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Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
651–660 of 759 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#652I created Tiny Flashlight for Android 12 years ago. It's been downloaded almost 500m times. Back then every hardware vendor implemented the camera API in their own way and it wasn't easy to start the camera led. I had to purchase many different devices from different carriers from all around the world just to find out a way to start the camera LED. It was very helpful when the vendor published the kernel source code…
haha this is sweet, did you monetize it? Did you make your money back from buying all those phones or just consider a tax for making a cool app?
I used Goodle Admob (back in the day it was only Admob) to monetize it. Thanks to the monetization I managed to purchase all of these devices and develop the app further. It was like finding a way to solve a tiny bootstrapping problem.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#653I work at the intersection of geospatial and emergency operations. This is pretty small in reach, but I found out recently that my re-mapping, re-griding, and so forth of a large local park may have played a significant role in locating someone who had suffered a cardiac arrest. The EMT arrival was quite prompt whereas before there would have been tens of minutes of floundering just locating him.
I feel good about that.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
That's interesting! My friends who were avid Ingress players totally repeated the story that at least the geospatial data was somehow reused directly (to generate points of interest automatically based on places that figured into Ingress gameplay). It would be interesting to hear to what extent that was a misconception.
The POI is indeed reused from Ingress. For a very long time the only way to get a new POI in Pokémon GO is to make a new portal in Ingress and it will sync over.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#655I helped build the mission planning system for several earth observation missions, most notably the TerraSAR-X / TanDEM-X SAR mission. It has created the best global digital elevation map (DEM), surpassing the SRTM data set.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TanDEM-X
We were a tiny team of 2 core people. I was the main software engineer, the other main contributor was a mathematician.
The project was done in C#, but in a very functional style. I had to write my own functional collections library for it. Functional style was a very good fit for this kind of classical optimisation problem. Basically zero cost backtracking.
The planning system was very challenging because the two sats fly in close formation, and some operations can cause permanent damage.
I have since left the European space industry out of frustration that most interesting stuff seems to happen in the US, where I am not allowed to work due to ITAR.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#656Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#657A new ETL with desktop management app and web interface for graphs/statistics for an office in a banking group. All with C# and, unfortunately, Visual Basic and the web stack.
Quite a challenge that took ~1 year all alone.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#658[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#659I built the first "post-play" experience for Netflix. It made it so that Netflix would automatically start playing the next episode of the show you are watching after a 15 second count down. We built it in the Silverlight player on the web because it was the fastest way to A/B test new features at the time. Before post-play, you had to open the episode menu and click on the next episode to play it. We didn't want to…
I hate, loathe, and despise that fucking thing! It prevents me from being able to see the credits! Sometimes I want to know who played what part! I'm okay with an optional prompt that lets me skip the credits if I want to, but that should NEVER be the default!!!
> It prevents
It doesn’t…
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 JavaSc…
My understanding is that JS/WASM is sandboxed within the browser environment. It does have some access (say Camera) but only if you allow it.
Care to develop more on the potential attacks here?