Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is the most complex software that you have built/worked on?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 43 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex software that you have built/worked on?

#11

Post by 8chanAnon »

32gbsd wrote: post #2

A videogame that runs at 60fps with a custom engine in c. And it didn't even use real physics. Only hacks and approximations but it was lovely.

>hacks and approximations Otherwise known as "heuristics". Otherwise known as "making a damn good guess". You don't always need precise math to get something done. I once wrote a program to estimate the average volume level in a WAV file. It was just a process of taking samples at different points in the file and then making a good guess. I compared with another program which used complex math to estimate the average volume. Neither approach achieved 100% accuracy. Maybe 80% overall.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex software that you have built/worked on?

#12

Post by 8chanAnon »

voodooEntity wrote: post #8

Well im about to release the alpha but basicly its a project i worked on ~4 years in privat time and consists of two parts. 1. A custom in-memory graph storage/database which is threadsafe and designed for fast multithreading purposes. It also comes with a custom query builder/language which can be transportet via json so viable for every language. It can either be used by directly importing it as dependency in your…

>This was a strongly simplified explaination for what it does

You missed the part about what the end result is supposed to be. What is the purpose? Can I use it to run a website?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex software that you have built/worked on?

#14

Post by 8chanAnon »

8chanAnon wrote: post #7

Hmm. A lot of software is unnecessarily complicated. This has to do with "too many cooks" or "design by committee". The term "complex" is relative. Is a trading system complex on its own merit or is it the process of building it that is complex? I haven't worked on a major project so I can't say. I took a programming course many years ago. Not because I needed to learn programming but to get job interviews. The instr…

Oh wait. I'm working on a project right now. Never mind the PDF-to-braille thingy. How about a proxy server with HTTP, HTTPS, Socks5 and websocket? Not complex enough? How about routing to Tor and I2P? DNS and DNS-over-HTTPS? It's a local proxy server so it supports local disk access from a web browser. Trapping requests to modify them or write them to disk? The purpose is to support browser apps to do things like reading Twitter or getting Youtube videos (or whatever else you would want to write an app for).

It runs on Node.js and the entire code base is just one file (under 100k). No third-party includes.

Took me three years to get it to the point where it is now (I spent most of that time wondering what to do next).

Is that complex? Dunno. I'm trying to finish the documentation but, damn, there is so much to cover! It's a beast. That's really why I'm here. Gonna announce something soon.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex software that you have built/worked on?

#15

Post by phendrenad2 »

The BSD kernels (Net, Open, and Free). So many interlocking layers of C macros and typedefs, so many layers of "security features"(1) that are copy-pasted all over the codebase (such that a very simple syscall might be two lines of actual code and 200 lines of boilerplate copy-pasted security features). But I got my tasks done, and swore to never touch kernel dev again.

(1) - Actually, what I'm calling actual security features, plus jails and zones and Linux compat layers and performance counters and debug systems and obscure compile options and features that haven't been used by a soul since 2004.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex software that you have built/worked on?

#16

Post by hurrrr »

kingnothing wrote: post #6

A distributed event-based transaction processing system that handled around 400k requests per second peak traffic with many petabytes of data stored in a purpose-built DB.

cool. can you share more? what was the most difficult challenge? is something open source?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex software that you have built/worked on?

#17

Post by retrocryptid »

Nuclear power plant simulator. The actual controls were pretty straight-forward, but the simulator was MUCH more complicated because it had to take all the inputs that the actual moving bits in the power plant took, plus simulate how it thought the system would behave.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex software that you have built/worked on?

#18

Post by dfinninger »

Not the most complex software, but definitely the most needlessly complex software.

I worked for a company where IT owned customer onboarding for historical reasons. Each customer had their own DB in the same server so that each site would be isolated. So onboarding was basically cloning a “gold DB” and templating some values.

The script that cloned the DB was over 50k lines of Batch files (Windows .bat). There were so many includes, GOTOs, random black holes, passwords in plain text, reliance on special IP whitelisting in the AD server… it had been grown organically by someone who didn’t know how to program and it was a major mess.

It took me three weeks to figure out what was happening, and another to make sure the details were correct.

I replaced the whole thing with My Facebook rant at the time got me invited to speak to an upcoming class at my Alma Mater about software quality.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex software that you have built/worked on?

#19

Post by LoganDark »

dfinninger wrote: post #18

Not the most complex software, but definitely the most needlessly complex software. I worked for a company where IT owned customer onboarding for historical reasons. Each customer had their own DB in the same server so that each site would be isolated. So onboarding was basically cloning a “gold DB” and templating some values. The script that cloned the DB was over 50k lines of Batch files (Windows .bat). There were…

> the management at the time didn’t want to change the process…

Every time I see something like this it makes me want to scream. This is not how you develop software, setting all implementations in stone. Ugh

Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex software that you have built/worked on?

#20

Post by skulk »

8chanAnon wrote: post #14
8chanAnon wrote: post #7

Hmm. A lot of software is unnecessarily complicated. This has to do with "too many cooks" or "design by committee". The term "complex" is relative. Is a trading system complex on its own merit or is it the process of building it that is complex? I haven't worked on a major project so I can't say. I took a programming course many years ago. Not because I needed to learn programming but to get job interviews. The instr…

Oh wait. I'm working on a project right now. Never mind the PDF-to-braille thingy. How about a proxy server with HTTP, HTTPS, Socks5 and websocket? Not complex enough? How about routing to Tor and I2P? DNS and DNS-over-HTTPS? It's a local proxy server so it supports local disk access from a web browser. Trapping requests to modify them or write them to disk? The purpose is to support browser apps to do things like re…

If it's something you want others to use, why not reuse audited libraries? For something for which security is important, no one wants to audit your homegrown HTTP parser/TOR implementation/etc.
Post reply on HN