
Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects? - aarongough
I think everyone has at least one of these projects: something that seemed like an awesome idea when you started it, then mid-way through you realize how bad it was for such-and-such reason.<p>Going through my old files this afternoon in an effort to reclaim some HDD space reminded me of some of the crazier ideas I've had. It's always great to follow up your ideas, but it's even better to realize when they're totally crazy!<p>I'm sure that all of you have some great stories, and who knows, maybe our crazy ideas will inspire someone else to write their own crazy, and possibly great, app!
======
pavel_lishin
Prison Buddy Search.

Basically, I wanted something that would let you search for your high school
friends in all the jails & prisons, state and federal. Optionally I thought
about hooking it into facebook, for automatic updates.

"Ben Jerry has just been imprisoned for 5 years for aggravated assault!"

Hope someone doesn't steal my idea; then again, if they do that means I'd get
to reap the fun benefit without the hard work!

~~~
rrival
In the same vein, AdoptACon.com - trade prisoners like playing cards

~~~
pavel_lishin
That's a pretty neat idea, actually. You could start a "fantasy" game based on
that, since I assume that some basic crime statistics are available via FOIA.

Except that these stats won't change much...

~~~
rrival
and mugshots. like baseball cards.

------
dfranke
<http://dfranke.us/pfs.html>

Though, I've recently been contacted by a high school student who intends to
implement a subset of the idea for some sort of school project. I'll be
interested to see what he does with it.

~~~
zeckalpha
Slow to load, but interesting concept.

~~~
dfranke
Really? It loads instantly for me, and the server is basically idle.

~~~
jeroen
It's very fast for me too.

~~~
zeckalpha
It loaded much faster this access. Must have been something on my end
temporarily.

------
old-gregg
<http://pikluk.com>

I consider this crazy because abandoning the development and having it just
sit there seemed crazy to a lot of people. Pikluk was a damn great idea with a
few paying customers who are absolutely in love with a _tiny_ percentage of
what actually got implemented.

But in the end, after exhausting some personal savings, we just could not find
the resources to keep working on it and we lacked PR to sell it on eBay for a
six-figure sum.

~~~
dugmartin
btw, I just read your user bio page. It says "Before web I've been doing
fairly low-level high-perf C++/Win32 work for industrial automation". That is
my exact background - my case with C/assembly working on the real time OS for
GE Fanuc's 90-70 programmable logic controller. What drives real time systems
engineers to want to build kid friendly interfaces?

~~~
aarongough
Probably the fact that building a service so user-friendly and easy to use
that a child can enjoy it is the exact opposite of the crazy stuff that you
have to do to build embedded and real-time systems...

I salute you guys! Without you the world as we know it would not turn. Now,
I'm off to code in Ruby...

------
apgwoz
I have a whole directory on my personal laptop of abandoned projects, that
I've worked on over the past few years. One that I still would love to see
built on is the concept of a Fisheye Editor. I wrote a prototype in Python Tk:
<http://apgwoz.com/fisheye-edit/>

Another idea I had, which I thought was good, was building a Twitter like site
to track what you were eating, and marry the concept with Reddit style voting
and a collaborative filtering + Bayes classifier to find new things to eat. I
had a working demo, but never tried to promote it. The idea of the Bayes
classifier was to eliminate ingredients you strongly disliked. Not sure if
what I did worked entirely correctly since I didn't amass enough users to get
feedback.

~~~
kidko
This seems like it could go places, but I can't seem to grab a copy of the
file. The server keeps running it!

~~~
dkersten
Same for me. Pity, I really wanted to try this.

~~~
apgwoz
Sorry. I explained in your sibling comment. I put it here:
<http://apgwoz.com/hacks/fisheyeedit.py>

------
erik
<http://www.imageboard.net/> (possibly NSFW content)

It's sort of a pixel art discussion board. You would have to check it out to
really understand it.

It was fun to build, but it would be hard to commercialize. Plus nurturing a
community that is more interested in quality art than anonymous penis drawings
would be more work than I have motivation for.

~~~
PebblesRox
Move it farther from a text-thread format. Explore some undiscovered
territory! For example, a slideshow would be a great way to view replies. I
love the way people are making little cartoons, but the replies just keep
sliding to the right. They should just change, with some way to control the
speed. (Maybe the author of the reply can set the default amount of time for
the image to appear before the next one comes.) So many possibilities!

~~~
jward
This functionality already exists! It was one of my first times futzing with
javascript so it's slow and clunky and could be done a lot better.

<http://www.imageboard.net/921/slideshow/>

~~~
PebblesRox
What do I need to do so that this page doesn't appear when I try to save my
avatar? <http://www.imageboard.net/create/avatar/>

------
tkiley
This: <http://votesimple.org/>

I would like to see this kind of thing in the USA someday, but there are some
pretty significant practical hurdles in the way. I think it's possible to
design around the problems, but I just haven't had the time + energy to move
forward.

~~~
tierack
There are a couple of reasons I'm not a huge fan of plans like this. I have a
friend running for state legislature under a similar goal (though only
district residents would vote on his votes, not all state residents), and
these are the two big points I made to him.

1\. Most people aren't equipped to think about the kind of issues that come up
with legislation. There are subtle interactions between laws, small economic
provisions can have huge market effects, and many sentences end up meaning the
exact opposite of what they seem to say. Ideally (for me, though you may
disagree), the person getting voted in is equipped by experience, education,
and general smarts. I want someone voting who is studying law, proposed and
current, and making informed decisions. I don't always get that, but I'm more
likely to get that with one person than with many.

2\. Many Americans are terribly prejudiced. Pick any poll you have handy
showing that more than 50% of Americans believe in something ridiculous and
imagine them voting on a law related to that belief. Historically, perhaps,
this vision is dimmer. It's a cultural issue, not an absolute one, so if we
get better as a people, this argument against will become less important.

I do like when these kinds of ideas are brought up, however. Lots of
interesting talk happens.

~~~
aarongough
I agree with you on both points. I have had several similar discussion with a
political analyst friend of mine.

I think that because of the way things run now we are also predisposed to
think that other people will take care of the minutiae. The only problem is
that in a direct democracy there is no 'other people'...

I think that a direct democracy is possible, but I think that the transition
to it and the period afterward would be very rocky, possibly rocky enough to
bring back the old system.

------
aarongough
While going through my old files today I have found 3 already!

\- A JavaScript framework: Like jQuery wasn't good enough?

\- A client-side search engine: Used AJAX calls to crawl a website and return
results... Can you say slooow? Yuck.

\- Hoppy: A simple little program that creates several new versions of itself,
with names generated by a markov chain, then runs those new versions after a
time delay. I never inflicted this upon anyone else, but trying to shut it
down without re-booting was hell!

~~~
rick2047
mine was something similar to hoppy.What I basically tried to do was write a
ruby script that generated newer ruby scripts.And what did all these ruby
scripts do?they scaned the long long equation and then try to put in different
values in it and solve them for one variable. All this was so random and vague
that I had to abandon it after about 66 minutes into it.

~~~
tocomment
I made a Python script that copied itself and launched the copies (It had the
ability to mutate too though by randomly changing the copies). I thought
eventually it would evolve into a sentient being. But it would just tie up all
my resources and freeze the computer.

One time something interesting happened though. I noticed the latest copies
had commented out the mutation part of the code. They had "evolved" to not
mutate. I'm guessing that was the best strategy to make viable offspring.

My take away lesson was that mutation has to come from the environment for
early life forms to advance.

~~~
DrJokepu
That's exactly what happened when procariotes evolved to eucariotes and
dropped RNA in favour of DNA for storing genetic information which is much
more stable so mutatuons are much more rare (our body still uses RNA just not
for genetic information)

------
falsestprophet
After I learned Java (huge upgrade from QBasic btw) when I was a sophomore in
high school in 2003, I built an online storefront application. Cute maybe?
But, after infinite feature creep (not that I knew what that was at the time),
I ended up trying to build what was effectively Viaweb (not that I knew what
that was at the time).

Predictably, this was a disaster.

In retrospect, I do not recommend Viaweb as an introductory _Hello World_ web
app. (I also do not recommend Java web programming in general.)

------
elboheme
This: <http://mentorapp.org/>

For me this was a potential solution to one of the fundamental problems with
education: it is full of unchallenging, unrelated-to-life, contrived tasks.
When any process (creative writing, math, coding) is harnessed to a
fascinating, meaningful-to-students goal I believe you get motivation. And
creativity.

So this service would just help mentors and apprentices in all sorts of fields
find each other.

This idea was originally inspired by Dr. Tae's presentation:

"Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning: Why is skateboarding a
better model for education than school?"

~~~
jbr
Wow, I've been thinking of building something like this lately fairly
seriously. Why did you stop?

I wasn't able to find anything at mentorapp.org; has the hosting expired?

I'd love to talk about possibly collaborating on this (although I think it
would be tough to monetize, so I see it as more of a "pro-bono side project").
My contact info is in my profile.

------
dpifke
I spent a not-insignificant amount of time a few years back writing poker
bots. It's one of those projects that's really easy to do, but really
difficult to do well. It didn't help that I dove right into coding without the
benefit of having read any of the academic research on the subject (i.e.
<http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/>).

I will say that the time spent made me a better poker player and taught me
some nifty things about AI and game theory to which I wouldn't have otherwise
been exposed.

------
8plot
A mechanical ant trap/killer to be the only "conventional weapon" for my war
on ants.

I attract a line of ants to eat the bait (in my case, cat food), then
periodically suck (or blow) ants into an un-escapable garbage bag, but only a
few at a time to keep the line of ants stable. (or until the entire colony is
exhausted)

Compared to the traditional poison method, it is much more satisfying for me
to dispose of a garbage bags full of ants which I might make good use of. The
mass of corpses could be good fertilizer, or bird feed.

~~~
euccastro
Is it too inconvenient to keep your (including your cat's) food out of their
reach, so they'll just go away?

~~~
PebblesRox
<http://xkcd.com/382/>

~~~
8plot
Even cooler, mosquito lasers!
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html>

------
arohner
Competing with Visa and Paypal, by using digital certificates, public keys,
etc to cut down on fraud.

In the right mood, sometimes I think my current project is crazy, but I'm
sticking with it!

~~~
aarongough
Yeah I know that feeling...

I've been working on a CMS called Picl for the last 6 months or so, it's
already in production with a few client websites. But every so often I look at
it and go 'why? wasn't there enough CMS's already?'. I just have to remember
to look at the original design goals and remember that it is still a good
idea!

------
polvi
Sexual Assault Facebook app.

Allow people to report when they are victims of sexual assault. I started
discussions with the local sexual assault center, but after hearing feedback,
it seemed like people did not want stuff like "3 of your friends were
inappropriately touched last night" popping up on Facebook. Although, I do
still think part of the problem with sexual assault on college campuses is
that nobody talks about it.

Has a possible business model too: rev share with legal teams.

Feel free to run with the idea!

------
modoc
\- TV Channel that streams video from various strip clubs.

\- Filter than mounts to the front of your tv and polarizes in alternating
directions based on a sync signal hidden in the channel that lets you do 3D tv
at home for cheap.

------
dangrover
A domain-specific language for describing music at a higher level of
abstraction.

<http://svn.wonderwarp.com/tuplet/>

Decided to work on something profitable instead.

------
andymoe
<http://www.magicbeef.com> It's going to be huge... As soon as I get some free
time and finish it. GAE and full of bugs ;-p

------
ErrantX
I have a couple.

Biggest one was a social networking site (which technically is still in my
mind, but pretty dead) to compete with the big boys. In the end I was offered
enough money for the work I had done on caching and some other bits that it
was silly not to take it. :)

I'd love to have another go some day.

There was Qoppa which was intended to be an extensible Browser game server
written in Python. That fell apart when there was no one much to work on the
artistic side. <http://hg.errant.me.uk/errant/qoppa> (dont smirk :D)

What else. A quite-advanced attempt to write a distributed file store for
really large write-once/read many files (2GB+) in Python. I got as far as
implementing a REST interface and then got bored of the tedious work on the
replication side.

A CMS/Blog tool specifically for magazines. Gave up when it turned into a
massive amount of work and the magazine who tentatively were my first client
decided not to "go online".

I could list a few more. My theory is just to keep plugging away at a few
projects till one makes it. I was nearly there with the social network.

Currently Im planning to try and assault the blogging empire with a Wordpress
competitor.

~~~
apgwoz
You don't need fancy art to make an interesting game.

~~~
zeckalpha
Who said fancy was desired? Artistic direction, especially in games, refers to
much more than just graphics.

------
mtrimpe
Building a native database in Perl.

I had already built the storage subsystem, indexing and single-column search
... when I found out that the size of data types differs across platforms and
I had hardcoded the size throughout the database.

~~~
revorad
Haha if only you'd read this -
<http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/introduction.html>

------
brianlash
<http://FleeTheShame.com>

A "Post Secret" type of a blog that would allow people to anonymously own up
to those times they broke the law and got away with it. Bad idea all around.

~~~
mtrimpe
I actually kind of like it. I do hope you weren't planning on making any money
off of it though ;)

------
jacquesm
\- a rating system for ex husbands and ex wives (exs4all)

\- a search engine (noseo)

\- an operating system called younite (unix + dynamite ;) )

I'm not proud of any of these but they were fun to build at the time, even if
the projects went nowhere I learned a lot from them. The search engine was
done using 'leo', a literate programming editor. That alone was worth the
experience.

------
ratsbane
This goes back a ways. In the late '80s, when I was in college, I saw a story
in the local newspaper about the city school system. They were totally jammed
up trying to make schedules for the school bus routes. I'm thinking they might
have even delayed the opening of school a few days, but I might be
misremembering that. I'd been studying algorithms and this was, to me,
obviously a traveling salesman problem taken to the next level. I spent
several months researching the problem. I met with the guy at city schools who
ran the office that made the routes. I got a friend's brother who was a
fireman to give me a whole stack of large extremely high-resolution blueprint
street maps. I spent an astonishing number of hours encoding street
intersections and soforth into coordinates (using yardstick and multicolor
pencils) and entering them into a QBasic program I wrote running on a PC under
DOS. I wrote a functioning routing program that, given the map data and a
bunch of addresses, would create a reasonable set of routes.

In the course of doing all of that work I really learned the meaning of tree-
spanning algorithms, big O notation, and soforth - but I never created a
usable SYSTEM. The map data was just too huge; I only encoded a small part of
it. Also, the amount of computation required grew so fast that I realized if I
ever did succeed in encoding the entire map the amount of computational time
to produce usable routes would be impossibly huge.

My grades suffered horribly and I found actual paying work writing software
for an insurance company. There were other issues, too. Finally I had to just
quit the whole thing.

In hindsight, had I had access to Tiger/Line (I think it existed then but cost
far more than I could afford) and been more advanced as a programmer and had
more (any) support the problem could have been solved. Tom-Tom, Google Maps',
et al route-finding fascinates me. It's obvious that they don't do a complete
graph search - I think they use clever tricks like identify arterial roads
limiting the graph search to those roads - things like that.

------
dugmartin
An AJAX api library where you specify types and RESTful actions and it builds
an object with type-checked methods.

The code looks like:

    
    
      var api = new AjaxAPI(
      "page = /testapi.php \n" + 
      "mydate= (^\\d\\d-\\d\\d-\\d\\d\\d\\d$) \n" +
      "int=(^\\d?+$) \n" +
      "text = (^.+$) \n" +
      
      "get_messages : GET /messages/project={int}/date={mydate}/ \n" +
      "get_comments: GET /comments/project={int} \n" +
      "save_comment:POST /save_comment?project={int}&comment={text} \n" +
      "delete_comment :POST /delete_comment/project={int}?comment_id={int} \n" +
      "echo: GET {page}?_method=echo&[foo={int}]&name={text}&[baz=(text)] \n");
    
      api.call.get_messages({project: 12, comment_id: 21}, function (request, response) {...});
    

Its done and been sitting on my hard drive for 2-3 years.

~~~
geuis
Why not post that up somewhere. I want to take a look at this.

------
petesalty
<http://glunote.com>

It was fun to build and gave me a good look at Twitter oAuth and the APIs but
I doubt it'll take it any further than it is already. I do use it on a fairly
regular basis, as I'm kind of forgetful, and it does work pretty well so who
knows.

~~~
nedwin
This isn't so weird or crazy and might even be useful! Have followed and will
see how I go.

~~~
petesalty
Let me know if we can make things better.

------
rms
I've been very interested in #2 on <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html> for a
long time. I always thought that a sufficiently simple, unbreakable operating
system constitutes a solution to the problem, especially combined with a
homepage enabling basic access to 3 or 4 separate tasks.

I am optimistic that Google Chrome OS constitutes an absolutely enormous step
towards #2 by building the actual Web OS -- which is more like the Palm Pre's
OS than any other existing operating system. But I won't know if it actually
works until it actually comes out, probably a few days to 2 weeks before YC
apps are due, because Google usually launches about a week before Microsoft
and Windows 7 comes out then.

------
th0ma5
I had a thing as a kid written in Turbo Pascal that converted RBBS email to
Proboard email and back again. I got a call about it from some BBS operators
back in the day. I think it is safely abandoned, was insanely specific, and of
use to maybe 2 or 3 people on the planet.

------
frankus
I can never seem to get past the "buy a marginally clever domain name" phase.
So I can go down the list of my domains on GoDaddy:

Yakrazor.com: time management app. I can't remember exactly where I was going
to go with it, but the basic idea was to bring some order to the process of
Yak Shaving.

ToShove.com: provide a nice REST interface on top of Apple's push notification
service.

CarZero.net: TSD rally site; mostly an online scorekeeping app. Still
considering building this out with an iPhone-based front end.

SportsCarClub.net: basically WordPress for local car clubs, plus postal-code
search for nearby events and clubs.

And then I have a half dozen more that I'm actually doing something with or
seriously plan to do something with.

------
mooders
<http://www.twitread.com>

Started to gain some traction, but beyond a (very) few amazon affiliate sales,
I couldn't really see how to effectively monetise it.

------
suicidespam
purely for artistic purposes and social commentary, do not take this too
seriously ...

* welcome to the "anti-social" web

* <http://www.suicidespam.com>

* website caters to those who really hate the world, this life, and want to get out ...

* ... and to make the biggest splash they possibly can in the process

* website offers high-quality, expensive video/audio equipment, great high-power wireless/satellite IP services connectivity, and great battery life

* website customers purchase the equipement (they're about to kill themselves, they'll charge $15,000 to their credit card, no problem)

* they record their own suicide with the equipment

* beforehand they register 100, 200, 500 e-mail address of their dear friends, relatives, immediate family (intro, premier, and gold levels)

* the equipment transmits their suicide to central servers ...

* which then uploads HD video of their suicide to youtube.com ...

* ... and makes sure their 100, 200, or 500 contacts gets direct links to watch their suicide

* ... plus 500,000 additional random e-mail addresses

revenue potential is excellent ... suiciders don't care about debt, they'll
pay anything!! this will be a viral product!! spread by word-of-death!!

i'd like to pitch this seriously at some VC conference. let me into
y-combinator or tech-crunch or some other startup contest. i'm sure someone
will take me up on the proposal! _

~~~
pbhjpbhj
You might be the greatest capitalist thinker I've ever come across. Gruesome,
macabre, the epitome of evil genius.

~~~
suicidespam
my high school colleagues voted me "most likely to go insane." i've been too
long repressed, time to let what lurks come forth.

------
martythemaniak
<http://mld.dreamhosters.com/Backup.avi>

I actually applied to YC with this some time ago. After I took this
screencast, I even re-worked the UI to make it look all slick and web2.0-y. I
abandoned it because it was too ambitious for a part-time project.

------
hernan7
A scripting language that's somewhere between Bourne Shell and Perl: you don't
need to spawn a new process to do a grep or sed, and also you use cat and
pipes instead of file handles. Maybe when Perl 6 is a bit more mature I will
look at implementing it as a source filter.

------
zandorg
A user-submitted database of magazines. I ended up writing OCR software so
people could photograph the contents pages of their magazines, totally off
base. The OCR software worked, but I got so caught up in it, the database was
totally unfinished.

------
SapphireSun
Back before Facebook came out with its new version, I tried making a website
for clubs. It was instructive, but ultimately pointless. I fell victim to the
disease that so many others did ;-) It did polish my coding skills a lot
though!

------
antirez
I'm not sure I like this implementation a lot. For instance if I've some kind
of struct inside my application that is allocated a lot of times and is rarely
put into a linked list I don't want to have the two pointers overhead in all
the instances of this structure.

On the other side it's a win about cache locality, and even mmeory-wise when
the object happens to be linked to a linked list most of the times (you win a
pointer, 8 bytes in a 64 bit arch).

------
spaghetti
iPhone app called something like "Scene". User can choose a natural scene to
display (forest w/ birds and stream, desert w/ a thunderstorm etc) and then
just put their phone next to their computer at work. The various scenes would
have sound too so the user could enjoy the scene w/o looking at the phone the
entire time. I'd personally like something w/ wind-chimes.

------
frankus
A sundial app for the iPhone, the semi-useful side effect of which would be a
true solar time and local mean time display.

------
aarongough
Thanks to everyone for the great responses, great fun to read them all!

------
albertcardona
Building a cell simulator -- a biological, in-your-tissues cell, where the
lowest simulated elements are exons (E), introns (I), expressed exons (Ee) and
protein domains (PD), with cube-wise compartmentalization of membranes and
intracellular space which contain chains of E+I, Ee, and PDs, and
concentration functions for microelements like phosphates.

I wrote it in C++ and when launched with very downsized dimensions, it ate up
6 Gb of RAM and crashed with out of memory. I may try again when I can afford
several hundred Gb of RAM.

