I created a really popular park in a mid-sized city. It’s surreal to see all kinds of people play on it.
Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
271–280 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#272Probably bsdiff; a few hundred lines of code hacked together over a weekend has saved people over a hundred thousand years of waiting for software updates to download.
Next up is probably scrypt; it would rank higher if cryptocurrencies used it, but instead they use nerfedscrypt which defeats the entire point of scrypt.
Third is probably FreeBSD/EC2. Of course I didn't do all the work for that, but I can certainly claim the status of technical project manager.
My day job, Tarsnap, comes in fourth.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#273I built an automation on a form for students who have free-time during lunch. Admin wanted some accountability on where students were. The form allows teachers to set limits on the attendance for the room, records names and emails every day and keeps a record of who was signed up to go somewhere on a given day.
helps teachers stay organized and helps keeps the students accountable. Its simple, quick and eliminated paper hall passes etc...
it is small and quiet. But the students use and respect it the admin appreciate the simple records it keeps and teachers like the extra time they get avoiding paper sign ins.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#274During 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…
> This was the project that made realise how huge the effort-to-effect ratio that can be when computers are involved I love Steve Jobs' metaphor: computers as a bicycle of the mind [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of effort is concentrated on problems that scale to billions of people. There's a lack of attention to problems that would have a big effect for a relatively small number of people. It's a shame, because they're a…
The first time I heard that metaphor, I thought that he meant it in the way that bicycles are really fun to ride. I agree with both interpretations.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#275Probably bsdiff; a few hundred lines of code hacked together over a weekend has saved people over a hundred thousand years of waiting for software updates to download. Next up is probably scrypt; it would rank higher if cryptocurrencies used it, but instead they use nerfedscrypt which defeats the entire point of scrypt. Third is probably FreeBSD/EC2. Of course I didn't do all the work for that, but I can certainly cl…
You forgot my favorite cperciva project: spipe
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
p90 for a full-text search on 330 million documents was 15ms?
I know you can tune the hell out of search performance, but that seems a bit too insane for what looks like a relatively unspecialized setup (Standard DB).
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#277A long time ago I worked for one of the big medical journal publishing firms. (No, the other one.) I was one of the lead software developers, nominally in charge of the web application that served all of our licensed content to medical professionals and librarians all over the world. I was senior enough at that point that I attended regular planning meetings with the CEO and her team. We were working on a new product…
That's an annoying part about capitalism.
For example, the guy who invemted the process to create artificial diamondsnfor GE,got a nice plaque and $1.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#278I 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).
As a football fan and obsesive, France 98 has a special place in my heart because it was my first world cup as a child (I am from 1990, I wasn't fully aware in USA 94), so please please please write more about this.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#279I'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...
I love ODK! I've worked with it for a community health volunteer program and contributed a bug fix, even. The impact of ODK goes beyond the software itself, since so many other survey platforms use it as their base. Kudos and thanks from everyone in global health.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's awesome! Wish I had heard about it when I moved there, definitely going to hunt through the site to see if you have a guide to getting some of my pension payments refunded now that I've moved
I do! https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pension-payments-refund Don't forget your tax return too. If you didn't work the full year, you'll get money back.
Ha, amazing, thank you!