Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 759 posts

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

#291

Post by yboris »

colecut wrote: post #253
yboris wrote: post #22

Built Video Hub App that almost 5,000 people have purchased. I was a math teacher, became a web dev 6 years ago, built this 5 years ago. Most proceeds go to charity. Very minor by comparison to others, but I'm just starting out ;) https://videohubapp.com/ && https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App What I did that is most impactful is that I've been giving at least 10% of my income to cost-effective charities for ov…

What was your app build with if you dont mind me asking

It's Electron (Chromium & Node) running Angular. Has FFmpeg under the hood to generate screenshots. The full code is in the repo - see link above :)

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

#292

Post by cperciva »

koolba wrote: post #275
cperciva wrote: post #272

Probably bsdiff; a few hundred lines of code hacked together over a weekend has saved people over a hundred thousand years of waiting for software updates to download. Next up is probably scrypt; it would rank higher if cryptocurrencies used it, but instead they use nerfedscrypt which defeats the entire point of scrypt. Third is probably FreeBSD/EC2. Of course I didn't do all the work for that, but I can certainly cl…

You forgot my favorite cperciva project: spipe

I didn't forget it, and it's one of my favorites too -- but I don't know if it qualifies as the most impactful. People who use it love it, but it's not very widely used compared to, say, bsdiff.

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

#293

Post by cdavid »

Hard to say, as they were contributions to existing projects. Those would have happened without me most likely.

- ported numpy/scipy to windows 64 bits, and making sure windows was well supported

- pushing for numpy/scipy to move from svn to git

- wrote a prototype of what would become scikit learn. The project really took off after I stopped contributing though

I do very little coding now, but I had several people I managed go on good careers and thanking me for it. That was maybe in the end the most impactful thing I do, I hope.

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

#294

Post by tagami »

A network of science labs linked to the International Space Station for science centers, museums, libraries, and schools around the world.

Our 10th mission launches next Tuesday on SpaceX-26 cargo Dragon. https://magnitude.io/exolab-10/

Next mission in planning stages Feb 2024.

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

#296

Post by rnk »

For one of the leading database engines, I created the cost model that the database uses to pick between database query plan choices for almost every query (except trivial ones). For that same database engine I led the card estimation team and did part of the design of the cardinality estimation and statistics that powers the cost estimation.

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

#297

Post by rmen »

yanokwa wrote: post #166

I'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...

We never met but I had evaluated ODK for the Sharedsolar project at Columbia U for data collection purposes. I used to work alongside mberg and ODk was an indispensable tool for nearly all the health initiatives and surveying. Truly impactful, congratulations!

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

#299

Post by zadjii »

The Windows Terminal. It was a long journey to get the console code fairly modernized and maintainable. Another long journey to build a whole new application that could be compatible with the old. And years now of iterating of that original prototype, out in the open.

It's not a perfect application, by any means. But the bar was _so_ low, that I can't help but think of how much we've helped users just over the last few years.

Post reply on HN