
Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures? - mhrnik
After asking this question at indie hackers, I would like to know if anyone over here would like to share recent lessons from failures.<p>Let&#x27;s celebrate failures &amp; grow.
======
aguzzi94
Oh sweet sweet failures! I'll start. I recently started trying to quit
drinking for good, since it slowly turned from a thing that made me all
charismatic and happy and jumping around, to a bitter angry man. This change
started when I got together with my current girlfriend, since every time we
would go out and have a (probably more than one) drink, I would get jealous
(I'm very jealous and insecure, working on it) for stupid silly things.
Problem is the alcohol made my jealousy amplified by 100x (wish it would do
the same with my startup revenue)and I would flip out for nothing. Two weeks
ago I promised to my gf and to myself that I would have stopped with this
behavior and that I would have drunk less. No need to say, that same night, I
drank waay too much and flipped out because she just glanced at another guy
and made her cry and leave me there all alone, drunk and stupid. She couldn't
take it anymore. Fortunately, the day after we talked about it and I decided
to quit drinking cold turkey (Allen Carr's book helped a lot in this-
suggested if you're in the same boat). It has been 10 days and I haven't
touched a drop of alcohol nor I intend to. Working on my insecurity/jealousy
as well. Your turn!

~~~
samuraiseoul
I'm coming up on three years sober this Sunday.

For me the thing that helped the most was the /r/stopdrinking sub on reddit.
Reading people's experiences and techniques from all sorts of groups and
books, and reading about the triggers and follies of their relapses helped me
a lot. Also a place where I could talk about problems related to the sobriety
was nice.

If you live in a bigger city or another you may want to look for a craft soda
shop. It can be helpful when you go to a friend's where they drink. You'll
have your fancy soda so you don't feel left out when they get their fancy
beers. Also my 3 go to drinks for bars and such to not feel left out or
another are: a mock mojito, ginger beer with a splash of cranberry juice, or a
roy rogers(coke with grenadine). In that order. A lot of places can't make a
mojito, some places don't have ginger beer or they have super low quality
ginger beer, but everywhere has grenadine(which is pomegranate syrup not
cherry...) experimenting with mocktails and stuff at home may be a good thing
for you depending on what your relationship with alcohol was like.

Also last year for my soberversary I wrote an article on my sobriety and
experience in tech if you want to give it a read. A lot of my points above are
expanded and there's some good discussion in the comments.
[https://dev.to/samuraiseoul/alcohol-and-developer-
culture-19...](https://dev.to/samuraiseoul/alcohol-and-developer-culture-19b8)

Lastly, if you want to talk or vent or have questions feel free to reach out
to me either on here, or using the contacts in the article I linked to above.

I will not drink with you today, good luck and good job on the ten days!

~~~
aguzzi94
Thank you very much for the tips and insights. If I need help I will reach out
or take a look at r/stopdrinking, but rn I feel very confident about this. I
finally understood that alcohol literally has 0 upsides, therefore my desire
for it is just gone. Again thank you for your time and cheers! _Raises a cup
of orange juice in the air_

------
dukeofharen
Well, not recent, but a few years ago I deleted the production database of my
fathers rental company (whoops). The (manual) backup was a week old. Luckily,
all data was still there, but on paper (all signed contracts) so I worked
overnight to restore all data from the paper pile.

After this, I built a script that did a backup once a day and made sure I had
to go through some extra hoops to connect to the production database from my
own dev machine.

All in all, this was a good learning experience.

~~~
raxxorrax
I know how that feels. Even worse than any program or script, I especially
dislike db management tools that just allow you to fire off random queries
against the db. On the other hand you always get these little adrenaline
rushes every time you do something like that until you can confirm that you
actually fired that delete statement on the correct table... or not.

~~~
bartread
The trick is to execute a BEGIN TRANSACTION, then do whatever you need to,
then verify that you've done everything correctly (consider doing this twice).
Then, only when you're absolutely certain all is as it should be, do you
execute a COMMIT TRANSACTION.

All of this is predicated on the idea that you know exactly what changes you
need to make, exactly what state the database should be in afterwards, exactly
how to verify this, and also how to check for unintended side-effects.

I suppose the real trick is to avoid having to do this kind of thing in the
first place but, as well all know, sometimes that's just not possible.

------
cessor
Most recent: Failed to get out of bed this morning at the time I comited to
the night before. I wanted to get up at 8, be at work around 9, got in at
10/11\. Fairly recent: I have been doing it like this for three weeks now

My larger failure: I was hired as a contractor/consultant by a major media
company earlier this year to help the team develop some cloud based software.
I was hired to improve their testing karate. When I started, I was constantly
being blocked; all my ideas were rejected and the team kept reverting to they
way they had always done it. After 1.5 months the teamleader threw me out.
Another team leader was happy take me, there, things were doing great, but I
struggled to refactor the mess of TypeScript-AWS-Lambda-Cloud-Crap in a
meaningful way.

Not all of it was my fault; the situation there was horrible. But I believe
someone more experienced than me, or just someone who doesn't get as emotional
as quickly as I do could have handled the situation way better. I feel like a
failure.

I am frustrated by the situation, because while it was going on, I felt that I
was doing everything right. Not sure what my lesson is.

~~~
0x445442
> I was hired as a contractor/consultant by a major media company earlier this
> year to help the team develop some cloud based software. I was hired to
> improve their testing karate. When I started, I was constantly being
> blocked;

I'm going on a bit of a tangent here but this statement highlights some big
problems in our industry. To me, being hired as a contractor/consultant means
being hired to a job which satisfies some very specific requirements, not to
be a butt in a seat on retainer to perform any immediate task which happens to
come up.

As a contractor/consultant it seems the best approach would be to demand
specific, well defined interfaces and use cases and to provide a solution
which adheres to those interfaces and satisfies those use cases. If done
right, your solution should be verifiable with acceptance testing. If the
solution you provide meets those requirements you've fulfilled your end of the
contract. The client is free to do whatever they'd like with that solution
based on other criteria not in the contract. Based off your work, they're free
to hire you for more work or not.

All this to say, don't get down on yourself. It sounds like there's an
expectation mismatch between you and your client. It sounds like what you were
expecting is closer to what I've described and what the client was expecting
was another body to be on retainer for an hourly rate.

~~~
username90
You are probably thinking of "consultants" and not consultants. Consultants
comes in, fixes a problem, maybe educate employees about the problem and then
leave.

Take management consultants, their main job is mostly to go in and fix other
managers messes and possible educate them so it wont happen again or get them
replaced.

Software consultants can often have very similar roles, a company have a
problem with producing software, they take in a consultant to fix the issue
because they themselves don't know how, the consultant comes in and fixes the
issue and in the best case educates your workers so they can handle these
issues themselves in the future. This is what a company typically wants when
they hire a consultant to fix a problem, not a person who only solves already
well defined problems.

Example: You have a new cloud based solution but prod is often broken, you
hire a consultant to flesh out your deployment strategy to make it more
robust, he comes in, creates a basic deployment strategy and shows your team
how it works and how to add more tests to it, then he leaves. Production
failures go down and your team is now stronger as a result. This is an ideal
software consultant.

Of course you also have "consultants" who are just normal employees with less
legal rights, those are more like what you are talking about.

------
thiscatis
I once put adding the recipients for an email to the wrong loop which meant if
you were the last user in the database you would receive the email 10.000
times if there were 10.000 users. If you were the user before 9999 times etc..
only the first user that signed up received it once (my test account). So I
only found out when the client called me that all their mandrill credits had
ran out in a few seconds.

In startup failures: didn’t listen to my gut feeling and let my cofounder pile
on more features and quibble about the design for a year before validating a
single feature with a potential customer. We didn’t make it with that one...

~~~
aguzzi94
haha the first one is funny. About the second one, yes it's important to talk
to users as soon as possible.

------
marmaduke
I spent 3 years building a complex statistical model in Stan, only to double
its performance with a trivial linear regression.

The growth is realizing that sometimes variance in the data means that really
cool model/code you want to write isn't useful, and there's always a trade-off
between elegance and utility (if the two aren't in fact opposites)

~~~
mojomark
Ha, this is a great reflection. In a different domain I had a similar
experience - working for about 2 years on an unmanned vehicle design I thought
was revolutionary, only for a colleage to review the design and point out that
reverting to a traditional propulsion engine increases performance by a factor
of 2. I felt like a balloon deflating; alas life goes on.

I suppose the lesson learned is avoid working in a vacuum of a project for
long stretches and instead ask for a variety of consult from colleagues early
and regularly.

~~~
marmaduke
That's a good remark as well: we didn't have effective iterations with
feedback, just long arcs of speculative changes.

------
Insanity
A few days ago I updated to a new version of Go and noticed a perf regression
on one of the programs for a cloudspanner backup. A really bad regression, so
I thought the update must have changed something to cause this, and started to
debug it.

After a few hours, and help of a colleague, we figured out the issue. I wasn't
using the companies wired connection but instead was using the much slower
wifi..

~~~
thoughtpalette
Oh man, this reminds me. Trying to debug/work in changes for a web app and
refreshing the production server instead of looking at localhost. Wondering
why my changes are not working. It's taken over a half hour sometimes before
realizing I'm looking at the wrong domain.

------
elp
Last week.

Updating DNSSEC infrastructure for a bunch of zones we manage. As part of that
update I added extra DS* records at the parent zones. We were using SHA-256
and since our new signer generated SHA-384 signatures as well I included them.
All nice and standard. Our tests were all good. dnsviz.net said everything was
good, but... It turns out the version of Unbound that was included in older
versions of Ubuntu and Redhat can't handle SHA-384 DS records and instead of
ignoring them like they are supposed to simply fail validation.

Naturally those obsolete nameservers are in use by fun people like Comcast who
proceeded to drop lookups for the entire zone. This particular zone was the
major commercial zone for a small country ie. co.tld. Around a million
subdomains.

Fortunately it this was a subdomain inside a country so we could get the
SHA-384 signatures dropped at the parent quickly, but yeah tracking down the
problem was ... Lets just say it was a bad day.

I wonder if I can put "I broke the internet" on my CV?

\--- * English for everyone who doesn't speak DNSSEC: DNSSEC is kind of like
SSL but for DNS. A DS (Delegation Signer) record is a hash that goes in the
parent zone so that resolvers can verify you are using the correct DNSKEYs.
Its kind of like X509 certificates in reverse.

DNSSEC is VERY complicated and brittle with many ways to hurt yourself.

~~~
tptacek
Can I ask why your organization bothers with DNSSEC, when virtually nobody in
the industry does? Can I take a wild guess that you're located somewhere in
Europe? DNSSEC is a dead letter in the US.

~~~
elp
We're a backend registry operator. ICANN requires it for the new generic TLDs
and all the ccTLDs we support expect the same "best practice".

ICANN that wonderful organization that requires us to have TLSA records for
our RDAP servers even though browser support out the box is zero.

~~~
tptacek
You have my deep sympathies.

------
cambalache
I was laid off from a middle manager position , I was with a H1-B like Visa
(not in the US) the only chance to stay in my host country was to open a
business and get an investor visa. I did that with a business partner, the
business went down, my partner fled with the remaining money and now the
government is giving me 2 months to leave since I am not longer and investor.
Good times. I have always coded so I am moving into that direction. So
although this is not a thread for that, if you are looking for a Rails or
Phoenix guy please reach to me. I work with Python too.

~~~
vincvinc
Which host country? People on HN might be inclined to help.

~~~
cambalache
It does not matter now, because I need to leave in 2 months tops otherwise I
will be deported. I am planning to move to the Americas south cone (Argentina
or Brazil) so it is preferable an opportunity there or remote than in my
current host country.

------
mlacks
I failed to start a business that would provide reliable income post-military
enlistment. I tried for maybe six good years a few ideas: investing in real
estate, running facebook ads for business, and building routers were some of
my best projects with foreseeable upside and a runway towards sustainability.
I failed to focus on just one or two core products and this - combined with my
active duty work schedule- really made it difficult to see each project
through the tough parts.

Its not a total failure; I have a steady career with great benefits that I can
retire from in ten more years (total of 20) with a pension. I've learned to
focus on my core competencies which has of course catapulted my progress in
the selected field. I miss my side projects but I know now that I really can't
do everything at once.

~~~
mhrnik
I am not sure how hard is for you to not start side project again but you can
start with small steps.

------
woutr_be
I've been really struggling with my weight for the past few years. It has
gotten to a point where it's affecting my social life and my mental health.
I've always been fairly introverted and shy, but nowadays I find myself
sitting at home wishing I was out with friends, or wishing someone would text
me.

I'm a fairly active gym-goer, but I have incredibly bad eating habits, so
instead of losing, or just maintaining weight, I've been slowly gaining it.
This combined with my general shyness and low confidence, has caused me to
just cancel social events, and stay home. And of course eat fast food to
compensate. I'm struggling with sleep, and I'm at a point where I don't care
much for work anymore (I've been arriving late, and leaving early for the past
few months). I realize I'm borderline depressed, and my best guess is that my
weight is the major cause of this.

~~~
Slimbo
Try to stay positive, looks like you have a good idea what the issues are
which means you can plan to make it better. Ideally you should do your best to
find someone who can help by simply talking these issues though, ideally face
to face. It looks to me that it's food that's the problem rather than your
weight, so why not look at that first. With a longer term view; try to reverse
that trend of weight slowly going on, to weight slowly going off. Things that
worked for me are intermittent fasting (mostly because it's easier to follow
than diets), and some rules around processed food. Try to go with foods with
under 5 ingredients, prioritising foods that are low in sugars or flours
(wheat, cornflour, etc). If you slip, don't sweat it, just get back to it as
soon as you can.

~~~
woutr_be
Thanks, my weight is the aftermath of the unhealthy food, and I do consider it
my biggest problem. I constantly feel embarrassed when doing things, I feel
shy when meeting new people, constantly wondering whether they're judging me
on my weight or not. I've been trying for years to eat healthier, tried
intermittent fasting as well. Usually it works for a few days, and then I
screw it up over the weekend. I think that constant failure is having a
negative impact on everything else too.

~~~
Slimbo
I do IF weekdays only, as I know I'll screw it up weekends. It's not as
effective as if I did it every day obviously, but it's still better than not
doing it at all!

------
ryanmercer
My life mostly.

I'm 34, have a GED, have a bankruptcy, do not have a degree, do not have some
sort of skill where I _might_ be able to get around not having a degree like
some sort of CS skills, I basically make a little less each year due to
inflation and increase in insurance costs not being higher than the tiny merit
based increase my employer gives, I've never had a relationship as an adult,
I'm repeatedly denied jobs because of lack of degree and/or my bankruptcy
and/or the fact my job doesn't really transfer to anything else and I've been
doing it for 13 years, I can't afford to even contribute enough to my 401k to
get the full employer match.

Even someone, with considerable means that told me thier success is purely due
to luck (and obviously through chances they've been given by mentors), told me
that they are sorry/find it unfortunate that a degree is treated as a de facto
dues card... yet the past 2 companies they've ran, require degrees for their
entry level work and when I flat out asked for any job that could give me new
experience, asked to take a chance on me, I got an "I'm real busy right now,
but I'd love to work together some day".

I could try and get a degree, but I don't test well and while I'm quite
intelligent school was always difficult for me. So taking out tens of
thousands of dollars of loans and spending my free time doing something I'll
almost certainly hate and/or be frustrated by, just to bury myself in debt for
the second time in my life and graduate around 40 to compete against 20-22
year old people for entry level jobs in a new field with my fancy piece of
financed paper... doesn't sound very smart, does it?

In literally hundreds of appplications in the past 3 years I've had 3
interviews, 2 of them declined and the 3rd I declined when they told me the
starting pay was a 5$ and change less than I make an hour now and less than 4$
above minimum wage. Doing roughly what I already do, just for freight on ships
instead of planes.

Yup.

Basically my life is a complete failure. If I dropped dead today my mother,
that lives with me, would notice and honestly that's probably it. I'm a wholly
replaceable cog in a machine.

(obligatory disclaimer: not suicidal, just honest and mostly defeated).

~~~
tomcam
Hey, Ryan, thanks for sharing. It's hard. I have some thoughts--you didn't ask
for feedback, so feel free to ignore. Also feel free to contact me via my
profile address. No, I won't be selling your anything or trying to make money
off you. But man, do I understand hard times.

I anticipated being in your position when I was younger and my technique has
worked repeatedly. I'm about twice your age and was never denied a job due to
lack of a degree. That includes a stint as a full time employee at the
original Really Big Tech Company.

My path has always been the same: get really good (top 80%, not top 1%) at
something most people aren't good at. That way I can get a job regardless of
my requirements. Back in my day that was assembly, systems programming in C,
and the Windows API. Obviously not where you want to be today.

As I see it, you have some great resources. You're willing to be a little
humble, you have a place to stay, you've got brains.

Have you considered contacting a few recruiters to see what they're looking
for, then taking the time to acquire and/or sharpen your skills? These days
I'm guessing it's something like C#, Python, maybe Go, but I'm spitballing.
Point is, you still have plenty of time to get super strong at something. It
may take a year, but it'd be better to earn $75K in 2 years at a job in
Minnesota than languish at a dead end gig now.

Another reason to get excellent at something is it imparts a confidence that
makes you more attractive. I'm fat and ugly but I pay attention to people.
Being a good programmer and a rewarding listener meant I never, ever had
trouble meeting awesome women

My very best to you. That can't have been fun to share.

~~~
ryanmercer
>Have you considered contacting a few recruiters to see what they're looking
for, then taking the time to acquire and/or sharpen your skills? These days
I'm guessing it's something like C#, Python, maybe Go, but I'm spitballing.
Point is, you still have plenty of time to get super strong at something. It
may take a year, but it'd be better to earn $75K in 2 years at a job in
Minnesota than languish at a dead end gig now.

I've no interest whatsoever in programming. I tinkered enough back in the day
on MUDs and in a programming vocational class in high school that I know it is
absolutely not for me. Even hammering out some really simple QBASIC games from
scratch was incredibly frustrating for me.

As far as recruiters in general, I tried to use one a few years ago. They got
my an interview, at a company with 4 employees in the US where I was told
during the interview "IF we hire you, we do not provide insurance, my wife
works at Eli Lilly so I am covered under her insurance" and it was a
significant pay cut to do the same thing I do now and when I told them in the
interview I would not be open to an offer I never heard from the recruiter
again.

From my impression recruiters mostly want programmers or people with MBAs for
placing in lower-level corporate positions, at least these are the sorts I've
found in Google queries but perhaps I just don't know what I should be
searching for.

~~~
tomcam
It's not a programming thing in particular. Based on the odds I mentioned
programming but my point is, you've got what you need to move ahead. My
strategy is to figure out a saleable skill you can tolerate, then work your
tail off until you're better than most people at it.

There are a zillion recruiters out there, but I'd respectfully suggest that
your best bet would be to listen to what they need, not worry how one got you
a particularly lousy offer. Most people are bad at what they do.

I'll not bother you again but I wanted to know you're heard, and not
completely alone.

------
derpherpsson
Getting a job at a huge megacorp has shown to be a failure for me.

Why?

At my previous job - a small firm - I spent 8 hours actually working, each
day. At my new job I am doing bureaucracy all days long, and very little
actual work. Sometimes I come home without actually having had _any_ real work
done for the entire day.

I flipped out after maybe 3-4 weeks, because Not Doing Actual Work turns out
to be extremely stressful for me. I felt guilty for not achieving anything.

But no one cares. This is "normal" at my new job. I brought it up with my boss
and told him how I felt. I also told him that, I can not stay at this job for
too long, since it will in the long run be really bad for my career. If I
don't write code, I will eventually become bad at it. Weirdly, he said that he
understood and thought that more of my coworkers need to realize this, before
it's too late for them.

So now I am planning my escape. I am a bit worried that only working for this
company like 8-10 months will look bad at my CV... I have not decided how long
I should stay.

~~~
bartread
> So now I am planning my escape. I am a bit worried that only working for
> this company like 8-10 months will look bad at my CV.

Don't worry about it. If your entire CV were full of jobs where you've spent <
12 months (contracting aside), it would a red flag. The odd one here or there
doesn't matter: everyone has a job that doesn't work out/isn't for them from
time to time.

(Also, I too have worked for a megacorp - as a contractor - and it, quite
literally, nearly drove me off the rails. I lasted 8 months. Who knew that
getting next to nothing done, and being paid for it, could be so stressful?
But it really is. You're not wrong about it being bad for your career either.
I don't have _loads_ of data, but I have found that developers who've spent
too long in that kind of environment don't do so well in our selection process
so, if anything, leaving after a short time will only be a positive for your
career.)

------
Gibbon1
I spent three hours digging through my build system to figure out why the
compiler couldn't find a header file named 'blahblah .h'

------
zhdc1
I haven't been able to motivate myself to finish several projects that are
90-95% done.

~~~
yonixw
Same. But I found a loophole in my mind. I make a second phase. By expanding
the project scope and targets even more, you are required to finish the first
phase bugs and fixes.

The only problem is you now have the second phase only 90% completed. Here
comes phase 3 ...

------
cirgue
I’ve been building a forum. The software part is done, I worked for like 9
months on and off to get it deployed, and now I just don’t have the motivation
to do the work involved in building the community.

~~~
scrollaway
This reminds me of why you don't make your own game engine when you are
building a game. You'll spend months or years working on exactly what isn't a
game.

You built a forum, that's great. If you set out to build a forum, you
succeeded. If you set out to build a community, you just wasted a bunch of
time on doing something only loosely related at best.

So the question is, what did you actually set out to do? If you are
considering this a failure, then you can turn it into a success by releasing
the forum software for others to use.

~~~
cirgue
I set out to build a product I would want to use from scratch. I succeeded in
that I deployed a web app that does everything it's supposed to do (More or
less a Metafilter clone). This is the first thing I've ever put on the
internet, and I definitely learned a huge amount (my day job is in ML and most
of my side projects are data/stats/ML related). I guess the answer is that I
set out to do both. I did one, and have been dragging my feet on the other.

~~~
scrollaway
Sounds so glass-half-empty. In my book you succeeded at one of your goals. :)

------
keerthiko
I once was changing the pricing for the primary subscription product for all
8000+ users registered in our CMS, and accidentally resumed the subscription
and charged 300+ customers $75 who had cancelled the plan months or even years
ago.

The payment platform's API's `updatePlan` function had an optional flag for
`reactivateSubscriptionAndBillImmediately` with default value of `true`, as it
turns out.

I had to stay up till 6AM writing a script to detect all of them, refund their
money, send an apology email with some free credit, and cancel their
subscriptions, and also write a note to my cofounders outlining the situation
so they could crisis manage while I was out cold.

After which I wrote an angry email to the billing platform (probably harsher
than they deserved given I didn't test their API appropriately on our dev
instance). To their credit, they promptly changed the default. They were a
young company and apparently not that many clients had used that API endpoint
before.

It resulted in some very angry customers threatening to cite us to various
business practice enforcement bodies around the world, but all in all some
floor-sweeping profuse apologies and prompt action laid concerns to rest and
no harm was done.

------
closingin
Past winter, I had to deploy a new version of a package that was used by a lot
of our applications (at least 5 apps, some for our customers, and some
internal ones).

Because it was a "simple" package, we did not have any deployment system
ready, and deploying was just SSH/SCP commands that created a directory with
the package version and upload my dist. I forgot to bump the package version,
and ended up wiping a working and in-use package. The problem is that this
package can only work up to a specific angular version (which wasn't set in
the package.json, so my build installed the wrong one), therefore the only
thing that our applications were producing was a blank page.

And because I had wiped the original package, I had no way to know which
angular version we needed, and we had to find a cached version to get it, by
reading the angular license comment in the minified code. The shittiest 5 mins
of my life, even though I'm sure no one noticed it.

What I learned from this : don't speak with someone else while deploying, huge
focus loss.

PS : The company is an ISP.

------
throwaway8879
More like a decade of failures really, resulting mostly from hard addiction to
drugs and drinking that led to a failed suicide attempt in 2017. Still
recovering from it. Initially there was hatred and resentment towards people
who "saved" me, but I can see why people would do it for their fellow human,
especially as time goes by. I'm 30 now and starting over...

~~~
derpherpsson
You are the most free when you have nothing to lose. A failed suicide attempt
can be thought of as that Every Single Moment from that point in life is a
_Bonus_.

I know because I was there :) I _should have_ died a few years ago, but didnt.
Not giving a fsck and also being adventurous is a nice combo.

------
tekstar
I wrote a video synthesizer based on the idea behind cha/ves, but used an
Arduino to generate the oscillator waves that control the VGA pins. I used an
Arduino Uno that was laying around. It ended up spending most of the time just
reading the MIDI data. It could do about 10 "pixels" per screen refresh. It
was neat to see how slow the code I wrote was though, if I accidentally added
a modulo or divide operation I would get half as many pixels onto the screen.
Too bad the Arduino standard library uses % for serial buffer checking,
random, and other features.. it made some cool glitches but was just too slow.
Moving on to a raspberry pi and working through the book of shaders now.

------
iKnowWhyIamHere
I'm a pre-final year undergrad failing to get a research internship in
Computer Vision/Deep Learning/Information Retrieval abroad(I'm from India)
because of poor grades(GPA 6/10). I have won Kaggle Medal, various deep
learning/machine learning Hackathons, got a job(Data Scientist) offer by the
end of sophomore year and a few interview calls in the last 5 months all from
great start-ups. They all didn't knew I was a still student or God knows why
they approached. Still nothing is helping.

I don't know how to approach the next two years. I don't wanna work in
industry at least for now and enroll in a MS program.

~~~
bbimbop
this is more of a humble brag than a failure

------
muddi900
My current venture is has been a week away from insolvency for the past 6
months.

------
haolez
I had the opportunity to receive relevant angel investment to my newly born
startup if I could find a cofounder (the investor asked me to not be a solo
founder).

The person that I chose was a close friend that I’ve worked with before, but
deep down I knew he wasn’t really entrepreneurial material.

In the end, he accepted, just to turn around and say “no” when we got the term
sheet to sign (“it’s just too much work for me”). The investor aborted the
offer.

I’ve made a bad choice because he was my friend and I valued that above the
business parameters. It was a terrible mistake.

------
HNLurker2
I failed starting running. I failed getting into my preferable school and
disappointed my family I failed getting a gf this year also (3 months left we
all going to make it)

~~~
psv1
The last one is more likely to happen and things work out better when it isn't
an explicit goal.

------
michaelbrooks
I failed to start an IG video channel talking about starting your own
contracting business. Released two or three videos and then just stopped, and
probably won't go back.

However, I have now started a Youtube channel for vlogging which is one of my
old loves. I had a vlogging channel in 2006 and stopped because of bullies and
life getting in the way. Feel like I'm getting my creative side back which has
been a revelation for me.

------
mister_hn
Most recent: trying to convince my superior to throw away our old Java
monoliths (still running on Java5/6) and start from scratch with other
technology than Java, in a cloud-native manner. Still, my superior is a super
Java-fan and has summoned fears about changing everything, because people who
worked on those monoliths are long gone from company.

~~~
sbierwagen
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-
should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-
do-part-i/)

~~~
mister_hn
yes, I know, but from scratch in the sense of porting the portions of code in
another environment and at same time using unit tests and code coverage tool
to isolate the parts and adapt to a better architecture.

------
otobrglez
As a technology director succumbed to the (product) managements wish for new
functionalities over the scalability.

Now we have a lot of useful and legitimately needed functionality and
unscalable system.

Make sure that you always measure and present the numbers of your systems
abilities along with new product features to the management.

It is a very tricky balance. Hard to master. Communicate!

------
platoscubicle
I've been failing to grow. I feel stagnant at my current job and yearn for
greener pastures. Bad habits prevent me from being productive in my spare
time. Very little action is being taken to improve my situation and I feel
like a slave to the habits I've cultivated.

------
pkphilip
Plenty of failures. Too many to count.

------
_Understated_
I tried to create a blogging platform called Readology but I knew that with
other commitments (day job, family) I needed a business partner to really get
it off the ground.

I couldn't devote all the required time to it so I've stopped it now.

Partner in tow, I am working on something else though.

------
prune998
I had a lot of failures since my company switched to Azure AKS... losing
clusters, losing API server=crashing operators and so much more... Lesson in :
don't go with AKS !

------
ulisesrmzroche
I was writing a series about ecoterrorist sorcerers but then I started a tough
contract at work that took all my energy away

The MVP was promising tho

------
Jedi72
I've been trying to customize emacs into a useful editor for weeks now.

~~~
AndrewOMartin
This sounds like the start of a Zen Koan.

A master approaches an apprentice, the master has a software engineering
project for them both to work on, and tells the apprentice to make it clear
when they were ready to start.

Weeks pass and the apprentice never says anything, but just hacks away at
their own machine.

The master asks them why they aren't ready, and the apprentice replies, "We'll
be ready once we've customized vim/emacs into a useful editor. But don't blame
me for the delay, you have just installed stock vim/emacs, you haven't even
started your customization", the master replied "I've already finished".

Then the apprentice was enlightened.

------
omergultekin
The key to the success lock is the unsuccessful experience.

------
mikekchar
I couldn't think of something to write here. That was probably the most recent
one. I have lots of others, though.

