
Ask HN: What is something impressive you have built or achieved? - wave
One of the question from the YC application is "Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that each founder has built or achieved".<p>This might be a good question to ask everyone by posting it here because there are a lot of people in this community that have achieved or built impressive thing.<p>What is something impressive you have built or achieved?
======
zasz
I just finished cycling across America yesterday. I didn't go on my own, since
researching the route would have been very time consuming, and I'm too weak to
push both myself and my luggage up a hill. I went with a touring company,
America by Bicycle, instead. I highly recommend them. Their website's
www.abbike.com. It doesn't look professional, but it's run by a bunch of
cyclists who know what they're doing.

(But given the nature of this site, I wish I could post something really
intellectual or otherwise related to hacking instead.)

\-----

Addenda:

very frequently asked questions: What was the mileage per day? About 80 miles.
The shortest day was 38 miles, the longest was 120.

What was the group size? About 50. The average age was 58, which surprised me.
I expected to see a bunch of retired people, but I was the only recent college
grad. The youngest person was a girl who had just graduated from high school;
the oldest was an 80 year old man.

What was your fitness level prior to the ride? I ran at the gym for maybe 10
minutes, perhaps every other week. I was not especially fit, had never done
any sports and was generally unathletic. Imagine my surprise when the tour
booklet came two and a half months before I was to leave, recommending a year
of training prior to the ride. =( Anyway, I put in about 1000 miles of
training in those two and a half months. I was so afraid they would kick me
out for being unfit that I didn't even dare ask them if they had that policy,
lest it be true. It was pretty dumb of me to worry, in retrospect, since
they'll just pick you up in a van if you can't make it to the next checkpoint,
but I wanted the trip so badly that I avoided the thought of failure as much
as possible.

How fast did you ride? The strongest riders probably averaged 20 mph. I think
the 80 year old man averaged 12-13 mph in the hilly places like Oregon. He was
terribly slow at going up hills, but the descents made up for it a bit. I
started out averaging 11-12 mph, but with lots of help and mentoring I moved
up to 14-16, depending on the terrain and wind.

~~~
BobbyH
How much weight did you lose on the trip? Did you also lose weight from the
training? [This sounds amazing. I bet you got a lot of Forrest Gump jokes,
though.]

~~~
zasz
I actually gained weight, surprisingly. I'm 5'3" and weighed in somewhere
around 106 or 107 pounds before the trip, and now I weigh 109.5. (Just enough
to finally donate blood, I hope.) The other women on the trip kept a pretty
constant weight, though I think I am the only one who actually gained weight.
One guy started out around 260 pounds and lost at least 16.

I didn't lose any weight from training, probably because I didn't train
enough.

~~~
stse
Weight is a poor measurement of fitness. Body fat percentage, body
measurements or VO2 max are better indicators.

------
mahmud
I got my father $80k to pay the IRS within 48 hours. At the time, I was 21
years old, making $6/hr working full time at starbucks, and was in a bachelor
house with other college kids. He called me and said I could go to the office
and take the fridge, TV and whatever else I liked, because there will be
nothing left of it by January 7th, first federal working day, and IRS was
coming to take it all. They already froze his accounts and step-mom packed her
stuff and left for Canada.

I called him from the office to ask him for the password so I can check my
email. I played some music, stood there and decided to take a look at his
business software. The rest was history. We did a lot of apologizing to people
later, and we lost 5% of our clients, but the feds where paid, we kept the
family business, and we paid people back within a month.

Since then, I have fucked up and fucked up big. Me and him fought repeatedly.
He disapproved of my life choices and sometimes we didn't talk for weeks, but
STILL, every time I screw up he tells me I am a very gifted screw-up and loves
me very much.

~~~
clistctrl
you skipped over the best part... how did you do it?

------
Cantdog
A spaceship sends messages to a logging system I built

(That's the coolest way I could phrase interning at NASA)

------
edw519
I made my mother laugh when nothing else could. Everything else I have ever
achieved is a distant second.

------
mkramlich
Hard to compete with some of the great things accomplished by others here
(spaceships, businesses, businesses that process logs from spaceships while
cycling around the country in spaceships while making your mother laugh about
a nuclear power plant you helped build that hopefully does not run Windows,
etc.), BUT I'll try anyway and throw out my Dead By Zombie game
(<http://DeadByZombie.com>), whose Windows port just launched last week. It
has a Rogue-like UI style but is otherwise very different from a Rogue-like in
terms of play style and goals. I tend to develop several new hobby projects
each year from scratch, outside my day job in software development, and then
release them and try to monetize them in various ways. By HN standards,
probably pretty simple and unimpressive.

I think it's just good to be creative and productive. By my standards, it's
impressive to be doing things like this rather than merely sitting around
watching TV or making inane chit-chat at bars, like so many Americans seem to
do. (Though there's value in doing even those in moderation.)

Live, love, think, create, do, repeat. A life full of that is what impresses
me.

------
swolchok
Found remotely-exploitable security vulnerabilities in China's no-longer-
mandated Green Dam censorware, resulting in my first Slashdotting:
<http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pub/gd>

HN discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=654107>

------
dmfdmf
Lead systems engineer for ABWR Feedwater Control System Units 1 & 2, Lungmen
Nuclear Power Station in Taiwan. Designed it 10yrs ago, just going online now.

<http://www.power-technology.com/projects/lungmen/>

~~~
mkramlich
great job! and please tell us it doesn't run Windows

~~~
dmfdmf
"No Comment"

~~~
mkramlich
_shudder_ :)

------
run4yourlives
My Sons. (Still building them, as a co-contributor)

What, not the answer you were looking for? :)

~~~
mixmax
Exactly the nerdy answer I was expecting. Make sure you clear out the bugs and
get a clean build early on, it'll save you a lot of trouble later.

~~~
run4yourlives
No way, these things are clearly products of successive iterations. No
waterfall technique here. :-)

~~~
jey
Hope you're not also applying the "plan to throw the first one away"
principle...

~~~
run4yourlives
hehe, no we're building out the prototype.

------
alain94040
Sounds like a good lead for bragging, but not sure if this community actually
encourages it.

I'll go with: first to write a mainstream article with the word "Internet" in
1992 (at least where I lived at the time).

To add some balance: first to miss the Internet revolution in 1993, sounded
like old news to me :-)

~~~
zasz
Oh dear, I didn't mean to brag.

~~~
jcdreads
It ain't bragging if you can back it up.

<http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/503362.html>

------
modoc
Built 10MinuteMail.com to learn Seam. The site now gets over 100,000 hits/day.

Started Sparkred.com and have been profitable while competing against much
larger established players.

Built a woodshed that didn't fall over from the snow last winter. Built a
closet that makes my wife happy. Built a desk that makes me happy.

------
pingswept
I converted a Porsche 914 to electric power. <http://www.evalbum.com/573.html>

~~~
manish
That's a neat hack

------
Mz
Got myself well when that's not supposed to be possible. Now living my life-
long dream of a "normal" life: working for the weekend, saying things like
"TGIF" and doing other ordinary working stiff type things.

~~~
trapper
How and from what (if it's ok to ask)

~~~
Mz
What: After spending 3 1/2 months bedridden, I was diagnosed in May 2001 with
"atypical cystic fibrosis" in my mid-thirties. Doctors blamed my condition on
my genes. I figured there had to be more to it than that.

How: I have a small website that attempts to answer that question:
<http://www.healthgazelle.com>

To sum up my point of view: White people are more vulnerable to sunburn than
darker-skinned people but "pale skin disorder" does not doom you to be
chronically sunburned to the point of peeling and does not doom you to die at
an early age of skin cancer. Similarly, cystic fibrosis makes one more
vulnerable to infection, but one does not have to accept being sick all the
time as their only fate. It takes both pale skin and sunlight to cause
sunburn. It takes both CF and germs to make one deathly ill. The environmental
and lifestyle part is what we can control. So far, so good.

~~~
trapper
I'm all for patient heal thyself. But, I think you should tone down the
conspiracy theory style of your site. Doctors aren't all bad - far from it.
The medical profession is trying to help, but in an evidence based way. You
may not agree, but that's what the status quo is. It's not evil - it's the
only sane way to progress.

If you think you know better than the current literature, get someone to
research it. Go talk to your local university, get someone excited. Or do it
yourself during a summer scholarship. If you are right and can prove it you'll
help a lot more people.

~~~
Mz
Some of that is humor. At some point, I imagine the front page will change. As
far as I know, that's the only place where I (jokingly) comment in a
conspiracy theory style.

But the reality is also that most CF patients are prisoners of the mental
models used by medicine. Ex: Zithromax is very commonly prescribed as a
prophylactic antibiotic and to control inflammation. It also competes with
magnesium. So taking zithromax tends to make one magnesium deficient.
Magnesium is an alkaline mineral. Thus magnesium deficiency leads to excess
acidity, which leads to inflammation, which promotes infection, for which
doctors then prescribe drugs like zithromax. It's a vicious cycle: Once you
start taking zithromax, you tend to become dependent upon it because it
worsens the underlying issues which cause the thing it is treating for. Most
doctors seem to be completely unaware of stuff like that. I have never had a
doctor tell me what nutritional supplements I needed to take or what foods I
needed to eat to combat the side effects the drugs cause. Getting off the 8 or
so prescription drugs I used to take has made me feel strongly that the
solutions doctors prescribe -- and which most patients blindly and obediently
follow to a T -- are part of the problem.

I wish the picture were prettier. But my CF specialist expressed zero interest
in what I was doing to get myself well. His response to my improvement was to
schedule me fewer appointments because other patients needed his help more. If
anyone is going to get well using the information on the site, it will be a
grass roots movement. Doing some kind of research on it when it is already
helping people (me, my son, others with CF that contact my via email) looks to
me like a huge waste of time -- kind of like a recent article about avoiding
spending undue amounts of time writing your business plan.

Thanks for the feedback. I will make a mental note of it for future reference
as the site gets improved. :-)

~~~
trapper
I gathered you must have had some bad experiences with your own doctors.
That's unfortunate.

There are drug guidelines for a reason: they are evidence based on the current
literature. Of course they follow the path with the most evidence behind it.

My take would simply be collect some evidence. Then get someone excited.
Someone wants to make their mark - this would be a relatively simple study if
what you say is repeatable amongst the general CF population.

~~~
Mz
A) Lots of people with CF are taking between $3000 and $4000 worth of
"maintenance drugs" per month -- ie what they take when they "aren't sick".
More drugs get added to that if they have an exacerbation. (And many of them
are hospitalized once or twice a year.) The idea that drugs are used according
to some conservative set of guidelines doesn't really apply when you have a
dread disease. I estimate that the US population of people with CF -- a mere
30,000 people -- probably goes through around $2 Billion a year worth of
medication.

B) I hear back from other people using the information and the feedback
suggests it is potentially repeatedly. The issue is that most folks won't go
to the lengths I have gone. And I do not believe anyone should ask them to. It
needs to be a choice. The site is intended to be descriptive, not
prescriptive. I believe the top-down model is part of the problem. So I have
zero desire to replicate that model. I would rather do nothing than contribute
to the current (clearly failed) paradigm.

In recent weeks, someone familiar with the site did become desperate enough to
try more than most folks have. Initial results are astonishingly good. This is
an individual with an antibiotic resistant infection who was basically out of
conventional options. Over time, I imagine word will spread. The way it
spreads is important. I'm satisfied with the current direction of things.

~~~
swolchok
What about the placebo effect?

------
p01nd3xt3r
Developed a sales forecasting algorithm that turned out to be within 5% of
actual sales numbers over a 18 month period.

Note: I don't know how its performing now because I switched jobs.

~~~
jbr
Isn't it weird leaving that sort of thing behind? I also built a "purchase
prediction model" right before I left a startup. It did really well on the
test portion of the data (which wasn't included when building the model), but
I have no idea how it's performing in the wild. It's stranger than leaving
something like a program that has a clear function, because it's not
necessarily obvious how well the model is performing compared to how well it
"could" be performing.

Have you thought about getting ahold of them to find out how it performs now,
just for curiosity's sake?

~~~
p01nd3xt3r
Actually yes it was weird and kind of sad because the developers that I left
to maintain it are kind of morons (IMHO).

I never really considered asking them how it was doing now; I have been so
busy working on other projects but I would like to know.

------
zkz
I personally have a problem finding my most impressive achievement not
impressive at all from the instant it's done. Anyone else?

~~~
anigbrowl
Yes, I know exactly what you mean. It's intensely demotivating - all I can
advise is a supportive partner and friends, and occasional professional help.

------
tobych
A small proportion of data from four spaceships send data that is decompressed
by my code. Oh, and I found a bug in code in the the same spaceships.

Wrote an spreadsheet, and interactive disassembler, in BBC BASIC and 6502
assembler when I was sixteen. Still seems the most impressive thing I ever
did... but perhaps it wasn't actually. Um ah.

------
mrlyc
I wrote a bulletin board in 1984 on a Commodore Vic20. It had public and
private rooms (message areas), private mail and an online game, all in 9.6K of
BASIC. Users could start their own rooms and make them public or private. I
ran it on the Vic for six months then rewrote it in Turbo Pascal and ran it
for eighteen months on an XT clone with 384K (I couldn't afford the full 640)
and one floppy. There was no hard drive. The board was very popular. Each user
spent an average of 70 minutes on it.

------
Keyframe
Persuaded my girlfriend to be with me.

~~~
davidw
That rings true with me. I've done some cool hacks here and there, but
marrying an intelligent, beautiful woman, and having a wonderful daughter are
pretty high up on the list for someone who wasn't always terribly well
adapted, socially.

In terms of hacks, the thing I like the most is Hecl: <http://www.hecl.org>

------
Mankhool
Thanks for the boost on my YC application. When I was in university I made a
short film and sold it to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and it
aired nationally.

~~~
Keyframe
Can it be viewed somewhere online or otherwise?

------
NoBSWebDesign
I built a predictive model for finding the maximum temperatures of the core
components of heavy-duty alternators, which cut the alternator testing cycle
for the biggest Tier 1 automotive supplier in the world down from 3 months to
about a day and a half. Two PhD's had been trying for 2 years before me to
accomplish this. It was meant to be an educational exercise, but last I heard,
they were still using it to get new business.

------
bgnm2000
I created a website that 3/4 of my college started using - and still uses now
that I'm gone - solely through word of mouth.

menumunchies.com - for those interested

------
terpua
Was temporarily paralyzed from neck down (it seemed permanent at the time)
from a major car accident but managed to crack jokes with the paramedics on
the way to ICU.

Ended up with fractured C3 to C5 and ripped ligaments and had 2 major
operations and a halo device. I was 15 yo.

~~~
mofey
I'm hearing about people around me getting into serious accidents. Aren't seat
belts and air bags supposed to prevent these kind of injuries?

~~~
terpua
I was in the back seat with my seat belt strapped. And seat belts / air bags
will not prevent serious injuries 100% of the time.

~~~
mofey
:(

------
darwinw
Single handedly created <http://Tripntale.com>

------
kvs
"invented" something small but useful in CS. Won some reserach competition,
got invited to the Turing Award ceremoney, got an award on the same stage
right after Vincent Cerf and Rob Khan got thier Turing Award. Goose bumps :-)

~~~
dansdans
So what was it? So intriguing.

------
mrlyc
Rewrote 2,650 lines of C as a seven line shell script. The previous
programming team had written a data transfer program using their own
implementation of ftp. I just used the one that was already on the computer.

------
javanix
It wasn't really overly special - but I built and debugged a full web app from
the ground up including MySQL backend, (simple) scripting language, and
design/logic in about a month on deadline earlier this summer.

------
stewiecat
Took 2.5 hours of my Ironman triathlon time. Went from a 15 hour race to a
12.5 hour race, which I managed to repeat last year.

~~~
ssanders82
Awesome man, what were your swim/bike/run splits?

~~~
stewiecat
1:14 swim (5 minutes faster than first) 6:13:55 bike (way faster than the
first, like over an hour and change) 4:43 run (about 45-50 minutes faster than
the first)

First was Wisconsin, second was Lake Placid.

------
richardw
Once designed and created a system to manage very complex ethnobotanical
information, so we could define rules like "X company reserves all samples
taken from Q parts of plants that might be related to people speaking Y
language from Z area using words that hint at it helping their stomach."

Another system - "it must tell us everything about e.g. nanotechnology and
Japan". Recognised countries, technologies, projects, did implicit search on
internal document databases, internal project databases, CIA world factbook,
stored URL's, Google's API etc. Showed links, e.g. team X went to Japan in
2004, team Y dealt with nanotech in 2001, there are two reports here that deal
with X, Bob stored these related URL's, etc.

May not impress some, but I really enjoyed those projects and they were
helluva challenging!

------
happymonkey00
Helped build a cardiovascular diagramming system that converts
diagnostic(textual) reports of kids with congenital heart defects to "circuit
diagrams" of the heart annotated with various cardiovascular measurements.

------
nwatson
technically, helped build products <http://www.sensage.com> and
<http://www.zenprise.com> ... two very good software development experiences
with some great development (and business) teams.

------
Gibbon
I set 52 national records, tied a world record and won a category at the
nationals in model aircraft competitions when I was 15. Two of the records
were set at a contest on a sat and I won the nationals at another contest on
sunday.. the two contests were 1000 miles apart.

------
thomanil
Found my Better Half. Fathered my daughter. Built v.1 of
<http://thoughtmuse.com> singlehandedly on nights and weekends, in under five
months (as estimated).

------
dcminter
Learnt to dance.

Ok, I'm still learning (and always will be) but I went from absolutely hating
dancing to being a competent social swing dancer in a year - just coming up to
the anniversary of my first lesson in fact.

------
geuis
Hacked the Google VPN client that was released a few years ago to work with
non google pptp networks. Did that within a couple days of it being released.
Not the most impressive but it was fun.

------
kvogt
cracked a safe with a robot <http://web.mit.edu/kvogt/www/safecracker.html>

------
ssanders82
After months and months of late-night coding sessions, created
<http://www.howmucharestamps.com>

:)

------
jubos
got ie6 and ie7 running on the same windows install.

------
fsniper
filmed our friend for his proposal to his girl friend and merged in a
Hollywood movie. The interesting part is making him - who does not know any
English - read English. He could not manage to read and look into the camera
at the same time so I cut a hole in the paper and put the paper around the
camera. :)

------
wlievens
Built a webgame that has had a small (400 users) but very dedicated following
for over four years.

------
cosmok
Personal bookmarker and web-history search.

