Ask HN: Do you have a personal secret software?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513677

by segmondy • 6 years ago

2 5 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It's well known that big orgs have secret software that are part of their super powers. NSA has software that they keep for themselves, so does Google, Amazon, etc

How about individuals? Outside of hackers with their 0-day exploits. Do you or anyone you know have a software that gives an extreme edge and you keep for yourself?

donatj• 6 years ago

I mean I have probably hundreds of little tools I've built over the last 15 years to make my job easier but most of them are on GitHub and I'd happily share them with anyone.

curiouscat321• 6 years ago

I think you’re overstating what this “secret software does.”

Those organizations are willing to invest money into software that makes them better at what they do. It’s not magic, it’s not secret. It’s just that at large organizations, it’s easier to justify writing pieces of software that have seemingly-small impact because that total impact is so large at their scale.

segmondy• 6 years ago

I'm not overstating what the secret software does. Google had Borg, BigTable, Spanner etc that was there special sauce. Just like NSA tools dumped by shadow brokers was a special sauce for NSA, etc.

tux• 6 years ago

I wouldn't call it secret software, but private utilities that I use for myself that were never released publicly for various of reasons yes. I'm sure that many programmers have this. And if some organization have a secret software, I don't think they would reveal it here.

brettkromkamp• 6 years ago

I use my own tool for structured thinking: Contextualise (https://contextualise.dev/).

Ask HN: Do you have a personal secret software?

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