I wrote a data integration between two internal, siloed tools at a major ISP. This let me build security alerting on social engineering attempts and successful compromises. These se campaigns were using information from other corporate and gov data breaches to access accounts that had not been setup with pins/passphrases, and going for quantity over quality for targets. Anyone was fair game to them and if they couldn't steal money then they'd resell the access and PII to even more unsavory types for identity theft. At the time, if a caller had the account holder's PII, they'd be able make limited changes to the account. Unfortunately, those 'limited' changes were things like forwarding phone or email service.
They did pool the data eventually and the alerts continue to be used today to identify compromise and lock email/phone to prevent them from being used for bank fraud. The reduction of financial fraud on normal people was significant. My work kicked off a ton of other initiatives to prevent other avenues of compromise as well. I went from working customer compromise investigations in the scale of thousands a year to a few hundred after implementation. Having clear data of malicious access that couldn't be ignored prompted those initiatives to be seriously funded and maintained. Moving from reactive to proactive on these was very satisfying.
Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
241–250 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#242At 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.
or maybe the internet archive?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#243Despite being in the industry a long time, I think most of what I worked on had little to no impact. In terms of impacting other people, probably the biggest thing was blog posts and sample code. It’s funny how sample code has less “cred” than “real” code, but if you’ve ever been trying to start a new project in a new language or framework you know how invaluable sample code can be. In terms of impact in general, wha…
>Despite being in the industry a long time, I think most of what I worked on had little to no impact. This is kinda what drove me out of tech a few years back... I could point to tens of millions (at minimum) of people who had used my work. I could point to hundreds of millions in net revenue / cost savings for my employers and clients. But was it "impactful"? IE: was any major world problem solved, or were lives act…
its all ephemeral
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#244Not sure if it counts as building something concrete (I have been programming commercially for ~20 years so I'm pretty sure there's something if I dig) but does Stack Overflow impact count? I have over 6,000 answers posted and a calculated reach/impact of over 50 million people. That sometimes makes me smile and feel that I have contributed something.
Yes that counts.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#245Probably this JavaScript function I posted on my blog in 2003 https://simonwillison.net/2003/Mar/25/getElementsBySelector/
Ten years ago I was reading [0] and I remember your name was mentioned somewhere. Here is a quote: > Locating elements by their class name is a widespread technique popularized by Simon Willison ( http://simon.incutio.com ) in 2003 and originally written by Andrew Hayward ( http://www.mooncalf.me.uk ) [0] Page 91 from "Pro JavaScript Techniques" by John Resig.
Yeah here's Andy's getElementsByClassName post (via the Internet Archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20030402172546/http://blog.moonc...
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#246I am not sure I want it to be this, but back when I worked on software for airports, there was a concept of a Target Startup Approval Time (TSAT). This is the moment an aircraft is expected to power up in preparation to roll back and taxi to the runway before taking off. I worked with some clever statisticians who were focused on optimizing this exact moment. That calculation has hopefully contributed to reducing more pollution than anything else I could conceivably do in my lifetime.
That's incredibly boring though, and I work in sport now. The most _emotionally_ impactful achievement is the first soccer player signed based on my statistical models. He helped win his club their first title in a decade, got his first international callup, and won his country their continental cup (he also made his club a lot of profit when they sold him and my sell-on percentage never materialised).
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#247This is only a personal project. I am building a Twitter graph tool. It created a 2d graph of all of your followers (Up to 20,000 followers), and calculates proximity based on shared followership.
[1] https://twitter.com/Nican/status/1592010109202616322 [2] https://graph.bunnypa.ws/
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#248About 14 years ago - before I'd taken as much as an intro to CS class - I wrote some software that helped a bar keep track of who'd drank what. They were the type of bar where, if you drank every beer they had available, you'd get a free mug. Prior to it being computerized, the staff used index cards in shoeboxes. Lots of the wait staff's time was lost fumbling through those boxes, unsticking them from each other (gr…
It is amazing how much you can do with code when you only have minimal knowledge and the desire to make something work, before having ideas of "how it should be done" or "how to do it right"
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#249I used to work for Twitch and built the Custom Live notifications for streamers. It was a relatively straightforward change where we just changed the payload of what the streamers wanted the iOS, Android, email notifications to show. There were some behind-the-scenes work where there is actually a language/curse word check and decisions on if we needed to translate the copy to the receivers local language.
The measurable change was a 30-60% increase in the notification CTR and resulted in hundreds of millions of incremental hours watched.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#250I architected and led the team that delivered the Covid vaccine system for a US state government. Hitting that perpetual moving target and deadline was the hardest thing I’ve done so far. It had a lot of technical impact on that state’s department of health, lots of kudos from healthcare professionals and regular people plus won awards from the governor and secretary of health.