I worked on the epitaxy for vcsels that go into iphones for the facial recognition. Not that impactful but cool to know that the stuff I worked on is in use all around me.
Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
21–30 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#22Built Video Hub App that almost 5,000 people have purchased. I was a math teacher, became a web dev 6 years ago, built this 5 years ago. Most proceeds go to charity. Very minor by comparison to others, but I'm just starting out ;)
https://videohubapp.com/ && https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
What I did that is most impactful is that I've been giving at least 10% of my income to cost-effective charities for over 10 years now (see Giving What We Can - thousands of others do the same). This amounts to almost $100,000 given to charity which translates to thousands of people protected from malaria for many years of their lives.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#23During a centralisation of public school local servers to a data centre, I created a consolidated library enquiry system. It served over 2,000 libraries, had 330 million titles, and had about a million users. It was efficient enough to run off my laptop, if need be. AFAIK it was one of the top five biggest library systems in the world at the time. I was asked to add some features that would have been too difficult in…
> This was the project that made realise how huge the effort-to-effect ratio that can be when computers are involved
I love Steve Jobs' metaphor: computers as a bicycle of the mind [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of effort is concentrated on problems that scale to billions of people. There's a lack of attention to problems that would have a big effect for a relatively small number of people. It's a shame, because they're a blast to work on.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#24I built a blog in 1999, very small impact, but it was the most impactful thing I've built. I wanted to build a website to be Slashdot for librarians, and it was quite popular for years. I ended up starting my own webhosting business, and changed my entire career path. So it mostly impacted me, but I think there were some small ripple effects.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#25Worked on software used in cash registers owned by Target, Walmart, the US Postal Service, and various large European and Asian equivalents. Comparing the previous model's UI to the new one was similar to the jump from command line UIs to GUIs, in that they were easier to understand without having to know a bunch of obscure commands. The company did a lot of work to ensure they were also fast to use like the old text-based ones. It really made the obscure cases easier for cashiers with little training to handle.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#26I like to write personal open source projects to learn a language / learn a statistical concept to its core. To learn Python, I build a missing-value imputation package. This one hit it (to my standards) pretty big. 500k downloads so far, but as someone who uses it daily, I’m most proud of the fact that it’s still the best at what it does[1]:
https://github.com/AnotherSamWilson/miceforest
[1] according to my personal benchmarking/use cases and anecdotal experience, no promises.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#27Nothing groundbreaking. But during my few years in game dev I built a relaxing game that had a spiritual component to it. Was one of my first games so.. plenty of flaws from a game design perspective. But one day I got an email from a player thanking me because the game helped immensely during a difficult time. Made my day... actually, I still think about once in a while. So, I guess you can say it was impactful for one ;)
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#28Did a lot of work on Wikipedia with media, usability, and internationalization. As with all such things that merely facilitate volunteers, it’s hard to say what’s mine or put dollar values on it. But it’s touched at least a billion lives, and facilitated a large fraction of a media library that will likely outlive me.
I’ve worked on minor stuff that was foundational to Google’s commercial offerings, but I think that isn’t as high impact and probably someone else would have done that as well or better. For the Wikipedia stuff, for good or ill, I owned some of those decisions.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#29Built Video Hub App that almost 5,000 people have purchased. I was a math teacher, became a web dev 6 years ago, built this 5 years ago. Most proceeds go to charity. Very minor by comparison to others, but I'm just starting out ;) https://videohubapp.com/ && https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App What I did that is most impactful is that I've been giving at least 10% of my income to cost-effective charities for ov…
Very cool! Thanks for sharing.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#30About 25 years ago, with a group of friends: https://www.srcf.net/
It was what you'd call a community-run webhost, but at a time when such things weren't common. The main innovation was making it easy for multiple people to administer and hand over websites: we'd noticed that student society websites tended to get lost or rebuilt every year, because they were run under people's personal accounts which stopped working when they graduated.