Ideated and built a low-code platform in 2011, that went on to be primary tool for a company and won accolades from Gartner. Company achieved multifold growth, opened door for partnership with giant software firm and eventually the department itself was sold for more than $500 million. We worked for crazy hours, not caring how it impacts health and family. At the end, we didn't get anything apart from regular paycheck. :(
Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
471–480 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in college I wrote a Windows app to do the side-by-side translations of the bible just like you have on your site. It was commissioned by a multilingual church. Funny thing is, I'm a atheist raised by Catholics. I'm not sure if I would take the job today. I feel it would be unscrupulous for me to facilitate religious studies.
I mean, parabible is really aimed at research. In that sense, hopefully there's something useful about it as a tool for study, irrespective of personal convictions. That said, I'm a Christian and I'm studying the Bible because I believe that's how we know God, and I would be the first to say that there is something different about that kind of research.
I'm curious: When you say "something different" what do you mean? For example,when you engage in bible reasearch, does it feel that a different part of your self is gaining sustinance?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#473I did agency work for a while. One of our clients around 2010 was the US Holocaust museum here in DC. They had stumbled on a trove of pictures of orphaned children and needed help identifying them. We built a site to display them and integrated a handful of carefully selected social networks including Polish network Nasza Klasa. The idea was that people could share these photos and through the network effect, the museum would be able to find, tell, and archive the stories of these children. I was skeptical that anything would come of it but almost immediately, the site started getting results like "that's my father" or even "that's me". It still amazes me.
Looks like the site is miraculously still up though the Cufon is looking a little rough these days: https://rememberme.ushmm.org/
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#474Contributed a patch to the Java String class that caches the hash code.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#475My first job out of college I worked for an international telecommunications company. The first big project I worked on was to develop a call detail record (CDR) search tool. This tool was used to help locate a missing family who had been lost in the Nevada wilderness for more than 48 hours: https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/11/us/nevada-family-found-alive/...
> The first big project I worked on was to develop a call detail record (CDR) search tool.
Dunno if they're still used but I wrote a whole bunch of CDR libraries/viewers/decoders for a telco consultancy that saved people a whole bunch of time back in ~2006-7.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#476Probably the 3D animation code I wrote early in my career, which was then used to animate the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park".
Do you know unix?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#477A bunch of captcha OCR software 10 years ago, recaptha(45% success), various file sharing captchas like megaupload etc.
It used a neural network before it became cool.
Bit embarrassed about the destructive nature, caused a lot of spam for services like twitter.
I was a broke student, too bad these things don't have w good future
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#478In 2005 I created podcastbunker.com with mambo cms. MmI listed only the best podcast. I came from a radio background. You could listen to the podcast right on the site.
It was chosen as one of the “50 coolest web sites of 2005” by Time Magazine. I did it all from my basement on a 3 meg down 750k up dsl. It’s stil listed on the Time Magazine web site.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#479No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#480Two functioning adults