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

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741–750 of 759 posts

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

#742
post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The vast majority of my answers are in C. Not sure how to filter out and count them, though. Fun if you have! :)

Cool! C is my main language

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

#744

Earlier 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…

Quick and dirty cleanup - convert to, then from postscript.

I absolutely love your thinking. What you propose does is defang the programmability aspect into an inert (but safer) "text-based" form.

But which side should assume the responsibility of this JS-defanging effort into text-based? Client or server? Postal said "be liberal in what you receive and conservative in what you send". So, being conservative (in this respect), server has to be minimalistic (including denial of programmability).

Real problem remains, too much accessibility of programming is being made available to let client-side take it in ... in a gullible way.

And no amount of Sideshow Barker (not a dig on HN's Sideshow Barker) can fix this, until one of the MAANG decides "enough".

Meanwhile, the wild Wild West shall continue.

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

#745
Worked for a large, national US cinema chain not long ago. Was tasked with automating the on/off of the projection bulbs for the entire circuit based on individual auditorium ticket sales. Collaborated with one other guy to turn off the bulb in an auditorium if ticket sales were zero 15 minutes into the show and strike the bulb if a ticket was sold during the show. This small piece of software saved the company electricity and bulb replacement costs in the millions $$ per year. As a cog in the machine, I did not see any of that savings in my paycheck.

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

#746
post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this symphony or horizon or spydus or koha? or?

All those commercial systems existed before his (going by his use of SQL 2005).

ah. i was just listing the ones that i could think of that use the concept of a library id.

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

#747
post #702
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

Hope so too but

> I made it in about 2 weekends on my own time.

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

#748
Bit late to post, though the most impact for me was coding a Y2K bios/rtc tester. It was released as freeware and went global and also generated income for ppl testing PC's for y2k compliance. China had it as an official download on their gov website.

The tester took around 3-mths to get to the production verion and used Turbo Pascal with inline assembly, C and quickbasic for the reports.

The y2k was a big issue in the day and glad the tester played a small part in ensuring a smooth transition.

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

#749

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…

Creating DALL-E Mini at 22 is a huge achievement, especially with less than two years of experience!

I merely worked on the team. It wasn’t my project, per se.

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

#750

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.

Very glad that you liked it.
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