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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?

#191

Post by robswc »

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…

>Website: ip4.me/ip6.me

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

>adult LEGO fan conference

Wow, what a small world. That's what I love about HN. The people that make things you use are on it :)

I wish I had something nearly as impressive. I just have open source stuff that people use. Nothing recognizable though.

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

#192

Post by jim_lawless »

Some things I built on the side, outside of my day job:

In the late 90's, I sold a command-line SMTP e-mailer for Windows. It was easy enough for folks to integrate e-mail transmission into their systems ... even 16-bit systems since spawning a copy of the shell would allow 16-bit systems to invoke my 32-bit mailer. Lots of folks had used these tools for all sorts of things. I got registration checks and cash from around the world before I started taking credit card payments.

I have an open source command-line MP3 player for Windows that folks still use and incorporate into their systems, JS libraries for node.js, ...etc.

https://github.com/jimlawless/cmdmp3

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

#193

Post by alexdumitru »

I built and launched corona.help in January 2020. Almost nobody expected a pandemic, but somehow I thought it was possible and decided to centralize all Covid cases. Just 2 months later it had over 5 million users daily. Eventually Google and other huge companies started doing the same thing and users tanked.

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

#195

Post by lucb1e »

halifaxbeard wrote: post #56

I wrote a vaccine booking availability scraper that helped double digits of people get a COVID vaccine a few weeks sooner otherwise.

To check my understanding: this is about changing the order of vaccinations rather than speeding up vaccinations right?

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

#196

Post by woodruffw »

I wrote a Mach-O parser for Homebrew (the macOS package manager) that’s invoked on just about every package install, so that’s probably a couple of million daily users. It also ended up as a dependency of CocoaPods at some point, so it’s on the critical path for a good chunk of the App ecosystem as well.

I also implemented 2FA and API tokens for PyPI (and helped/continue to work on lots of other parts of that ecosystem).

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

#197

Post by calmtech »

suprjami wrote: post #145
calmtech wrote: post #122

Found a single line of byte code that cost $4M of compute per year.

Please tell us more. This sounds like a good investigative story.

We noticed that one line of byte code was crazy hot. We traced it back to the code, and realized it was a special case fallback.

They were summing 10mb of 8 bit encoded integers, in the 99.5th percentile of traffic, so no one noticed. It was using 10% of fleet compute.

We changed the encoding to 64bit; the data size stayed constant, the 99.5%tile latency plummeted, and I got a bonus. Took a week. My contribution to climate change.

A lot of stuff can hide past 99%.

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

#198

Post by 0xpotato »

a5seo wrote: post #179

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 the…

This is impressive and hugely respectable at the same time. I'm working on a ratings site using zero-knowledge cryptography, would you mind if I reach out?

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

#199

Post by MivLives »

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…

Thank you for the Lego thing.

My mom got into adult lego when she took apart my child hood lego and reassembled them to resell.

Now we mail each other sets that the other is done with, and it gives us a great opportunity to connect. We're both anxious people and there's something relaxing about just assembling something where everything has a place.

When she found out there's a lego con in my town, she made plans to come visit me so we can go together and I can show her around the city I just moved to.

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

#200

Post by lucb1e »

tromp wrote: post #180
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 [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…

> the PoW verifier needs as much memory as the PoW prover, whereas a good PoW should be instantly verifiable

Ooh, yes I see, that is a big difference. Cool work!

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