[HN Gopher] Why I prefer making useless stuff
___________________________________________________________________
Why I prefer making useless stuff
Author : azhenley
Score : 205 points
Date : 2021-05-23 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.eecs.utk.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.eecs.utk.edu)
| mrweasel wrote:
| Most of the projects I do for fun is either project I know
| customers are working on, or stuff we already have at work. This
| gives me a goal, and gives me a sense of how hard the problem
| actually is. If it does work out, no one care, the thing already
| exists.
|
| I also have a project I normally use when attempting to learn a
| new language. It involves naked women and copyright violations,
| but it get's me around most aspects of a language and gives me a
| sense of how complete a language and its eco-system it.
| cosmojg wrote:
| > It involves naked women and copyright violations, but it
| get's me around most aspects of a language and gives me a sense
| of how complete a language and its eco-system it.
|
| You can't just leave us hanging like that. What's the project?
| Areading314 wrote:
| > A typed Lisp compiler with a focus on performance
|
| Not useless and much needed!
| spottybanana wrote:
| Doesn't sound like useless to me, these projects sound very
| educational.
| grouphugs wrote:
| must be nice to be so fortunate, but this is just regular nazi
| greed
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There seems to be a critical role of _consequence-free
| exploration_ (or at least consequence-reduced) in creativity.
|
| Richard Feynman's commentary on being burned out and playing with
| ideas of spinning plates, which culminated in his Nobel Prize
| award, comes to mind. Recently featured on HN (and something of a
| perennial favourite):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359
|
| https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html?rep...
|
| You'll find similar observations regarding corporate research and
| development. See David Hounshell's work on R&D at DuPont:
| _Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R &D 1902-1980_,
| originally published in the 1980s.
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/science-and-corporate-strateg...
|
| Similar stories exist for AT&T's Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM
| Research, and even Ford Motor Company's research division. In the
| case of the latter, Henry Ford (in)famously gave his engineers
| significant discretion, but somewhat-less-than-optimal equipment,
| the latter apparently a spur to creativity in order to overcome
| limitations.
|
| Geoffrey West has discussed this regarding the Santa Fe
| Institute, I believe in the Q&A of this presentation:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=w-8sbSPf4ko (After about 50 minutes.)
|
| West quotes the late Max Perutz's guidelines for organizing
| research, in full:
|
| _Impishly, whenever he was asked whether there are simple
| guidelines along which to organise research so that it will be
| highly creative, he would say: no politics, no committees, no
| reports, no referees, no interviews; just gifted, highly
| motivated people picked by a few men of good judgment. Certainly
| not the way research is usually run in our fuzzy democracy but,
| from a man of great gifts and of extremely good judgment, such a
| reply is not elitist. It is simply to be expected, for Max had
| practised it and shown that this recipe is right for those who,
| in science, want to beat the world by getting the best in the
| world to beat a path to their door._
|
| http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/feb/07/guardianobituari...
|
| As an anti-creative environment, the most effective obstruction
| is to ensure that _everything_ is not only consequential, but a
| path to failure. This tends to emerge in oppressive and
| excessively bureaucratic environments. John Cleese outlines the
| general parameters toward the end of this presentation:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
|
| The start-up world seems to me to increasingly exemplify the
| high-consequence, no-win environment.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| The thing I love most about useless projects is the freedom to
| not explain anything to anyone.
|
| That's the part about painting that I love the most too. You
| don't understand it? I don't care
| rdiddly wrote:
| Building useful stuff with a "user base" of one falls under that
| too. I'm my own customer.
| nicbou wrote:
| Since a little less than two years, I live from a website I
| built, and I have a lot more control over my schedule.
|
| Since then, I built a lot more useless stuff. I'm the only user.
| I can hardcode things, introduce breaking changes, manually
| migrate data and so on. I can cut corners, or over-engineer
| everything. Other people can use it, but I don't care about what
| they think of my variable names, or which features they want.
|
| The turning point for me was the concept of apps as home-cooked
| meals [0]. If a gardener can grow flowers only he will see, I can
| write code only I will run.
|
| [0] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
| massysett wrote:
| I think of it as my in-house software. Most software businesses
| write never leave the business, with a lot of the remainder
| being written in a support role just to further other business
| needs, not to be sold (such as a bank's online banking phone
| app.)
|
| But it might be even better than in-house software. I don't
| have to collaborate with anyone. I can observe "best practices"
| or not. I don't have to care about rough edges like bad error
| messages - I'm the programmer and user, so I know what the
| message means.
|
| I'm calling it my return to hacker roots. Unix was written for
| hackers who cobbled together quick solutions to personal
| problems. I no longer feel pressure to share my creations -
| sometimes I think people get minimal benefit from what I share,
| but it's more work for me than it's usually worth. Sometimes I
| feel bad about "not giving back" but many people "giving back"
| have their own self-driven reasons, such as building their
| portfolio of work. I have a day job so these reasons don't
| exist for me.
|
| My most useful software is my meal planning and grocery list
| system. I've been using it over ten years now. Occasionally I'm
| asked to share it but it's a very nasty personal creation. I
| have no desire to share it. I do need to overhaul it though.
|
| Linus Torvalds says he uses some hacked-up abomination of a
| text editor because it works for him and he knows it. That's
| the hacker spirit.
| cco wrote:
| I really enjoyed this post, thank you so much for writing it.
| It made me think of a lot of "personal app" ideas I've had over
| the years, almost all of them orbiting around the idea of
| sharing something with my family friends in a more simple and
| straightforward way than off the shelf apps.
| headmelted wrote:
| Genuinely curious - Are you saying here that you have a blog
| that runs on your own code or your income comes from the
| project?
|
| I only ask as if you've discovered a way to produce an income
| from coding something your own way while still having no-one
| else to answer to then I too would like to reach Valhalla and
| you must show me the way.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Show us the way!
| boothby wrote:
| I didn't know anything about compilers, but I figured out how to
| compile Piet programs, so I wrote a compiler[1]. The project has
| stalled out for (a) lack of free time and (b) some silly
| ambitions, but _I don 't care_ what the public thinks about my
| lack of updates, and that's great. In the meantime, I've been
| going down weird rabbit holes and learning aspects of computing
| that I missed in school.
|
| [1] https://github.com/boothby/repiet
| neolog wrote:
| I'm curious how much money you make from the affiliate links on
| your site?
| brundolf wrote:
| It's funny, my favorite useless projects have also mostly been
| compilers and game engines!
|
| +1 to this mindset. I would go even further and suggest that
| useless projects tend to be _morally_ superior to useful ones. A
| lot (not all) of the useful software out there ends up being used
| to make the world worse, but useless software can only ever
| inspire joy (in yourself and, hopefully, in others).
| ratww wrote:
| Agree. Something else: Useless software is also very
| educational.
|
| I'm also into compilers and engines. I learned 3d programming
| by looking at small projects online. The "worse" the code, the
| easier to learn. If I had tried to follow the
| Unreal/Unity/Godot codebase I'd still be at the intro screen.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I love making tiny projects for fun and not for profit, using
| tools I enjoy working with and not tools I would need to scale to
| a trillion users, trying ideas I like and not ideas I can
| monetize. I almost forgot why I enjoyed coding.
| seg_lol wrote:
| It isn't useless by any stretch, it is non-Commericial, it is
| playful, experimental. I understand the sentiment and the
| terminology, not challenging it, but being silly and playful
| should be just as valid as making a your next open source side
| hustle.
|
| Once things start getting _serious_ for some definition, a whole
| other cloud rolls in. There is now a right way to do things, but
| how do we know this is the right way. How do the boundaries get
| pushed? Much of the time, best practices is a signaling phrase to
| have an in group and an out group.
|
| Things like esolangs give one cover to be playful. For example if
| you try metaprogramming in Python, you will be called out as
| unpythonic. If you create classes in Python with public member
| variables, you will be ridiculed.
| abhinav22 wrote:
| This is something I try to be careful of. Programming takes time,
| which is an opportunity cost as we get older. If I was well off,
| I would love to relax my mind on projects not going anywhere.
|
| However until that point, I try to do something that I feel has
| some value (or hope will one day).
|
| That said, I do agree with the general premise that work is where
| we spend to make money and we should relax in our spare time. The
| criteria for me is that I should enjoy what I'm doing and it
| should have some small chance of success. But as long as I enjoy
| it, then I'll be okay. Better to do a project with 2% chance of
| success that I enjoy than one of 50% chance of success that I
| feel like a chore. Life's too short.
|
| However I would not be able to actively do a project with zero
| chance of any value (learning can be achieved through many ways,
| so I don't count that as value on the outset, only as
| justification for the time spent afterwards). I rather go for a
| walk then. There are only a few hours a day where I have the
| energy to code, it's too precious to waste.
|
| (ps sorry for the over use of first person - just wanted to share
| my perspective)
| _wldu wrote:
| I agree 100%. All my programs are "Toy Programs" and they are
| very fun to build and use.
| leifg wrote:
| I came to the same conclusion over the time. Mainly because I
| figured out:
|
| When you want to build stuff for profit, coding is an
| afterthought. There are so many tasks necessary that involve zero
| coding. You essentially become your own product manager that
| needs to talk to (potential) customers, completely reevaluate
| your value proposition, do marketing sales. The more time you
| spend on coding, the higher the chance your assumptions about
| what people want are wrong.
|
| If you want to spend 100% coding I would argue that's impossible
| to make profitably.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Did someone say useless stuff! I love useless projects.
|
| Do you need a doctor that is published on the procedure you are
| about to have?
|
| https://www.opendoctor.io/research/?research_papers=mohs+sur...
|
| What about ranking doctors based on their Opioid subscription
| count? I got you covered.
|
| https://www.opendoctor.io/opioid/highest/
| tooltower wrote:
| This is exactly why I hate the expansive IP contracts I've had to
| sign with my employer. It effectively requires me to ask
| permission for publishing these useless weekend stuff, robbing me
| of the joy.
| adamius wrote:
| Is it useless? Compare coding these projects to Dorodango
| https://www.laurenceking.com/blog/2019/09/26/dorodango-blog/
|
| Perhaps the act is the end in itself. The journey in this case is
| probably more important than the destination.
| mosselman wrote:
| This is amazing. I totally see the parallel to coding little
| things that are 'useless'. It is a form of meditation maybe.
|
| Working on 'useless' code is a sort of massage for the mind
| sometimes.
| Delk wrote:
| I think the important thing is that considering a project
| useless frees one of any obligation to think about its
| usefulness. It might not be useless but its value might come
| from not trying to be useful.
|
| Which is probably what you meant anyway, but I think "useless"
| means two different things here.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Same approach over here.
|
| I try new approaches and languages, occasionally something gets
| dumped into Github for the usual headhunters requests for HR
| filter.
|
| Turning them into useful stuff for others? Well that is what work
| is for.
| stemlord wrote:
| Obviously it's not useless. I'd say it's super important even,
| because it fosters a culture beyond the dominant capitalist
| culture of consumption for the sake of consumption which seems to
| eat away at every facet of living leaving complete emptiness of
| meaning in its wake. This is fundamentally what 20th century
| capitalist critique is all about and IMO a big reason why
| contemporary art practice is all about critical theory
| ssivark wrote:
| Love the OP's attitude. It's perfect for anyone looking to
| explore computing as a medium.
|
| The HN comments they quote (shipping for customers, and avoiding
| pointless homework) come from a very different perspective --
| where the medium being explored is not computing, but rather the
| process of satisfying specific human needs in the context of a
| "market".
|
| Both have their own value; it's just that they're completely
| orthogonal in intent and worth not conflating.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Sounds like this is how he keeps his interest in coding alive and
| his ability to enjoy it in spite of getting paid to do it. If you
| only do what you get paid to do as a coder, you may grow to hate
| it and this can be career-ending. You could suffer burnout or
| just decide to quit or get fired and no one wants you anymore.
|
| The first rule of sustainable productivity is taking care of the
| thing doing the producing. If that's a human, that isn't limited
| to physical wellbeing, especially if they are producing knowledge
| work.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| The usefulness question is the a poison to discovery.
|
| How many things we use in our daily life would have survived the
| first peer review for usefulness?
|
| The printing press? Makes no sense, use scribes. The public cant
| even read.
|
| The internet? Why would people use a computer to communicate and
| share data? Its super slow, just send a magnetic drive or even
| better, copy the images on paper.
|
| Solar power? We have coal, oil, nuclear, that stuff has no
| future.
|
| If something is not useful, in dubio assume, that it is, but you
| just are not capable of seeing the use or the market it will
| create.
| revskill wrote:
| I once tried to setup isomorphic Haskell webapp (haskell on both
| server and client) and i learnt a bunch of things. The result is
| useless, not practical but their knowledge is practical, and it's
| what matters to me, not the result.
| asimjalis wrote:
| I love this. I feel the same way as OP. Question in my mind is
| why is this? Can we understand what makes our own useless
| projects so engaging?
| nicbou wrote:
| You accept from the start that you will be the only critic,
| user and contributor of the project, so you do whatever you
| want.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| My own guesswork answer: a 'useless project' necessarily
| combines a personal interest with the total absence of external
| obligations. Productive work sometimes has the former property,
| but rarely has the latter.
|
| A successful _useful_ unpaid project might feel like an
| obligation, if there are users and a community around it.
|
| Note: does not apply to Fabrice Bellard, with his remarkable
| talent for building incredibly useful software on a whim, on
| his own, in secret (at least initially).
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I think I'm somewhere in between. I like thinking about (and
| sometimes building) things that are possibly useful, but
| difficult or painful to monetize. Kind of an academic approach
| where I don't need to grovel for funding.
| stadium wrote:
| I've been building a useless app in my free time, an hour here or
| there, for the last 2 months. Then last week at work, I got a
| chance to contribute to a project that happened to use the same
| stack. It was random luck. And the useless project prepared me
| for the useful one that pays me a salary.
| mam3 wrote:
| Sure its nice to be "loving what you do" and its always better
| than having somensort of external pressure.
|
| Now saying you really prefer to do specifically useless stuff
| seems like glorifying a weakness for no reason. Why not leaving
| an open door to both have fun and make money ? Seems like the
| author tries to make some moral/practical higher ground because
| he cant deal with the ambivalence of whether what he does is for
| some "inherent" pleasure or for money.
|
| At the end of the day the way your deal with you psychology is
| not my problem. Having fun if is cool. Making money is cool in
| another way. If mixing both is too hard for you the maybe you
| really dont have any real problem in your life. That post wont
| get too much of my sympathy.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Yea it seems like OP is writing a bunch of throwaway projects
| that don't go anywhere. What's the point of writing software if
| nobody is gonna use it? I'd rather go do something else. Like
| go hiking or swimming or something....
|
| Don't get me wrong, I like coding videogames as much as the
| next guy but it's like, if nobody is gonna play it then what's
| the point?
| gammalost wrote:
| The point is that he enjoys them. Throwaway project can be
| like a puzzle (at least for me). Pick a subject, find some
| problem and figure it out.
|
| I could ask the same about going hiking, what's the point of
| that? You're still back home at the end of the day.
| cupofcoffee wrote:
| The point is you get better at it.
| hamburglar wrote:
| And some people find it fun.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| yes, we need more toys!
|
| https://sonnet.io/posts/reactive-hole/
| cryptica wrote:
| Making useless stuff is nice if you and everyone else knows that
| it's useless and you can optimize the activity for maximum
| learning.
|
| I hate making useless stuff when everyone else believes that it's
| useful. Then the work is usually tedious, repetitive, stressful
| and frustrating. There is 0 satisfaction. You just want to waste
| as much time as possible to maximize your hours/income.
| dheera wrote:
| I build a lot of "useless" stuff too. Where by useless I mean
| useful to me, but isn't ever going to have customers.
|
| A. Educational value is a thing. Not everything needs to be a
| business with customers. Not every project needs to make money.
| Many of my projects teach me something about science, tech, or
| arts.
|
| B. Fun is a thing. Building stuff is a way to enjoy life for me,
| similar to spending time on the beach.
|
| A couple of my more "useless" projects:
|
| https://dheera.net/projects/4x5/
|
| https://dheera.net/projects/mnist-clock/
|
| https://dheera.net/projects/einkframe/
|
| https://dheera.net/projects/shoji-lamps/
| radiator wrote:
| Someone who wouldn't want to undersell those projects could use
| the term art instead of useless.
| dheera wrote:
| Oh I just called them "useless" in mockery of the HN sense of
| the word, i.e. in the same sense of the word that TFA speaks
| of: not being able to scale it into a unicorn startup with
| customers.
|
| But yes, they are useful to me as art, as educational
| projects, as fun, etc.
| dorkwood wrote:
| > And if those aren't enough, I have several more useless
| projects planned! I can't wait to get started on them:
|
| I feel like this is such a key technique for maintaining momentum
| with your personal projects -- always keep a list of things you
| want to work on next. I'll often find myself day-dreaming about
| the next thing on my list while I'm still tinkering away on my
| current project. After I realized how important this was for
| myself, I started noticing other people doing it too; apparently
| whenever Bob Dylan had an idea, he'd write it down and put it in
| a box. When it came time to create, he'd open the box.
| legerdemain wrote:
| A lot of people who insist on building only stuff they can sell
| have very little business sense. They rarely seem to know if what
| they're building has any real chance of making money. As a
| result, they end up building a lot of stuff that's both useless
| _and_ boring.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| The biggest reason to make useless stuff instead of useful stuff
| is to avoid harassment. If you have something useful on GitHub
| then entitled users will come out of the woodwork to request
| features, report "bugs" (read: the user is doing something
| wrong), or otherwise expect free work out of you.
| dheera wrote:
| Let them know they are free to make a pull request? I don't see
| this as a reason to specifically avoid useful stuff.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| That's precisely the point. They _aren 't_ free to make a
| pull request. A pull request puts a time demand on the
| project owner to review and merge the patch.
|
| What they are free to do is fork the project, and do whatever
| the hell they want to in the fork.
| ratww wrote:
| Yep. It's a cathedral rather than a bazaar [1]. A very
| small cathedral, but still one.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
| salmo wrote:
| My biggest reason is that I don't have to finish. When I get
| bored with it, I move on.
|
| I used to put pressure on myself to "finish" and would often
| miss and feel guilty. Not just computer projects, but
| electronics, learning musical instruments, etc.
|
| Then I realized I was making my hobbies work and doing it
| badly. Real work (where I have to finish) got in the way of my
| hobbies. Hobbies are supposed to be fun, relaxing, and
| rewarding. What was I doing?
|
| I gave up the pressure and it was liberating. I pick up the
| guitar for a couple months, then get lost in trying to make
| analog circuits. I tinker in the garden then teach myself
| enough CAD to do a small woodworking project. I started sewing
| masks and tote bags then set it aside. I fish a bunch in the
| spring and fall. Then, I'll revisit them later when the muse
| hits and don't feel like I wasted money.
|
| Now my only goals are to have some fun, relax, and learn
| something new.
|
| I really only program for fun in languages I don't know or
| platforms I haven't played with. I learn by picking up a
| project that scratches an itch.
|
| Sometimes those feed back into my work (eg Go, Kotlin), but
| most don't (various LISPs, low level C).
|
| My issues are exacerbated by my ADHD, but I would recommend the
| approach to anyone with a steady job they enjoy. That and not
| using TV/movies as a hobby. There's just so much cool stuff to
| explore.
| toast0 wrote:
| I haven't gotten any feedback on my github stuff (which isn't
| quite useless, just not useful to many), but it's pretty easy
| to ignore feedback in general, and it's not too hard to turn
| off issues; not sure if you can turn off pull requests though.
| watwut wrote:
| Wasn't really my experience. Besides, github have tons of
| useful smaller projects that either don't have any issues filed
| by strangers or have them while author happily ignores
| those.You have make something pretty big to have big enough
| community for it to cause issues.
|
| And if that really bothers you, you can turn off issues in
| github.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is one of the downsides of programming-as-a-art: if you
| create paintings you may get feedback and requests for more (or
| less) - but you're unlikely to get bug reports.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Try making actual art with programming, eg demoscene or
| quirky twitter bots or programs that automously paint
| paintings, and you'll get way fewer bug reports.
| djoldman wrote:
| I wonder why people are so annoyed or upset by this.
|
| If you don't want to support an arch/language/platform, etc.
| just say so in the readme (all arch/languages/platforms besides
| ____ are unsupported.
|
| People expecting things are pretty par for the course on the
| internet... Just be firm and curt. Close the issues quickly and
| refer to them if reopened.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| People are annoyed because when your project gets big enough
| (or if you're just unlucky), _that doesn 't stop them_.
| nicbou wrote:
| Offer them a refund
| valbaca wrote:
| Or use the trick from Java Puzzlers (which may have borrowed
| it from another source):
|
| Feel free to mail us your feedback written in pencil on a $20
| bill.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > which may have borrowed it from another source
|
| Probably Car Talk. Iirc they instructed that puzzler
| answers be written on the back of a $20 bill also. It was a
| great radio show!
| jraph wrote:
| That is an excellent idea. I hope I'll never have to do that
| (haven't had to deal with this kind of thing so far), but
| I'll definitely try this should an entitled user show up in
| the future.
| epmaybe wrote:
| I laughed at this one, thank you for that
| [deleted]
| yannoninator wrote:
| > If you have something useful on GitHub...
|
| make the repo private or close contributions then?
|
| if it's going to be useless and only be used by yourself, you
| might as well blog about it and move onto the next useless
| project.
|
| hell, there may be no need to place it on github for these sort
| of projects.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I would suggest you may not be the right person to use code
| in these repos.
|
| For someone like me sometimes I'm looking for a small sample
| of code that fits a pattern. I could careless about the
| project. Sometimes you need an odd piece.
|
| Saying his code doesn't belong on github tells me you might
| not belong on github.
| ratww wrote:
| Terrible advice from an educational perspective.
|
| I use Github all the time to find code samples, especially
| for 3D stuff, shaders, audio, emulation, demoscene... It's
| more common to find solutions to my problems in zero-star
| projects than in big ones.
|
| Lots of people star my code-as-art experiments too, and from
| the forks I can see they find educational value in it.
|
| Not everything in the world has to fit perfectly into some
| preconceived mold. Heck, in that case, the most
| interesting/educational things are trying to avoid that.
| david_allison wrote:
| Someone might find value in it.
|
| An unmaintained[0] badge feels like a better solution
| compared to not publishing it
|
| [0] https://github.com/potch/unmaintained.tech
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(page generated 2021-05-23 23:00 UTC)