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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?

#551

Post by atlasunshrugged »

terramars wrote: post #268

I took couple years off coding to build a Kenyan infrastructure engineering firm - we're still going although I've started programming again. The biggest thing we've done is 6.7km of a mountain / lakeside ring road in Homa Bay on Lake Victoria (Kodula village section specifically, the work is visible on satellite). We're actually not completely done with it but watching the community growth from having the paved road…

Wow, super cool, I was in Kenya and Cameroon last year on two different projects (one tech, one traditional consulting doing market research) and there are so many problems still to be solved. If you're thinking about impact/scale for problems to tackle over there, what would you be working on? Somewhat crazy q, given how bad traffic and roads are, what do you think about dirigibles for goods transport between some major cities (or even regions like cobalt mines in DRC to Zambia)?

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

#552

Post by atlasunshrugged »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #468
terramars wrote: post #268

I took couple years off coding to build a Kenyan infrastructure engineering firm - we're still going although I've started programming again. The biggest thing we've done is 6.7km of a mountain / lakeside ring road in Homa Bay on Lake Victoria (Kodula village section specifically, the work is visible on satellite). We're actually not completely done with it but watching the community growth from having the paved road…

What's Kenya like for infrastructure development compared to regional neighbors? Seems always that Kenya is miles ahead of other countries in that part of Africa on almost every metric?

I was in Kenya and Cameroon for projects last year and went to Uganda on holiday, Kenya is far ahead of Cameroon, Uganda actually had decent infrastructure but it was all two lane highways so when you get heavy freight there can be huge delays (ditto for much of Kenya, but they built a rail line at least). Power was a bit better in Kenya than Cameroon, but in my apt (in a nice part of Nairobi) it went out about once a day and had to switch to generators for a bit.

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

#553

Post by citilife »

Anti-fraud detection system at a major bank. Reduced fraud by around $3-5m per day.

A close second was a script I wrote at a collections agency to pull and write off the max amount of debt allowed (per company & partners policy) per day. Would write off medical debt for a few thousand people a week.

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

#554

Post by relwin »

Built the prototype in-vehicle data collection system used by NHTSA to evaluate vehicle safety devices back in the 90’s. Probably the first MPEG2 encoder used in a car to record various cameras.

Co-produced “Pinball 101”, helping thousands of pinball players up their game: https://youtu.be/_RroLKc4wEQ

Created “Le Dominoux” for a 555 timer contest. Now popular electronics project. https://youtu.be/PQOjkuJtBfM

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

#555

Post by andrewmcwatters »

peterkelly wrote: post #345

I was a contributor to a little pair of libraries called KHTML and KJS, a HTML renderer and JavaScript interpreter. Joined about a year into the project and while I didn't lay the foundations I helped improve the DOM and JS support a fair bit. People I respected told me I was wasting my time because Internet Explorer was the de-facto standard and the idea of a new browser engine becoming prominent was fantasy. Then A…

Do you have any insights into how someone should approach a renderer today for HTML and CSS 2.1 rasterization?

Tiled rendering seems to be what all the major renderers use, but the layers of abstraction they utilize to get there are so dense they're unreadable without extensive amounts of time.

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

#556

Post by iboisvert »

TheTaytay wrote: post #511

1: Porting YNAB from a spreadsheet to a C# Windows app back in 2006. (People tell us YNAB has changed their life) 2: Subsequently helping build the YNAB company/team. They are an amazing group of people and I’ll likely never be prouder of anything in my life. To be very clear: I can’t take credit for the original idea or spreadsheet. That would be our original founder, Jesse.

YNAB did change my life, thank you!

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

#557

Post by gardenfelder »

Aeolun wrote: post #492
pmarreck wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes but why wouldn't you try regardless of knowing? In the time you spend gathering temp data, you could already be reviving

I imagine they were doing that regardless, but were very happy to learn that there was an actual chance of success.

That, in fact, is how I figured it went. I did not get to see the video, so everything remains speculation.

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

#558

Post by treme »

primax wrote: post #406

Impacting others? I started a Facebook group about a live stream for a falcon nest in Melbourne's CBD. It's had international news coverage and has been involved in a bunch of curriculums for schools around the world. Personally? I built a heavy duty portable hard drive shredder than can shred a drive down to 1mm pieces in 60 seconds. Overall I sunk about $300k into the business and probably made back maybe $100k. I…

seems like it'd find a market fit in military/intelligence market, did you have any luck reaching out to DOD?

would have been useful in situations like these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident

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

#559

Post by froh »

shagymoe wrote: post #527
mooreds wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so curious. So the process was: * supervisor drives to Chrysler, pastes part orders into text file, saves it a floppy * floppy returns to your company, you open it up and run the perl script, which prints barcode labels * ... then what?

The labels printed directly to the warehouse floor where parts were being sequenced. So, for example, the Rear Right Fender Flares printer would print barcodes labels and the person sequencing would pick up the next label in sequence, look at which color fender flare it specified, go pick that part, apply the label and put it in a sequencing rack. When the rack is full, it gets loaded on a truck bound for the plant.

so you kept the just in sequence supply chain of some Chrysler plant alive with a perl script that could import their sequence orders from floppy disks into your system, just as if they had arrived via wire? amazing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_in_sequence

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