Firefox for iOS and Firefox for Android. Used by tens of millions of people.
Not just me - big team effort. Engineering manager of both.
Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
341–350 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> I think would have both the ability and the incentive to keep it online. Ability? 5M/day for "what's my ip" is not much, and I'd wager most of us on this site would be able to keep it up and alive just fine. As for incentive... in addition to the Mozilla Foundation, orgs like Calyx, NLNet, Quad9 come to mind.
A non-technical nonprofit will fuck up regardless of the load. Beyond "keeping it online", it can be something as simple as "knowing how to configure the dns for it".
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#343During 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…
I have a bunch of small scale ideas that I want to implement. Not necessarily for profit. Any ideas on how to execute?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Not likely the full book, just title, author and a few other low cardinality fields I'm sure. Also not likely 330 million unique volumes, but total books. This is within reach of a single database with proper indexing.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#345I was a contributor to a little pair of libraries called KHTML and KJS, a HTML renderer and JavaScript interpreter. Joined about a year into the project and while I didn't lay the foundations I helped improve the DOM and JS support a fair bit.
People I respected told me I was wasting my time because Internet Explorer was the de-facto standard and the idea of a new browser engine becoming prominent was fantasy.
Then Apple decided they wanted do a browser and looked around at what open source engines were available they could use as a starting point. Thus was born WebKit [1].
I consistently ignore anyone who tells me I shouldn't try something because it's "too hard" or "nobody will use it". Most of the time they turn out to be right. But not always.
[1] https://marc.info/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197104218786&w=2
Edit: Here's an interesting presentation by Lars Knoll and George Staikos on the history of the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tldf1rT0Rn0
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#346I built and am still currently running a livestream tipping service localized for Indonesian. We need specialized service for this because Indonesians don't use credit card so existing services like Streamlabs is a no go.
I would like to think that it sparked this new cultural phenomenon and made livestream tipping a normal thing.
I am just amazed that something that started as a weekend project can help others tremendously.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> I think would have both the ability and the incentive to keep it online. Ability? 5M/day for "what's my ip" is not much, and I'd wager most of us on this site would be able to keep it up and alive just fine. As for incentive... in addition to the Mozilla Foundation, orgs like Calyx, NLNet, Quad9 come to mind.
You are correct it uses very little resources, especially since most queries are http instead of https. Since there are no user accounts and it doesn't track anyone it doesn't even have a backend database to connect to. Just a couple dirt simple programs written in C with some very easy to remember domain names.
I'm not getting any younger so it's really about survivability. Transferring to another individual HN'er probably wouldn't solve that.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Victorian parent who moves house way too often I would like to say thank you.
Hehe, well as with most things built professionally, I can't really take any credit for the concept or even the design, but I do take the responsibility of keeping it up and running pretty seriously.
I don't know how much other government-hosted software you use, but I guess I'm thanking you for the fact that it actually works (and please don't reply that you also worked on the census website :/ )
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
That's awesome!
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#350I was leading the team that build the software architecture for some of the Covid vaccine production instruments.