

When you care more about it working or what others think, stop. "Always get out of the saddle smiling, or you won't get back on."

demondemidi 3y ago

When something more exciting tickles your fancy. Don’t punish yourself when doing hobbies. That’s what hobbies are for: to be ephemeral and transient and glib.

rpmisms 3y ago

When it's 95/5. Giving up at 90/10 is dumb, but 95/5 is where things tend to stall out. Alternatively, just don't give up. Make it work. Completionism is vanishing, many amazing things have been garage projects for 15 years. Be determined and create your own advantage.

twodave 3y ago

I learned while building Nap[0] that sometimes ideas just need to simmer. It’s like cooking. Sometimes there’s that one step that makes the meal work, like adding wine to a hot skillet. I had the initial idea for Nap over a Christmas break and built a working prototype. It took another 2 years for me to see a good opportunity to even use it for myself! But that was a catalyst that helped turn it into a more mature tool. It still has very few users, but I’m very happy with it, and that’s enough for me. [0] https://naprun.dev https://naprun.dev

martindbp 3y ago

I've come to conclude a rule of thumb for (side) projects: if the project includes any form of web app, that part will take 90% of the development time and energy. Since I work in ML and not web stuff (which I don't really enjoy), this is not really how I'd like to spend my time. Unfortunately, almost every idea I have, even if it deep down has to do with AI or ML, includes some form of web app, because you need some way to interact with the interesting thing. In the end, maybe that means just doing nothing, because with kids and a busy life I just don't have the energy to spend on npm dependency management, front-end frameworks and JS build systems.

lelanthran 3y ago
I 'fixed' this but having a standard Go project that I clone, which allows me to do typed endpoints by describing them in s-expressions. All the user, perms and session mgmt are there already. Now I just need something similar for front end stuff...

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mattvr 3y ago

Wait. This is amazing. I think there are plenty of potential users. I've already found a bunch of cool stuff near me, and could see using this for any new area I go to. The list of locations could have their thumbnail image as a low hanging fruit improvement. Another consideration is not throwing in the towel after posting once. I've had the same link get 3 upvotes on subreddit A, and 300 on smaller subreddit B. The HN traction goes to show – it's context/timing/audience dependent. Take more shots on goal.