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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#541

Post by greenie_beans »

jiggawatts wrote: post #387
itsthecourier wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate a little bit more about how you partitioned it?

I simply added the "library id" as a prefix to almost every table's primary key. Every lookup specified it with an equality filter, so essentially it was thousands of standalone libraries in a single schema. One hiccup was that when the query cardinality estimator got confused, it would occasionally ignore the partition prefix and do a full scan somewhere, bloating the results by a factor of 2000x! This would cause d…

is this symphony or horizon or spydus or koha? or?

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

#542

Post by kaveh808 »

nickkell wrote: post #476
kaveh808 wrote: post #216

Probably 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?

I've worked with a number of Unix variants over the years. This animation code was developed on SGI IRIX.

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

#544

Post by viiralvx »

I was an early part of the team that helped build GitHub Actions. It had some crazy moments of flying for impromptu meetings and rewriting parts of the system (three times) to what Actions became today, but overall, I think its the most impactful thing I've worked on in my career yet. Seeing it go from its infancy to where it is today (even though I've since left GitHub) is amazing.

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

#545

Post by alasdair_ »

dang wrote: post #535
alasdair_ wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll write it up.

If you do, let use know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll put it in the second-chance pool ( https://news.ycombinator.com/pool , explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 ), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.

Will do! Thanks.

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

#546

Post by tpankaj »

Aeolun wrote: post #486
tpankaj wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 25 and I'd totally take it on, but you're probably looking for an actual nonprofit if you want true survivability. As someone who has used this tool for at least 10+ years (as long as I've known what an IP address is), I'd love to help make sure it stays around.

Maybe it’s an option to found a nonprofit especially for this goal? If it doesn’t already exist anyway.

The process is quite complex so it's usually too heavy handed for a project of this size. That's why people look for an existing nonprofit to take it on. But if kloch mainly wants a couple other people who care about the project to be around to make sure it continues, I'm onboard.

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

#547

Post by ipnon »

The impact was terribly negative. I worked for a couple of years on a CMS for health insurance companies. It was purchased for exorbitant sums by companies around the country. It never worked. Millions of Americans saw increases to their already expensive medical insurance for no benefit, and I contributed. It would be easy to say I needed the money and the company bears the ultimate responsibility, but my code is still running accomplishing nothing and costing much to people who can't afford it. Now the company is slowly dying and nothing of value will be lost when it's gone.

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

#548

Post by mysterydip »

schoen wrote: post #324

Let's Encrypt (along with the coauthors of https://abetterinternet.net/documents/letsencryptCCS2019.pdf and many other contributors). Now the world's largest public certificate authority!

I refused to use certificates for my own projects as it was too complicated and expensive, until LE came along. Thank you!

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

#549

Post by atlasunshrugged »

I helped to design a visa targeting remote workers and corresponding program for a South American government in an effort to drive more sustainable tourism to the country in the wake of the covid pandemic. They implemented the visa idea but not the program (which was focused on creating more of a concierge service for newcomers and helping integrate them into local communities, eg. volunteering at a local makerspace rather than just hanging out with other remote workers). Still very early days but hopefully it turns out to be impactful.

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

#550

Post by atlasunshrugged »

justsocrateasin wrote: post #41

First job out of college, I was at a consulting firm doing software development for DHS (Homeland Security). I got a lot of flack from my friends and family for "working for the devil", but the work was actually objectively good for society - basically there was a big data problem where when an immigrant trying to illegally cross into the US was apprehended, and if they were sick, their custody would be transferred f…

Wow, that's fantastic work! Hopefully you haven't been turned off of gov work forever, there are now more and more programs to bring in tech talent (e.g. the Presidential Innovation Fellowship, TechCongress, USDS, U.S. Digital Corps) at more reasonable pay scales for impactful roles. May be worth checking out if you want to do it again
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