Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830734

by aarongough • 17 years ago

64 92 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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.

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!

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!

aarongough9• 17 years ago

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!

rick20472• 17 years ago

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.

aarongough9• 17 years ago

I just remember that an hour or so after I left Hoppy running the whole machine would freeze as Hoppy consumed all it's resources... Seemed like fun at the time, but I always was a strange child!

At least your script started out with a vaguely practical purpose in mind!

tocomment• 17 years ago

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.

tkiley• 17 years ago

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.

aarongough9• 17 years ago

I like it! It's a very clever way to combine a direct democracy with the current system! I would be happy to see it working...

I was talking with a friend of mine who is a political analyst a while ago about a similar scheme... While sketching out a basic plan I realized how much work it would be and let it die...

timmaah• 17 years ago

In 2010, votesimple will run for one congressional seat in one district in the United States. If elected, we will establish a website where all Americans can read...

I like the idea, but I don't think you would ever get someone elected as congressional seats are supposed to represent the constituents of the state/district. Why would anyone in elect someone that is going to listen to all citizens vs those who they are stated as representing?

Zak• 17 years ago

Because most elected officials don't listen to any citizens much, if at all?

tierack• 17 years ago

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.

aarongough9• 17 years ago

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.

pavel_lishin2• 17 years ago

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!

aarongough9• 17 years ago

Haha, nice. Takes all the hard work out of avoiding jailhouse beatings :-p

prpon• 17 years ago

Or you can find out whom you are gonna join when you get there :p

rrival2• 17 years ago

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

pavel_lishin2• 17 years ago

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...

th0ma5• 17 years ago

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.

dpifke• 17 years ago

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.

martythemaniak• 17 years ago

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.

arohner2• 17 years ago

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!

aarongough9• 17 years ago

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!

old-gregg• 17 years ago

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.

dugmartin3• 17 years ago

I used Pikluk for a while with my kids after thinking of an idea around the same area and then finding you did it.

If its any consolation you did a very, very nice job on the interface.

dugmartin3• 17 years ago

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?

aarongough9• 17 years ago

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...

JeffJenkins• 17 years ago

That's really, really cool, although from the domain name I thought it was going to be some sort of online potluck organizer (which would have also been cool)

erik• 17 years ago

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.

Towle• 17 years ago

8===D

(sorry)

PebblesRox4• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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/

apgwoz5• 17 years ago

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.

MaysonL• 17 years ago

Re: Fisheye Editor - have you seen Dasher? A Bayesian Fisheye Input method. :-)

apgwoz5• 17 years ago

I have and it's pretty impressive. This is meant to move the focus of your editing to a few lines sorounding your cursor, and nothing else. It's not meant as an accessibility tool.

kidko• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

apgwoz5• 17 years ago

Sorry about that. Dreamhost moved me to a different server, and I haven't had a chance to get everything working again. In the mean time, I've copied it to: http://apgwoz.com/hacks/fisheyeedit.py

EDIT: The actual link is working again. which is actually much more up to date.

elboheme• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

antirez• 17 years ago

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).

dfranke2• 17 years ago

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.

zeckalpha3• 17 years ago

Slow to load, but interesting concept.

dfranke2• 17 years ago

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

aarongough9• 17 years ago

I would love to see that implemented on a large scale...

If someone like Google were to implement this as a response to every email that had positively been identified as spam then the scammers would spend so much time trying to sort the wheat from the chaff that they would never get anything else done!

At the moment the signal-to-noise ratio is low for us, as spam receivers, but if we made the signal-to-noise ratio lower for the spammers and scammers then they would have a much harder time making money!

arohner2• 17 years ago

Good job on the presentation. I had a lot of fun reading the GEB-inspired description.

modoc• 17 years ago

- 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.

mooders• 17 years ago

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.

dugmartin3• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

hernan7• 17 years ago

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.

brianlash• 17 years ago

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.

mtrimpe2• 17 years ago

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

andymoe• 17 years ago

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

petesalty2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

petesalty2• 17 years ago

Let me know if we can make things better.

falsestprophet• 17 years ago

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.)

dangrover• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

- 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.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

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.

apgwoz5• 17 years ago

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

zeckalpha3• 17 years ago

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

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

ok then: any art :P

The idea was to make a reusable FOSS engine then build some commercial games on it :) the market is quite competitive, good graphics is becoming quite important.

8plot3• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

PebblesRox4• 17 years ago

http://xkcd.com/382/

8plot3• 17 years ago

The problem I want to solve isn't unique to me, and the cat bowl is easy enough to hide from ants (it sits on a plate of shallow water).

I simply hate the idea of chemical warfare to combat ants.

polvi• 17 years ago

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!

mtrimpe2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

suicidespam2• 17 years ago

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!

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yters• 17 years ago

horrible

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pbhjpbhj• 17 years ago

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

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suicidespam2• 17 years ago

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

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zandorg• 17 years ago

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.

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spaghetti• 17 years ago

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.

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SapphireSun• 17 years ago

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!

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frankus2• 17 years ago

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.

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frankus2• 17 years ago

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

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aarongough9• 17 years ago

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

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ratsbane• 17 years ago

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.

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rms• 17 years ago

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.

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albertcardona• 17 years ago

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.

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Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

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