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

361–370 of 759 posts

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

#361

Post by agotterer »

AmblingAvocado wrote: post #254
kloch wrote: post #168

At work: the CDN for Megaupload. I was also the guy who had to shut it down when the FBI seized it. Personal non-code project: The first adult LEGO fan conference in 2000. While I got out of that business years ago it has been replicated by dozens of other annual cons around the world. Back then the LEGO group didn't really understand and was very weary of adult fans. Now there's a whole reality tv show about them wi…

Legoland in my city still requires adults to be accompanied by children to enter. Kind of bizarre.

That doesn’t surprise me. It’s a very child focused park and I’m guessing they want to control the experience and environment as best they can. A bunch of high schoolers running around might change the dynamic.

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

#363

Post by frellus »

vbezhenar wrote: post #84

So far most impactful thing I've built is web app for police in my country. When I had issues with police, I noticed that they used my app to look up my details. It was somewhat funny. Didn't tell them, I don't think they would believe me.

ULPT: would have maybe been a good point to have a backdoor in that app, maybe... or some sort of a filter for your name

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

#364

Post by cookie_monsta »

agotterer wrote: post #361
AmblingAvocado wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legoland in my city still requires adults to be accompanied by children to enter. Kind of bizarre.

That doesn’t surprise me. It’s a very child focused park and I’m guessing they want to control the experience and environment as best they can. A bunch of high schoolers running around might change the dynamic.

I am charmed by the innocence of this comment.

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

#365

Post by frellus »

jv22222 wrote: post #201

ModernTeacher.com - The platform has helped 1000’s of schools modernize learning away from traditional 1900’s style classrooms to a modern blended approach. It’s not just about technology it’s also about curriculum, classroom layout, adaptive learning per child etc.

anyone who does something in the educational space .. that's an upvote from me!

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

#366

Post by philliphaydon »

One of the things I did was helping at a company I contracted at for a few months.

The company did these pdf invoices and the design team would change the design weekly. And there was a junior dev working there and she spent 4 days a week trying to get these new designs into html to generate the invoice and convert to PDF.

She was quite down because she felt like she was missing out on working on stuff she could learn from.

So I went talked to the design team and got them to generate their designs as Adobe forms with named fields.

Then I sat with the dev and we implemented in about 2 hours Adobe form field data and outputting a pdf.

Then each week she got given a new form. Double checked the fields. And then replaced the form.

The weeks that followed she would spend 1 hour a week doing her task and was able to work on the main application and get real work.

Edit: wow people have contributed a lot of awesome stuff. I feel like I haven’t contributed anything now haha. I just picked this particular story because I felt like I helped someone out of a crappy situation.

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

#367

Post by patio11 »

I kickstarted and was the CEO of a non-profit which functioned for about six months as the shadow covid vaccine location data infrastructure for the U.S. during the early months of the 2021 rollout. We worked with Google, the federally-blessed initiative, California, many county health departments, etc.

My best estimate is many millions of Americans were successfully vaccinated as a result of data we sourced, collated, verified and distributed.

The probable magnitude of the impact is thousands of lives saved.

Our tech stack in the early days was a static site generated with Ruby with search results all in a single JSON file filtered by the client in JS, with the backing data store being Airtable. It got more sophisticated over time.

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

#368

Post by garyrob »

A statistical technique I developed was incorporated into a number of award-winning spam filters, including SpamAssassin.[1]

I'm also apparently the original inventor of the tracking cookie, which had the implication that no one was able to patent it. It was presented in a patent of mine[2] that was about a collaborative filtering technique for recommending ads; I'd come up with the tracking cookie mechanism to support that technique. So, it didn't attempt to patent the tracking cookie separately; but because it was the first publication describing the method, no one else could patent it either. In 2021 a joint legal brief filed by Google and Twitter together, defending themselves against a patent troll, called it "Robinson's Cookie". My patent is owned by Google now. It contained a lot of details for giving users control of the data derived from tracking; that part was pretty much ignored by people implementing it.

[1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6467 [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5918014A

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

#369

Post by smcameron »

Hmm, feel pretty small compared to many here.

Probably most impactful, I wrote the linux driver for HP's (now PMC Sierra's?) SmartArray RAID controllers, of which many millions were sold, most inside HP servers.

Back in 2009-2012, I built a cyclekart[1] in my driveway, and documented it on youtube[2]. Back then almost nobody was building cyclekarts, apart from the original inventors, the Stevensons. Many people have told me my videos inspired them to build their own cyclekarts, (maybe because I succeeded despite obviously not knowing what the hell I was doing) and today there is a thriving worldwide cyclekart community. I don't know for sure how much difference my videos made, but I like to think I had a hand in popularizing the hobby.

In the hobby software world, I made Space Nerds in Space[3], but I don't think that was very impactful, as nobody plays this game because it's too hard to gather together a crew, but as part of making that game, I made gaseous-giganticus[4], which creates textures for gas-giant planets, and has been used by people creating mods for Kerbal Space Program, and I haven't seen a better gas giant texture generator out there yet, despite that there are some obvious (but difficult) avenues to pursue.

[1] https://cyclekarts.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaNHLvHGONc&list=PLcSUyKz3gf... [3] https://spacenerdsinspace.com [4] https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus

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

#370

Post by didip »

Once upon a time, I sped up Tornado Web Framework by quite a bit.

I used to write one or two popular Go libraries.

There are (or were?) big McRouter + Memcache clusters behind New Relic. I prototyped that and deployed to prod in ~3 weeks.

I was one of the few engineers that introduced Go to New Relic.

These days I would send small patches to Apache Druid.

Besides Druid work, I can't really say all the cool things I do these days.

Post reply on HN