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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?

#171

Post by sitzkrieg »

Software for Navy RDCs - they basically double data entry info during recruit training on a paper in the day, then re enter it into their systems at night in personal time. made a fully offline capable little SPA to track the data and sync it later. saved 100s of hours each cycle. was challenging (pwa talking to soap..) but felt good

then it got pulled, shelved and never saw the light of day but this was after our time as contractors and i never heard why. but it's probably my most meaningful development aside some niche detection and warning sensor products

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

#174

Post by adastra22 »

lucb1e wrote: post #164
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?

SCrypt was thought to be memory hard. It was not, and making asics for it ended up being pretty trivial.

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

#176

Post by striking »

pertique wrote: post #39
striking wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the good you've done for the world, but isn't that last sentence just a little bit ironic?

I won't speak for the parent comment, and this isn't a critique on you, but I think it's more of a reflection on the reader than an ironic take. Many would read "I should be worth more than..." as "I should have more money than...", but that's exactly what the parent comment is railing against. In the corporate world, and especially in the startup space, money is often the metric that defines worth. In the parent com…

I understood it to mean "most of the people on this site", and I certainly didn't take it personally.

The irony I understood from the comment is that the metric the commenter suggests should be considered more strongly is how one treats others, and they do so in the same breath as talking down on some group of people, which would probably take a few points off of their value as measured by that metric. The irony, in my mind, does not hinge on whether or not they'd be more valuable than the subjects of their missive but rather on the fact that their actions conflict with their value system.

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

#179

Post by a5seo »

Built a niche ratings and reviews site that grew to 10M visitors a year before I sold it.

I’m mainly proud of the fact that we kept strict separation between revenue ops and content moderation despite a lot of pressure from billion dollar companies to delete reviews they didn’t like. We left lots of money on the table, but fuck those companies.

15 years on, reviews are woven into most websites in the industry and they’re all pretty biased and controlled by the companies we resisted before selling.

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

#180

Post by tromp »

lucb1e wrote: post #164
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?

Scrypt [1] is a password based key derivation function (PBKDF), which can be used as a hash function that takes a configurable amount of memory to compute.

The reason it makes a very poor PoW (as choice of hash function in the Hashcash Proof-of-Work) is that the PoW verifier needs as much memory as the PoW prover, whereas a good PoW should be instantly verifiable.

This is why blockchains using scrypt as hash function severely limit the amount of memory used (usually to 128KB). So that verification, while slow, is not horribly slow.

Cuckoo Cycle also requires a configurable amount of memory to solve (subject to certain tradeoffs), but crucially, can be instantly verified with no memory use at all. And thus makes for a good PoW.

In the form of the Cuckatoo32 variant that most mining takes place with, it requires 0.5 GB of SRAM and 0.5 GB of DRAM to solve most efficiently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt

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