Clever ideas that failed

Wow. This is brilliant. Especially the sins committed, as I am also guilty of a number of them.<p>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.

A refreshing change to the general level of hubris today. Thanks.

If you haven't already, check out this guy's growing treasure trove of writing:<p><a href="http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/" rel="nofollow">http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/</a><p>Many of his articles have been posted on HN and elsewhere already.

Hey what a coincidence! I dunno why he failed with the 4th one.<p>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)....

Good 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.

I got to the end of the entry and felt inclined to click "Report abuse" at the bottom of the page. =D<p>Loved it. Looking back, I have sinned as well.

Great article. It's a pity that over-engineering is often the path to failure, because over-engineering is so terrifically fun to do!

@clarencewenham, you should have a nice blog and move your content there. Doesn't matter whether you update it frequently or not.

Makes me think of that quote from Spinal Tap. You know, that there's a fine line...

Is there a way to access this without having to login to google docs?

an interesting article in similar vain: niklaus wirth's "good ideas, through the looking glass".