Hacker News Reader

Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

Once or twice a year on HN, I find myself reading a post and thinking "this is a complete and utter waste of time, this person has spent so much time and effort on something so meaningless that they could have spent on something else", and yet despite that thought, absolutely loving it.

This is probably my favourite link this year.

View on HN

I have the same thought, full of jealousy, because I used to waste my time in exactly the same kind of way, and I don't do it so much anymore.

I should probably set aside more of my time to waste on something pleasurable and useless.

I advise using pen and paper lists of ideas, somewhere visible! Whenever I have my eyes wandering from a screen, I pick it up and start working on a couple of ideas.

If you like this kind of thing you should take a look at the suckerpinch channel on YouTube. The technical complexity and amount of effort spent on some of his projects is quite unbelievable, with no practical use other than displaying the crazy things you can do with computing.

Particularly Reverse Emulating the NES and Harder Drives are good examples of this.

May favourite suckerpinch is the Uppestcase and Lowestcase letter video.

I like that he takes something familiar - and goes sideways with it such that you could have thought of that, but probably wouldn't have "explored that space" mentally.

It really is impressive! Like, sure - maybe many of us could learn these skills and are technically capable of doing something like this - but how many of us would have such a creative idea and then actually dedicate what must be hundreds if not thousands of hours to making it happen.

They explain very early on the purpose of it. As someone who's worked in events for years and worked with Nintendo on their own such official devices, this is niche but absolutely useful.

I am always pleasantly amazed and surprised when I see something truly odd, in a hyperbolic example, like "We have implemented a complete gravitational model of the solar system on a commodore 64" or "Custom cartridge created for NES/Famicom for advanced protein folding simulations" or "Reverse engineering a Chumby to add a 100 gigabit ethernet interface"

Agreed! I, probably like many HN readers, tend to over-optimize every part of my life. But life is more than optimization for an output — sometimes the purpose is just the pure joy and fun of doing it. Projects like this are a great reminder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com