I would rephrase that as, "...absolutely no redemming value at this time..."

You have just planted seeds. Of course you can see no "redemming value" right now. If you just planted seeds in your garden out back, you wouldn't see any results there either, today.

But just as the seeds in your garden will deliver results in a few months (provided you care for them), the seeds you just planted in your little "hairbrained" project, will also reap dividends. You just don't know when or what.

Sometime in the future when you least expect it, the lightbulb will go on and you'll figure out a cool solution to some other problem. What you don't know now (and probably won't even realize then) was that what you did today stirred a few neurons to enable that light bulb to go on in the future.

As hackers, everything we do is either planting seeds or reaping harvest. If you didn't see a harvest today, that's because you were planting seeds. Just keep on working and trust the process; that's how we all get better at what we do.

Seriously man, grow some skin. Wtf? "I feel incredibly sad that I wasted a few hours doing something that I can't see any value in, in hindsight"? I mean come on.

I'm really not trying to be overly harsh, but if you can't take the emotional turmoil of wasting a few hours on a harebrained idea, then you might want to bury yourself in a coffin filled with cotton, because this world is too harsh for you. Life is full of defeats and failures - and that's when everything goes well. A life without setbacks would be as bland and boring as an over-boiled cabbage leaf.

Have any other hackers ever spent time on something they genuinely wanted to create, only to feel completely empty after they actually create it?

If you've not done that a 100 million times, you really shouldn't call yourself a "hacker" - or even a "man", for that matter.

PS: Otoh, if you have a tendency to go through very deep/high ups and downs with no apparent relationship with reality, you might want to get yourself checked for bipolar disorder.

PPS: Oh, and btw, it's dilemma.

The other thing is positive thinking. I don't mean "happy" thinking; I mean positive in the sense of foreground vs. background. Foreground is something that can help you get where you want to go; background is something you don't have that would have helped you. When building something, you attach things to what you've already got - not try to attach things to space! Trees grow this way; crystals do too. And lots of people talk about building or growing software.

There's a framing issue too: I find it really helpful to compare what I have now compared with what I had before (to highlight the fact that I've had some impact). This is to counteract the frame of comparing what I've done with something that was better, was perfect.

Funny thing is, when I approach things in this "positive" way, I feel a lot more encouraged and inspired. Exciting ideas come to me from nowhere, and I have lots of energy. So, even though it seems like a fun, easy way, it results in much higher productivity. For me, anyway.

PS: there's a school of thought that depression is caused by formal reasoning errors ("cognitive distortions"). As a form of mind-hacking. I find it extremely fascinating: http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Therapy-Revised-Updated/d...

I would say though that I got over the whole "completely empty" thing afterwards a long time ago. Life is too short to get hung up on petty shit. Take what you can from the experience and move on!

Plus I enjoy writing software. Sometimes it's more about the journey than the destination, blah blah blah...

I would love to see a simple, nicely designed site that I can just click to and get a great idea for a blog post. Your little script seems half way there, so it has value to me.

Do you intend to continue with it?

I spent a couple of years in grad school before I decided to quit the field of computational biology. All that learning about DNA analysis was worthless, and I was sad about it. But in the years since then I frequently come back and draw analogies and use the things I learned. Just yesterday I was discussing the problem of developing a map from a large corpus of gps paths and realized, hey this is a lot like shotgun sequencing. A lot of stuff will end up being pretty useful.

I get sad when I make a toy and no one plays with it. Is that what you're feeling? I added some ideas to it. It's not a bad concept--just a limited, single-serving app.

"the benefits of our efforts are not always obvious"

this helps to remind me that any new project I work on helps me learn from simply the experience of creation. Additionally, there's no way to know how whatever you create (or half-create!) will benefit you in the future.