Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 759 posts

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

#491

Post by stokedbits »

Updated the architecture for the deployment model for millions of hospital devices. It originally required service techs to take a thumb drive to a hospital with the update and manually using a series of installers and scripts to perform tedious steps that could take days to update one device… usually with errors because the steps were not followed correctly.

The update was to put all the build steps into source control, decouple all the logic, setup ci/cd to support the changes, and use a series of aws services (greengrass, kinesis, S3, lambda, cognito, systems manager, app sync, Api gateway, cloudfront, dynamo, etc) to facilitate an event driven architecture. Then threw an easy to easy to use gui (nextjs/react) on top of it for the customer support teams to use that was as fail proof as possible with a holistic view of system state and update progress.

Easily saved the company 10s of millions of dollars yearly and update times for the most critical systems went from days to hours. Failure rates went from a problem to a minimal occurrence which we had the observability in place to resolve in future scenarios by adding additional tests for any regression issues found.

Super fun project, learned a lot about AWS. Made a lot of customers happy and hospitals more safe.

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

#492

Post by Aeolun »

pmarreck wrote: post #415
13of40 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a guess, but it might have something to do with whether the brain is able to be saved vs. just the body.

yes but why wouldn't you try regardless of knowing? In the time you spend gathering temp data, you could already be reviving

I imagine they were doing that regardless, but were very happy to learn that there was an actual chance of success.

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

#493

Post by Aeolun »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #112

Wow, weird to think about. Nothing. I haven’t built anything with a significant impact. I’ve made things that made a significant impact on businesses, but in the scheme of things, nothing exciting. The thing I made which generated the most revenue was easily the most harmful, and likely the most impactful. Unfortunately. It was an ad exchange that did extremely well. The owners went from random guys with a gross idea…

I dunno, I haven’t build anything impactful either, and I got in relatively early (early enough to build Facebook/Google). I imagine that’s true for lots of people.

I have a humongous list of failed stuff though, so much that when I look back I wonder why I couldn’t just stick with any given thing.

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

#494

Post by Aeolun »

I think the most impactful thing I’ve ever done was build a market information website for EVE Online (EVEMarketeer).

It was definitely the thing that I’ve had the most fun building, since I was both product manager and developer, and I had zero other responsibilities at the time.

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

#495

Post by egberts1 »

taforask272277 wrote: post #467
egberts1 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was actually a wandering hyperactive/ADHD mind that often said "why isn't there one" and follows through doggedly to the very end. It is one of those traits where a mind clicks and said "this is it and how" and surprisingly gets into the most illusive hyperfocus/high-energy mode (without using any drug). Slow-path network processing (arguably me) was commercially made in Ascom Timeplex in 1982 and someone else lea…

can you please explain what is JavaScript Host-Based Intrusion Detection/Protection System?

It is simple. Too many malicious and privacy-violating JavaScript abounds, especially after being boiled down to seemingly-indecipherable WebAssembly bytecode.

And a typical enterprise NIDS would not be able to see beyond those encrypted packet containing JS over 2-way-signed TLS/SSL, or HTTPv3 (QUIC) (or a few other E2E protocols).

Since JavaScript won't be banned (unlike Adobe Flash/ActionScript, BTW Adobe's JavaScript is still being used within PDF files) anytime soon, this is another example of seeing a void and rushing to fill its need for the betterment of Internet citizens.

Just yesterday, another "this is it and how" moment came to me: this Python PDF guy (and a few PDF experts) got me thinking "this is how to remove or make inert the JavaScript inside PDF": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33646951

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

#496

Post by shagymoe »

I saved my company ~$18 million with a 100 line perl script that I wrote in order to learn programming.

It parsed a text file containing Jeep parts that needed to be sequenced and printed barcode labels to Zebra printers. One day a construction crew dug up all of our data lines and we lost all comms to Chrysler and our data center.

We had to have a rotation of floor supervisors driving to Chrysler to copy/paste orders onto a floppy disk and bring it back to be processed. We kept the line running for about 30 hours, which basically saved our company because our contract with Chrysler stipulated that we would be charged $10,000 per minute if we stopped the line.

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

#497

Post by johnofthesea »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #210

Potlatch, the user-friendly editor for OpenStreetMap from 2007 to 2013. I'd been involved in OSM since its first few months (2004) but found contributing intensely frustrating. I wanted something where drawing a road was as quick as it was in Illustrator, which I was used to. Previously you had to create nodes, link them into segments, link those into ways, and manually add tags. Potlatch was a Flash app that allowed…

> as it was in Illustrator

I have also used your osm2ai Perl script. It inspired me to create own OSM processing scripts. I remember later, as student, writing these perl-scripts with pencil into small notepad while waiting at the airport.

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

#498

Post by egberts1 »

itsthecourier wrote: post #332
egberts1 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was actually a wandering hyperactive/ADHD mind that often said "why isn't there one" and follows through doggedly to the very end. It is one of those traits where a mind clicks and said "this is it and how" and surprisingly gets into the most illusive hyperfocus/high-energy mode (without using any drug). Slow-path network processing (arguably me) was commercially made in Ascom Timeplex in 1982 and someone else lea…

How did you get disabled?

A bacterial infection. Differently twice.

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

#499

Post by [deleted] »

tuyguntn wrote: post #162
egberts1 wrote: post #6

Impactful? Designed and deployed credit card readers used in gas pumps back in 1979. (Sold to Gasboy) Wrote a fine tuner to allow communication between satellites (precursor to TDRSS days). Still used to this day. Failover of IP in ATM switches (VVRP, PXE, secondary DHCP, secondary DNS, secondary LDAP, secondary NFS). While not invented here, it is still used today as this is a Common setup to this day. Printer drive…

OMG, Who are you?

[deleted]

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

#500

Post by garyrob »

garyrob wrote: post #368

A statistical technique I developed was incorporated into a number of award-winning spam filters, including SpamAssassin.[1] I'm also apparently the original inventor of the tracking cookie, which had the implication that no one was able to patent it. It was presented in a patent of mine[2] that was about a collaborative filtering technique for recommending ads; I'd come up with the tracking cookie mechanism to suppo…

The spam filter stuff used Paul Graham's word probabilities described in his seminal article A Plan For Spam. It changed those probabilities a bit, to better account for the number of emails a word appeared in. But in the main, my article was about a statistical method (NOT Bayesian) for combining those probabilities. The word probabilities were Bayesian, but the way of combining them used frequentist statistics. Even so, spam filters that used the technique were always referred to as Bayesian as if nothing frequentist was involved.
Post reply on HN