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Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#162

Post by tuyguntn »

egberts1 wrote: post #6

Impactful? Designed and deployed credit card readers used in gas pumps back in 1979. (Sold to Gasboy) Wrote a fine tuner to allow communication between satellites (precursor to TDRSS days). Still used to this day. Failover of IP in ATM switches (VVRP, PXE, secondary DHCP, secondary DNS, secondary LDAP, secondary NFS). While not invented here, it is still used today as this is a Common setup to this day. Printer drive…

OMG, Who are you?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#164

Post by lucb1e »

tromp wrote: post #77

In late 2013 I came up with the first memory hard Proof-of-Work puzzle, Cuckoo Cycle [1], based on finding fixed-length cycles in random graphs. Recently, custom chips were developed to solve it more efficiently than GPUs can. That probably had more impact than the Binary Lambda Calculus language I designed [2] or the logical rules of Go I co-formulated [3]. Computing the number of Go positions [4] or approximating t…

> the first memory hard Proof-of-Work puzzle

Scrypt is from 2009, per Wikipedia. That's memory hard, and using hashes with some zeroed out bits is a thing done for a long time (Bitcoin 2009; some old meaning of "cryptographic pepper" (fallen out of use) that iirc dates back to the 90s). Am I misunderstanding what you built?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#165

Post by rsweeney21 »

kkamperschroer wrote: post #142
rsweeney21 wrote: post #135

I built the first "post-play" experience for Netflix. It made it so that Netflix would automatically start playing the next episode of the show you are watching after a 15 second count down. We built it in the Silverlight player on the web because it was the fastest way to A/B test new features at the time. Before post-play, you had to open the episode menu and click on the next episode to play it. We didn't want to…

As I was reading your comment I was thinking "whoa, that sounds like Damien or Robert" and sure enough :) Hope you are doing well!

Hey Kyle!

Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#166

Post by yanokwa »

I'm one of the founders of ODK[1]. It's an open-source offline data collection app that, according to WHO[2], helped eradicate wild polio from Africa. It's become the de-facto app that social impact orgs (e.g., Red Cross, Carter Center) globally use to collect data in the field. It's kinda wild to think about, to be honest.

[1] https://getodk.org

[2] https://www.africakicksoutwildpolio.com/the-top-five-tech-so...

Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

#168

Post by kloch »

At work: the CDN for Megaupload. I was also the guy who had to shut it down when the FBI seized it.

Personal non-code project: The first adult LEGO fan conference in 2000. While I got out of that business years ago it has been replicated by dozens of other annual cons around the world. Back then the LEGO group didn't really understand and was very weary of adult fans. Now there's a whole reality tv show about them with LEGO designers as the judges, and LEGO actively supports cons and clubs.

Open source project: A project I released anonymously ~2010. Several github repos (unrelated to me) keep this project alive (the main one has ~600 stars and ~200 forks) and it's apparently used in several commercial products too.

Website: ip4.me/ip6.me serves 3-5M queries per day. I want to find a good non-profit to take this over to keep it ad and javascript free forever.

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