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Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
581–590 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#582I created http://tetration.org which explores what lies beyond exponentiation. My life's work has been to extend the Ackermann function to the complex numbers and matrices. I believe my website lead to a renaissance in tetration research.
The following Mathematica code replaces a thousand lines of earlier code. It computes the flows from maps. Combined with the historic three argument Ackermann function it allows the Ackermann function to the extended to the complex numbers.
order=10;
H[0]=0;
H[1]=f'[0]^t ;
Do[H[max]=First[r[t]/.RSolve[{r[0]==0,r[t]==Sum[Derivative[k][f][0]BellY[max,k,Table[H[j]/.t->t-1,{j,max}]],{k,2,max}]+ f'[0] r[t-1]},r[t],t]],{max,2,order}];
Schroeder=f'[0]^t z+Sum[1/k! H[k]z^k,{k,2,order}]
Abel=Limit[Schroeder,{f'[0]->1}]
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
You personally made Pokemon GO?
Bits of it. I wrote the code to figure out where on the planet all the pokestops and gyms should go, for example[1]. But there were five other backend engineers by the time we launched, plus a bunch of front end people, artists, etc. [1] To be extra-clear, all code in the game was touched by more than one person, every one of them better engineers than I am.
Being an extensive ingress player, i'm quite surprised at this considering this should have been ingress code to begin with. Did pogo not share much code with ingress, just the dataset?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#584The Arduino MIDI Library [1]. Back in 2008, I learned C++ to control my guitar effects pedals with custom electronics as part of my engineering degree. It kickstarted my career into tech and open source. Members of the community do all sorts of crazy things [2] with it.
[1] https://github.com/FortySevenEffects/arduino_midi_library
[2] https://diyelectromusic.wordpress.com/2020/09/19/introducing...
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#585I created http://tetration.org which explores what lies beyond exponentiation. My life's work has been to extend the Ackermann function to the complex numbers and matrices. I believe my website lead to a renaissance in tetration research. The following Mathematica code replaces a thousand lines of earlier code. It computes the flows from maps. Combined with the historic three argument Ackermann function it allows the…
Are there applications?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#586I'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 had the privilege of being a contributor to this project.
(Hi Yaw!)
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#587Most impactful, in order:
1. Was the intern that coded the mechanism to open/close the LIDAR cover on the Mars Phoenix Lander, so it runs on another planet. I also did circuit work, and other tasks for the CSA’s contribution to that mission. That was also the internship where I (re)met my wife.
2. Was on the Android team that brought video to Instagram back in 2013. We brought gyro stabilization to the iPhone, couldn’t quite get it running reliably on Android via the NDK, but I damned well tried.
3. Wrote the first Android app for Instacart.
4. Currently rolling out our new software platform to handle $15B/year revenue for Anheuser-Busch’s supply chain. We have 1000+ companies relying on us to ensure they can order and fulfill products.
Unsure what’s next, but it’ll likely be high impact and fun too.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your experience needs to be documented for history. Seriously. The people, personalities, the development setups, the day to day creation - all that is of keen interest to millions.
I'll write it up.
The OpenStreetMap community would be absolutely fascinated to learn what you were doing with OSM data, without a doubt.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#589Co-created Dall-E Mini (now named Craiyon, and I am not involved anymore). It was among the first text to language models created independently. And it was fully open source. It also got covered by New York Times in the article covering Dall-E 2 by Cade Metz. Links: - GitHub: https://github.com/borisdayma/dalle-mini - Hugging Face Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/flax-community/dalle-mini - NYT article: https://ww…
I used it and loved it a lot, thank you!
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bits of it. I wrote the code to figure out where on the planet all the pokestops and gyms should go, for example[1]. But there were five other backend engineers by the time we launched, plus a bunch of front end people, artists, etc. [1] To be extra-clear, all code in the game was touched by more than one person, every one of them better engineers than I am.
Being an extensive ingress player, i'm quite surprised at this considering this should have been ingress code to begin with. Did pogo not share much code with ingress, just the dataset?
There was very little code shared on the backend. Ingress was appengine talking to custom clients via JSON, PGO was GCE/GKE talking to Unity clients via protobufs. Almost everything on the backend was written specifically for PGO because the Ingress codebase just couldn't scale, at least not cost-efficiently, to the number of users.
Also, Ingress is all about controlling areas of the map, while PGO was mostly based on points of interest, so the architecture needed to be quite different. I'll go into more detail when I post the writeup.