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Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
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Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#682Work: Building a cyber investigations platform that can collect and forensically analyze thousands of computers within an hour. Not due to big scale cloud systems or anything like that, but rather due to efficient and hand-tuned data structures. Today we collect and analyze more than 150.000 computers for cyber investigations pr. year. Everything ranging from fraud investigations to large-scale ransomware attacks.
Private: Spent a few years on building Farseer Physics Engine. Back in 2007 it was used by almost all 2D games for Xbox and Windows Phone. Then Unity took over in 2013.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would love to hear more. Discussed this sort of possibility with an anesthetist friend at length and heard all about the importance of intuition. And limitation/absurdities of existing technologies (“humans aren’t a solid ball of fat and flesh!”). Clinical trials sound incredibly difficult to achieve - such a slow industry!
Hello Scyzork. thanks for asking, I'm still working out how to tell this story succinctly. Here's today's effort: Historically clinicians have had to work with blood pressure and heart rate as the key observable values they had to estimate oxygen perfusion to the tissues. Newer technologies allow you to also measure the volume of blood ejected from the heart with each beat. With this additional information, you can i…
So I work in surgical simulation training. And yeah the OR in my observations has also not been this romanticized mission control thing that I was expecting.
My impression is that it is more like a mechanic shop: people are doing their jobs, they're looking at the clock, thinking schedule, they're listening to music or radio, they're maybe casually arguing about something. They're used to their tools and instruments, they're in some sort of routine, everybody has their individual subdomain or specialty.
This stuff is tricky because you're not just coming up with a device, you're coming up with new human behavior in connection with the device. The human (anesthetist) needs to be won over by the physiological model, and then they need to actually be effective with it.
The funny anecdotes I've heard from an anesthetist were along the lines of "They're introducing new equipment that rings alarms about things I already know, so my job becomes turning those alarms off".
How far along with this process are you?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#684Earlier 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…
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I do enjoy sharing the fruit of my labor; but I share what money I have as well.
But, I "share" my money with those who provided me and others with things, like farmers, truckers, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, architects, textile workers, drafters, crafts-folks, artists, custodial, medical specialists, government workers, educational specialists, sanitation folks, engineers, engineers, engineers. Did I repeat that? Yes, more engineers.
I'm quite sure you do share your money too (and probably may not know the true extent of your reach).
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#685Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#686During the pandemic, I built an online version of the dominos-based game, Mexican Train, for my wife’s family. They play it often at family gatherings. Her mom posted it to the Villages Facebook group (a huge retirement community here in the US). Mexican Train is very popular in retirement communities.
It blew up. It peaked at around 2600 concurrent players on Christmas. It’s slowed down, but still averages around 70 games/day.
The most amazing party was I run it by donation. I’ve received enough donations to keep it running, and dozens of cards, letters, and long emails thanking me profusely for building the game, and how it kept people connected across the miles and especially during lockdowns.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#688Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#689A pipeline approval tool (internal at Amazon) that counts metrics. I was a fairly fresh college-hire SDE1 at Amazon. And I was annoyed, because I'm lazy. Every time I was oncall, I had to manage the deployment pipeline for my teams software- the UI for the tool used by Pickers inside Amazon Warehouses. On Monday, deploy the latest changes to the China stack (small). On Tuesday, check if anything bad happened, and the…
Holy shit. Forget counting the hours (which are easily into the tens, if not hundreds) you saved me and my teams - more importantly, RediFork was a great "on-ramp" for easily introducing observability in existing services without instrumenting anything new, and a great way to demonstrate the power of automation to newbies.
From one "engineer whose irritation at inefficiency spawned a whole tool" to another (I got sick of staying up overnight to run load tests, so wrote myself an automation and monitoring tool - which got picked up, spun off to its own team, and now is used by >300 teams) - thank you!
Re: Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
#690Earlier 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.
There are quite a few sources of data but yes, the ingress POI data was used as one source.