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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?

#701

Post by atlasunshrugged »

n02381e3 wrote: post #622
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #549

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…

That sounds like an amazing idea, especially what you cal the concierge service. It's a shame that didn't end up getting implemented. Where would I be able to learn more about the visa?

Thanks! It hasn't been super publicized yet which is a bit surprising, but here's an article about it https://www.fragomen.com/insights/colombia-new-immigration-l...

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

#702

Post by otikik »

mabbo wrote: post #240

A 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…

You saved Amazon a lot of wasted man hours. I hope they compensated you well

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

#703

Post by HorizonXP »

nso95 wrote: post #695
HorizonXP wrote: post #587

Most 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…

PhD?

I might do one when I retire. I did most of my Masters in medical imaging, but left before I wrote my thesis. I want to end my life just being able to say I did it.

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

#704

Post by pixelbeat__ »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #664
pixelbeat__ wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally custom userland, though does reuse common open source components

What was the reasoning for it though? Just seems a huge time sink for questionable gain.

You're not considering the scale.

We have faster iteration than upstream distros. More flexible. More tuned. I won't give exact details but 1% CPU gives extremely significant monetary savings, and there are at least 15% savings from static linking, PGO, LTO, more appropriate `-march`, more appropriate CPU security sharing considerations, ...

Billions of dollars per year, in essentially electricity and required systems savings (considering the scale of serving 3 billion users a day).

Also devs get access to the latest compilers, language levels, and libs, completely independent of distros, who have a more general compat issue to contend with. Considering there are about 30k tech in Meta this value also multiplys up.

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

#705

Post by ricopags »

utopcell wrote: post #617

Building on the shoulders of giants: I've made Google's Web Search >10% faster.

If you're not legally constrained, would you say more about when and how?

I'm curious if it's pre or post BERT, for instance, and also what kinds of things you had to do to induce that large a boost in speed.

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

#706

Post by realitylabs »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #317

A nights & weekends project that has since become a worldwide federated database and software infrastructure. Took ten years of managing it alone, but it’s been in the hands of a pretty capable team, for the last few years. It was/is a free project, designed to Serve a pretty challenged demographic. It has turned out to be quite successful, for a number of reasons; many of which have little to do with me, as the new…

Very grateful for you and it.

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

#707

Post by wan_ala »

__rito__ wrote: post #408

Co-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…

Thanks for making this, it has been very fun for me.

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

#708

Post by joshxyz »

jiggawatts wrote: post #4

During a centralisation of public school local servers to a data centre, I created a consolidated library enquiry system. It served over 2,000 libraries, had 330 million titles, and had about a million users. It was efficient enough to run off my laptop, if need be. AFAIK it was one of the top five biggest library systems in the world at the time. I was asked to add some features that would have been too difficult in…

> hardly anyone in the department of education even knows my name!

it's okay sir, we now know you as jiggawatts

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

#709

Post by wan_ala »

evronm wrote: post #7

This: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Farmer%27s_Market . Helped a few thousand people get their meds before we all got arrested. No regrets.

I have not used your site, but I think it is awesome you are back! How did you get caught? Are there any privacy tips you have learned from the experience?

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

#710

Post by wan_ala »

unwind wrote: post #87

Not sure if it counts as building something concrete (I have been programming commercially for ~20 years so I'm pretty sure there's something if I dig) but does Stack Overflow impact count? I have over 6,000 answers posted and a calculated reach/impact of over 50 million people. That sometimes makes me smile and feel that I have contributed something.

What languages? I might have used some of your code lol
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