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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?

#181

Post by scrollaway »

kloch wrote: post #168

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 wi…

> I want to find a good non-profit to take this over to keep it ad and javascript free forever.

Maybe worth reaching out to Mozilla. That's the only actual non-profit I can think of who I think would have both the ability and the incentive to keep it online.

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

#182

Post by jiggawatts »

_e4c8 wrote: post #18
jiggawatts wrote: post #4

During 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…

Cool story! what languages, frameworks, etc did you use? Or are you about to tell me COBOL? :P

The legacy back-end system being migrated was Clipper + dBase III on DOS, which is reminiscent of COBOL.

The part I added was built with ASP.NET 2.0 on top of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and was eventually upgraded to 4.0 and 2008 respectively.

The only magic sauce was the use of SQLCLR to embed a few small snippets of C# code into the SQL Server database engine. This allowed the full-text indexing to be specialised for the high level data partitioning. Without this, searches would have taken up to ten seconds. With this custom search the p90 response time was about 15 milliseconds! I believe PostgreSQL is the only other popular database engine out there that allows this level of fine-tuned custom indexing.

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

#185

Post by tromp »

adastra22 wrote: post #174
lucb1e wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Scrypt is memory hard. The reason ASICs were easy to make was the small memory requirement chosen to make PoW verification not too slow.

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

#186

Post by rmen »

sharedsolar.org

Back in 2010, I built the software systems to manage solar-powered microgrids providing prepaid electricity in remote, rural offgrid communities with no internet connectivity. People could pay for the electricity service when they wanted and could, with no minimum amounts required; aside from the tech, we wanted to demonstrate a viable, sustainable business model for scaling so free electricity was not the objective.

Constraints for the software system running at the microgrid included - server hardware should not draw more than an energy-efficient bulb at peak load, cost Took about 3-4 months to go from concept note to first field deployment in Mali. Over the course of the next couple of years, increased robustness and features and expanded to over 20 villages in East and West Africa (Mali, Uganda). These were all villages/communities that for the first time had homes with AC-electric outlets that they used then for applications like lighting, cell charging, small fans, etc.

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

#188

Post by agumonkey »

wazoox wrote: post #139

I designed and implemented the whole graphic system for the World Cup '98 (working 100h weeks for months). Billions of people have watched in real-time the result of my work and I earned absolutely nothing from it :) (there's a fun story to write about this, the tremendous amount of work, setting up the WAN connecting the SGI machines together, building the remote control hardware, etc).

Quite insane. If you ever write about it, I'll surely be reading.

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

#189

Post by Random_Person »

I was a warehouseman in the Marine Corps in the late 90s. Our warehouse was absolute garbage. we couldn't fill something like 30% of our orders because we couldn't find the items or the inventory was off. We were also still running on nightly batches from some IBM AS400 system. I wrote a receiving program to print labels and properly assign stock locations to incoming inventory. Coupled with better control procedures we turned the ~$4MM operation around and ran at over 99% efficiency. Earned myself two NAMs for that work. It was 100% VB with a custom flat-file database.

Then I stopped working on software for ~15 years because I burned out

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