4 ms·
Clever ideas that failed
- lamby 17y agoA refreshing change to the general level of hubris today. Thanks.
- obecalp 17y agoGood lessons, except for 1, without doing that there'd be no Google map-reduce and Hadoop. Of course, this means you should be using Hadoop now.
- steverb 17y agoWow. This is brilliant. Especially the sins committed, as I am also guilty of a number of them. This has inspired me to begin looking back at my projects and compiling a similar list of things that I have learned by doing it wrong.
- sb 17y agoan interesting article in similar vain: niklaus wirth's "good ideas, through the looking glass".
- DougBTX 17y agohttp://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/Articles/GoodIdeas_origFig.pdf http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/Articles/GoodIdeas_origFig....
- alain94040 17y agoIs there a way to access this without having to login to google docs?
- raphar 17y agoHey what a coincidence! I dunno why he failed with the 4th one. We maintain a leasing administration system here, and one of the most important/critical features is doing the thing he describes. You can know the exact state of any leasing contract (or a group, or all of them) by chosing a date of the future and past. That way you can compare the expected result vs reality. It is implemented fully inside a SQL DBMS (and works fine)....
- akeefer 17y agoYeah, that bit made me cringe a bit too, since you have to do the something similar for storing insurance policies (track when things become effective, including forward-dated changes, storing past versions, etc.). No predictions necessary in our case. I'm guessing dealing with the time dimension is a general property of any system that needs to store anything that qualifies as a legal contract. It is true, however, that adding in that time dimension makes everything a much, much harder problem.
- jkkramer 17y agoIf you haven't already, check out this guy's growing treasure trove of writing: http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/ http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/ Many of his articles have been posted on HN and elsewhere already.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- caffeine 17y agoA gem from that site: <Shipments> <LineItem LineNumber="1" SKU="123456"> <Order Number="555444"> <Package ShipMethod="UPS" Tracking="1Z123467WW53631"/> </Order> </LineItem> <LineItem LineNumber="2" SKU="654321"> <Order Number="555444"> <Package ShipMethod="UPS" Tracking="1Z123467WW53631"/> </Order> </LineItem> </Shipments> The designer of this schema was on crack. http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/Home/an-open-letter-to-all-those-about-to-commit-edi http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/Home/an-open-letter-to-...
- clistctrl 17y agoThat entire article is a treasure chest, almost strikes me as he wrote it during a therapy session.
- stcredzero 17y agoMakes me think of that quote from Spinal Tap. You know, that there's a fine line...
- socratees 17y ago@clarencewenham, you should have a nice blog and move your content there. Doesn't matter whether you update it frequently or not.
- clawrencewenham 17y agoI dislike the blog format, I've tried it several times and it doesn't work for me. I found that I prefer the Wiki style where you focus on a TOC. Hopefully Google will figure out how to implement RSS for GSites one day.
- nick-dap 17y agoI got to the end of the entry and felt inclined to click "Report abuse" at the bottom of the page. =D Loved it. Looking back, I have sinned as well.
- wlievens 17y agoGreat article. It's a pity that over-engineering is often the path to failure, because over-engineering is so terrifically fun to do!