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Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
200 points by niqolas on March 18, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 238 comments
I thought I'd start a "brag" thread. I know there are some really interesting and inspiring people here and I want to hear all the cool, unusual, unique things you have done.

Examples:

  * I've travelled to all 7 continents
  * I've won an olympic gold medal
  * I've built a start-up from scratch and sold to Google
  * I invented a consumer electronic device that has sold 10M units
  * I've produced a feature length motion picture [Insert Title]
  * I had this ... funny life experience
  * I went drinking with Vladimir Putin



I don't normally mention this stuff, but since you asked...

* I started at university when I was 13.

* I won the Putnam Competition.

* I hold a world record for computing Pi.

* My bsdiff binary patching tool is used on tens of millions of computers and has saved several hundred human-years of waiting for software updates to download.

* I found a security bug in an Intel CPU. (Osvik/Shamir/Tromer also found it, but I was first, by a few weeks.)

* I'm the Concertmaster of an amateur symphony orchestra which is performing the Verdi Requiem tomorrow.


Whoa, respect to you Sir. It's funny how reading people's comments on HN makes me feel I "know" them. Your comments are usually excellent. But I would have never thought you were so good.

Ok, back to centering that bloody div.


> Ok, back to centering that bloody div.

    div.centered {
       width: *x*;
       margin-left: auto;
       margin-right: auto;
    }


i just went through this myself. that will center the content horizontally, but only if you can declare the width. why can't i just say "use the width of the longest element in the div?" and if you want to center vertically, forget it. might as well use a <table> instead.

oh, this isn't the css-bashing thread? whoops.


Here you go. Should work in all browsers except IE7 and earlier.

You can add as many column divs as you like.

Note that the html { height:100% } is needed when in HTML5 mode.

  <!DOCTYPE HTML>
  <html>
    <head>
      <style type="text/css">
        html, body { height:100%; margin: 0 auto; }
        body { display: table; vertical-align: middle; }
        .column { display:table-cell; vertical-align: middle; }
        p { text-align: center; }
      </style>
    </head>
    <body>
      <div class="column">
        <p>holy cow!</p>
        <img alt="shock the monkey" src="http://i.imgur.com/Pt9Pd.jpg" />
        <p>it worked!</p>
      </div>
    </body>
  </html>


holy crap. that's pretty good, man! when i was trying to get this to work a couple of nights ago, i would have gladly given you a hundred bucks for that code snippet, just to make the pain go away.

i was afraid that your method would screw up <ul> lists the way most of my attempts did, where the bullets would wind up stuck to the left margin while the text strings are goofily centered in the middle, but no, your way presents lists properly as well.

your code snippet is going into production for my iphone card game, to replace this awful hacked-together menu i made:

http://www.platinumball.net/hearts/png/orig_help_large.png

thanks!


Glad you like it. :)

when i was trying to get this to work a couple of nights ago, i would have gladly given you a hundred bucks for that code snippet, just to make the pain go away.

If you like, feel free to give a shout-out to @jjs in your game's credits. :)


That's interesting. I had no idea you were the person who did the pi calculation. My co-worker and I setup all of the computers in our development area to help the cause. Looking at the old stats, we were the #4 producer (Viper). Brings back memories. Thanks for putting that together!


For a hilarious usage of this stuff, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079


Partway through the thread, one of the dropbox founders tries to get him on board!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095


You forgot "I started Tarsnap."


I don't really consider Tarsnap to be in the same category as those. Sure, I think Tarsnap is a fantastic online backup system; but that's rather subjective. If/when Tarsnap becomes wildly successful, I'll be able to make the objective claim of "I started a company which (is making $X/year profit | I sold for $Y | has N customers | etc. )" but until that happens, Tarsnap isn't really something to "brag" about.


Well "[You] started Tarsnap" is the one that has benefited me the most, and I think that's bragable.


excellent, I admire that you're so humble about it

I'm even more interested in trying out tarsnap!


> I'm even more interested in trying out tarsnap!

I'm even more interested in maybe considering trying out tarsnap!

:)


but you didn't figure out about canadian sales tax yet ;) http://www.tarsnap.com/legal-why.html#NOCANADIANS


Uh-Oh.

You can't just say "I don't sell to Canadians" and therefore avoid GST and the CRA.

The last thing he should be looking for is an expensive audit.


Dude, I saw Dan_Sim's comment below and I think you're headed for a world of hurt pretending that you are GST exempt if you ignore Canadians.

You need to speak with an accountant - if CRA decides to audit you (as they would seeing that you are declaring income with no GST remittance) you could be in a world of hurt.

See here: http://blog.9thsphere.com/blog/are-you-billing-gst-correctly...

Oh, and your list makes me feel unworthy. :-)


Thanks for the warning, I appreciate it. I think I'm fine, though -- I have a friend who works at CRA doing GST, and he (unofficially) agreed that avoiding Canadian customers should be good enough, and also commented that the CRA is unusually reasonable about honest mistakes, so even if I did screw something up, the worst I'm likely to face is being asked to pay the GST myself.


* I fixed a Brit Award for Best Newcomer in 1998 (Belle and Sebastian) using social engineering

* I built the consumer site for BTopenworld almost single-handedly in 6 weeks (CMS and portal from scratch in TCL), it was live for 7 years before being replaced

* Recently enjoyed a 97.5% mark on an MSc assignment

* Survived living on the streets for more than 2 winters (when you live on the street, you count winters and not years)

* Every code I've ever written outside of education has gone live somewhere... I first learned to code by making a stock control system for a small company and knew computers should be good at that stuff

* I taught myself TCL, PERL, Java, C#, C++, JavaScript, and am currently enjoying a foray into Clojure.

* I've met Paul McCartney, hung out with Blur, Elastica, Pulp and Oasis... partied several years of my life away in a blur

* I've created a data warehouse for semi-structured data from ECM systems

This list is not necessarily in chronological order. I absolutely am missing stuff but the bullets above fill me with joy of some kind. I haven't done the thing I want most to do, which is to work with some great minds on some complex problems, but this is why I'm doing an MSc so late, I want to knock on Google's door.


If you don't mind me asking, how did you end up on the streets, and how did you end up off them?


Rough family, poverty. I grew up in council housing in West London, there was physical violence and there was crime everywhere around. I put myself on the streets to get myself away from the immediate physical danger and to prevent myself from continuing the vicious cycle of being nurtured in crime having that define my own life.

Whilst on the streets I hitch-hiked around, and as I did so I discovered that you slept during the day and kept your wits about you at night. It's too cold some nights to sleep out, so then you move. Or crawl into a building site where others wouldn't go and you'd be safe and mostly sheltered.

I eventually found that not being on the street at night was better than being on the street, since I was young I went to bars that had gigs. You could get in early before the gig started, so entrance was free. And then stay post-gig as a club would run until 3am at least. Some nights you'd meet students who would take an interest in the story and let you crash at theirs. Which is a free toast top-up and shower opportunity. I developed confidence from having to find these opportunities.

With the gigs settling in I would meet bands, and then they'd know me and give me free food from their riders. Eventually I knew a lot of the bands and I offered to run their T-Shirt stalls. This earned me money too.

Knowing the bands gave me exposure to them, so I wrote fanzines and sold those. You'd sell more fanzines if the band who were playing were on the cover... so I'd make only the insides, and produce covers according to who was playing.

Elastica took a shine to me so I followed them around, helped design their merchandise, run their paper mailing lists and sold T-Shirts. This led to the stock management thing, they purchased me an IBM computer which I put in the squat I then was living in. I built a program to manage their stock, then their mailing list, then tax reports of merchandise sold, etc.

Finally I ran into another band who I liked, and I offered all of the services I now knew how to do. The sales of merchandise, running of fan club, etc. They said yes, and I did that stuff and also acquired a modem (it was 1996 now). I taught myself HTML and PERL and made a website too.

Within 2 years I'd gone from the streets to employment in the music industry where programming was a core part of my job alongside selling merchandise. Later I worked directly for the label and by this time was off the streets properly with a flat-share with a girl I'd met in the music industry.

It makes a great tale, but not all of it was easy. Hunger was frequent, illness almost as frequent, cold nights scar your memory. I slept in some bad places at times, and other times managed to blag my way into some swanky places. It was ups and downs, but all of it was better than returning to the place where I had grown up. And the driving force in my life is to ensure that I never return to the place I came from, and to never go back to the streets. It's a hell of a motivator.


I find your story very inspiring. Thanks for sharing it.


Initially I wanted to post a silly comment to the original question, but after I read your answer, I can't. You have my full respect, man. Your ghetto story is way more awesome than mine. :)


I'll admit something... my story hampers my present.

The problem with such a dark background and fighting out of it is that once out, not going back dominates everything you do. This translates to, "Don't risk what you have".

And therein lies a problem, if I have little but can't risk it then I'm risk averse and cannot gamble on high risk opportunities. I desperately want to do a start-up and to do something new, but what could possibly encourage me to risk what I now have, I've earned a normal life and I have no plan B were I to jeopardise it.

So I fight to never go back, which isn't the same as fighting to get somewhere in the future.

The real achievement, if I ever manage it, will be to get out of that predicament and to be free to take risk without fearing too greatly the repercussions. I probably won't ever be back on the street, but it's very hard to shake the fear of it. If someone else's tale can tell me how to do that I'd be grateful.


I know what you mean. I came from a fairly poor background myself - nothing as harrowing as your own though - and find myself more frugal than many of my peers. I tend not to commit to things that will become long-term obligations (for example, I rent and have no debt) and I save obsessively. I tend to measure my savings in how many years I could go without having to work. I think being in this kind of position helps with the fear.


First off, I'm very much impressed by your tenaciousness.

> The problem with such a dark background and fighting out of it is that once out, not going back dominates everything you do. This translates to, "Don't risk what you have".

I so agree with that, I feel that exactly like you do, and my background isn't nearly as rough as yours, not by a long shot.

Screwed up childhoods seem to come in all shapes and sizes.

I try to make reasonably small steps in order not to fail too badly. If I was more risk oriented I would have probably made out much better than I have, but whenever something works I become ultra conservative about it.

Investing in other peoples ventures is one of the ways in which I try to cure myself of that, it's been slow going and my 'batting average' so far is not fantastic but it still works for me.

It splits the 'fight to go back' from the 'fight to go forward', I literally write off the investment the moment it's done and from there it can only go 'up', not drag me back.

And it gives someone else a chance to fight their way out of whatever hole they're in.


Will the MSc help by providing a "safe" fallback position / opportunities should a venture not succeed (and/or a sense of same)?

I don't mean the question simply rhetorically -- although it initially popped into my mind in kind of that sense. I really wonder what your perspective is in that regard.


I hope so.

I have no A-levels and no prior college education (due to being on the street at that point).

The risk I think I have is that if I find myself out of work then no matter how good I am I won't find a job in a world where HR systems have check boxes to filter candidates. If "has degree" is a pre-req on a position then currently I won't even have my CV considered.

The MSc is the highest level thing I could attain with no pre-requisites save for experience. It is, for me, an insurance policy for what is now a career (a job is what I had when I was doing manual labour).

I have two goals for the degree: 1) Reduce risk of unemployment. 2) Increase chance of employment by a company that works on interesting things (I want to be the dumbest guy in the room so that I can learn even more).

What's been interesting is reading recent posts on HN and elsewhere about how dire education is and questioning its value. Yet for me it may be a life-saver and at GBP 7k is a bargain if it just keeps me employed. Only by reducing my risk and creating a buffer and fall-back am I going to be able to be free of the fear of failing... or so I believe currently.

Anyhow, the MSc after more than a decade of experience... I'm pleased by how much I do know, and have loved discovering the gaps in my knowledge. I especially love set theory, graph databases, semi-structured data, and the data structures, storage and algorithms for these things. As insurance goes, I'm not sure anything else could've also given me so much satisfaction to do and yet also is so universally recognised.


I understand the HR checkbox fear completely. I have been doing my own thing (limping along) for two years (as of this month) and out of the workforce. I don't have a college degree and am not sure if I can get a job when I need one.

I am not sure it is a completely rational fear since I have relationships in the industry, but it is not exactly a confidence booster.


I'm UK too and have no A-levels or Degree. I studied and dropped out of performing arts!

No issue in getting a job though. It's the experience, passion and determination that counts IMO. And only a few monolithic companies have those checkboxes.


My experience exactly (dropped out after 2 years). If a company requires a degree as an absolute, they most likely don't have super smart people working there, or it wont be a particularly great place to work (the government and large financial institutions come to mind).


Who are you doing the Msc with?

(Im currently doing mine with the OU and I got the impression your doing the same?)


Birkbeck, University of London.

They're got a couple of great professors and a few not-so-good ones. The great ones more than make up for the others and it's probably no surprise that their subjects also interest me the most.

I should be graduating this year (or maybe it's next year?), my project proposal is being reviewed and exams are in about 7 weeks time.


> They're got a couple of great professors and a few not-so-good ones.

Heh, ain't that always the way.

Good luck with those exams!


The great thing about the benefits system in the UK is that you just won't, unless you want to.

If you really do want to take the risk of starting a business, even if you do fail - you'll never be back on the streets.


I dont think I can post my list of "achievements" now; not much could nail that as a personal achievement :) Kudos.

By the way; how did you manage to fix the brit? (if you dont mind me asking). That tickled me.


You can probably guess how with some background info:

It's 1998, this is the first Brit Award to allow internet voting. The voting is via a GET request, there is no cookie being set, no email address being collected... IP dupe checking is all they could be doing... but it's 1998 and every time you dial-up you get a new IP address.

We had a majordomo mailing list of 25,000 fans, and all of the other nominees had either no internet presence at that point or nothing more than a single page that they didn't even update with news about the award nomination.

Traditionally at that point the music industry used "phoners". Teams of paid people to phone up and rig an award. Pete Waterman had a good team, and it's a 2 week voting window. It took us a week to get rolling, but we did what you might expect with the info above and our mailing list.

At the end of week 1 someone leaked to Pete Waterman that they were out in the lead. He attempted to save the money and laid off his phoners, at that point our campaign just got underway, and with that mailing list being mostly passionate students we accelerated past what the phoners had achieved.

We only won by a small margin of a few thousand. But what mattered was the viral campaign and having Pete lay off the phoners. It was a bit of a scandal at the time, Pete was furious, but he just didn't really understand the internet and had been out-manoeuvred in a space he thought he knew intimately. We even made the front page of the Daily Record in Scotland :)


* I never graduated college but somehow ended up working for google

* I survived and kept a roof over 3 kids and a wife while only making 10'000 one year. (in USA) --- Did the same with 4-5 kids while technically homeless and out of work.

* I'm raising 5 amazing children with an incredible wife

* I've taught myself C, Java, Perl, PHP, ASP, Erlang, Lisp, HTML, CSS, Javascript

* I'm a born again christian (Actually the thing I'm most proud of although I know not impressive to some, But it is a brag thread so I'm including it.)


I love that coding/startup culture gives hard working smart people like you an opportunity to self-learn and rise.


And you have an excellent taste in coffee ;)


Intelligentsia in Chicago. Only the best my friend :-)


Intelligentsia isn't bad, but there's always Metropolis and Asado :)


Metropolis and Asado are kind of hard to get to if you don't live on the North Side. Intelligentsia is nice for those of us who live/work in the loop.


Metropolis is worth the hike. They serve a great macchiato (a real one, not a starbucks monstrosity). I love any place that will throw away a shot if it doesn't look perfect.


I will head up there sometime soon. But just for the sake of completeness, I will note that Intelligentsia would do the same thing. Every time I walk in, I feel like I am in Seattle. And for coffee, that's a good thing.

(One time, a friend of mine who is from Seattle ended up behind me in line. I wondered for a second what city I was in :)


haven't tried them where they located? Not to hijack the thread but I love good coffee.


wow I'm surprised I got so many upvotes. Compared to saving a life and child prodigies I'm not really all that impressive. There are plenty of others on here deserving of much higher ratings than me.


Whether you consider these things amazing is up to you, but I'm happy about them.

* I obtained a government apology for the mistreatment of Alan Turing

* I wrote an original book

* I went to Oxford after my state school told me I wasn't up to it, I stayed and did a doctorate there

* I learnt to swim when I was 21

* I learnt to speak French fluently as an adult


I went to Oxford after my state school told me I wasn't up to it, I stayed and did a doctorate there

I always loved people that told me I wouldn't be able to do something. I remember a 4th grade teacher that told me I couldn't write (presumably because we were to make a copy-n-paste book entitled "quaken' shakin' earth" about earthquakes, and I spelled the title wrong. I still don't know how to spell it, in fact.)

Fast-forward 10 or so years, and now people give me money to write. I guess it's a long time to hold a grudge, but I still think it's funny that elementary school teachers feel the need to tell their students that they'll "never" do well. (I also had other teachers that thought I should be in special ed, presumably because I got a pencil stuck in my hair once. This still happens to me on a regular basis, in fact, but it turns out that that doesn't have much to do with actual abilities.)


To learn French, did you take classes? self-taught? What did you find was the most effective approach?


* I built a distributed search engine for my final year college project, when my teachers and friends told me I was taking on too much. It survived two project mates walking out, and some rather dumb ones pushed in. I got a 97 for it, and consider it THE accomplishment of my college years.

* Wrote an indexing program in C that crashed a Netware network. :P

* I've read the Bhagwad Gita, the Koran, the Bible and the Tao Teh Ching. I am still an atheist.

* I've written a complete IM module at work when drunk. Oddly, this has been considered one of my better contributions to the project in that company.

* I've completed reading five Asimov novels in the course of a single day.

* I am an Indian, yet can't speak any Hindi. I have lived in the Gulf, yet can't speak any Arabic. My folks speak Konkani at home, yet I cannot speak that either. Dad knows Portuguese, yet I somehow never picked it up from him. Strangely though, I can speak French, Japanese, Quenyan and am on my way to studying Sanskrit.


> * I've read the Bhagwad Gita, the Koran, the Bible and the Tao Teh Ching. I am still an atheist.

Perhaps that's why you're an atheist ;)


Speaking Hindi is not a necessary condition for one to be considered Indian.

Tao te ching is not a religious book.


I disagree about the Tao Te Ching not being a religious book. It is the primary book of Taoism.

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao"

That is a paraphrase from memory of the opening of the book. Which seems to me a lot like the Jewish refusal to speak the formal name for God because it is too holy and they couldn't speak it truthfully.


I've read the whole book(not saying that you haven't ;) and haven't found any references to Tao being a "God". Tao is a Way of Life, analogous to the concept of Dharma in Hinduism, Buddhism and other Indian religions.


Distributed Search Engine, can you kindly shed some light on that?


+1 for the last from a fellow countryman :) (who knows only his mother tongue and English!)


I kind of feel like no one here will care/be able to relate, but these are some of the things I am proud of:

* I graduated high school as STAR student and a national merit scholarship winner -- while missing 18 or 19 days of school every year and dragging myself to school sick much of the rest of the time and also being called "lazy" and told I "wasn't really sick". (I wasn't diagnosed with CF until I was almost 36.)

* I was also inducted into Mu Alpha Theta in 11th grade (the earliest you can be) and was state alternate for the Governor's Honors program in the subject of Journalism.

* I have a 22 year old son with cystic fibrosis who has not been on antibiotics in 12 years and has needed no medication at all in 3 years or so.

* My sons and I live without a car and walking is our primary mode of transit, in spite of two of us having CF which means we are supposed to be deathly ill.

* My divorce was amicable in spite of my family background. (In contrast, when my two siblings got divorced, their spouses made attempts on their lives.)

* As of last summer, I am drug free, having gotten off about 8 or 9 prescription drugs and then gotten off the OTC drugs that replaced them.

* I genuinely like men, as friends and lovers, in spite of having the kind of childhood that tends to produce women with multiple personality disorder.

* I am the one who decided to get divorced, not my husband, even though I was deathly ill at the time and had been a homemaker almost my entire adult life.

* Now that I am basically well for the first time in my life, I think my best years are ahead of me, not behind me. I'm 44. :-)


If there ever was a comment that justified the 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' proverb then this is it.

Congratulations, it looks like you've had a tough deck to play with and you're making the most of it.


If there ever was a comment that justified the 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' proverb then this is it.

Yes, but it's also a little like the joke about the sheik with many wives, 'each more beautiful than the last': Only if you line them up that way.

Congratulations

Thank you!

it looks like you've had a tough deck to play with and you're making the most of it.

I had a head start: I learned to play poker and deal cards when I was about 4 years old. Daddy was a cardsharp. Couldn't have a relationship to him if you didn't play. :-P


> Daddy was a cardsharp. Couldn't have a relationship to him if you didn't play. :-P

Funny :)

My family from my dads side was pretty large, and my grandfather decreed that the kids got their pocket money on Friday, and after that had to play cards, mandatory.

So, naturally the pocket money became part of the game, and all my aunts and uncles got to be pretty good at playing cards.

When I was 15 or so I stayed over for a week at my grandmothers house (my granddad died long before that), and in my innocence I asked her if she wanted to play cards with me.

I should have probably realized what was about to happen when she suggested giving me the opportunity to make some money.

Long story short, don't play cards with old ladies that can count two full decks, I was happy to go home with my clothes ;)


My dad didn't play the kids for money. He did play other adults for money when he was younger, and won consistently enough that he basically treated it like a part-time job in addition to his regular full-time job. (For some strange reason, mom didn't object to him spending Friday night out with the guys. <wink>) When I was a kid, we sometimes anted up with cookies or mints while playing poker. The problem was trying to not eat all your winnings while playing, thereby leaving yourself short for betting. :0


Hear, hear!


I strongly believe in initiative, achievement, and success, but for some reason, I find this thread a little troubling. Not because it's bragging, but because it's seems to be mostly about "me me me". I'd rather hear people brag about what they've done for others.

At the time I write this comment, most other comments are about "me".

Noteable exceptions:

- jgrahamc obtaining a government apology for the mistreatment of Alan Turing

- AN447 paying off his parent's mortgage

- patio11 saving a life

Great job, guys! You inspire me. (Apologies if I missed anyone.)

As for me, I've done lots of cool stuff, but if I had to pick one thing to put on my tombstone, it would be, "He made his mother laugh when nothing else would." Everything else seems to pale in comparison.


I agree. I'm rather disappointed in HN's readership that they voted my response up higher than patio11's.


That may be because everybody here would agree that in Patricks position they'd do the same thing, but hardly anybody can see themselves even getting to parity with what you've done.


Sure, one of the major reasons most of us haven't saved a drowning child is a lack of opportunity; but is that any different in the case of my accomplishments? I'd say that the largest reason most people haven't done the things I've done is that most people weren't born to Oxford-educated parents, one a Chemistry professor, the other a high school mathematics teacher.

I can't point to anything I've accomplished as being entirely independent of the advantages my parents gave me; what makes my circumstances any different from Patrick's?


Ok, good point :)

Let me try to put it this way:

I want't born stupid, but my family situation was pretty lousy to begin with (father violent and alcoholic), so my mom divorced when I was 6 and life was pretty tough for her, my sister and myself until I got to high school.

But I did eventually get to high school. There it got tougher, the first year I tried to learn as much as I could, pretty much scored straight A's, but was despised for it by my class mates, failed the second year, dropped out at 17 after failing again. My home situation steadily worsened during those years and at some point it looked like living with my dad would actually be the preferred situation.

Bad mistake... Anyway, by 17 I was working for a bank in the mailroom, eventually someone in the IT department gave me a break and I've been doing pretty good ever since.

And now for the but bit :)

So, even if I didn't have oxford educated parents, I know that I could not have matched you, even if I had wanted to.

The reason for that is simple, see, in spite of my 'rough' (nothing compared to some people in this thread though) start in life I know fairly well which bits I got through persistence and which bits because I got lucky.

I chalk up your living circumstances to luck, just as Patricks presence in the pool that day was luck, just like me getting a break.

So Patrick can take 'credit' for doing what he did, I can take credit for making the most of that one break I got and you can rightly take credit for the things you've achieved.

Circumstances made them possible, but the hard work that went in is what you get to take the credit for. Yours was a lucky situation, but plenty of people might not have made that much of it, myself included. I know my limitations. I also know what I'm good at :)

Everything in life is one part circumstance, one part what you do with it. So, you achieved well over and beyond what most people born to two educated parents would have achieved and I think that's what you are being recognized for.

People save other peoples lives on a daily basis and it literally is the most natural thing in the world. I prefer to think that anybody would respond to a child in danger that way.


I'm very interested in reading about the accomplishments of others, especially when they're particularly unique -- and I was happy to share my own.

I don't want my contribution to this interesting discussion to be read as "me me me", so I've removed it.


I wish you wouldn't have done so. I came across a comment you made recently and something made me interested in hearing more about you. I can't remember what it was.

Sure, telling stories about what you've done for others is great but that shouldn't preclude telling your others accomplishments. I can't understand why someone would take these comments as "me me me" when they were solicited and there's clearly a very interested audience.


I didn't read the word "Examples:" for a second and thought those were all your accomplishments until I read [Insert Title]. Was about to just quit and go home lol.


I believed the first one (7 continents) and paused on the second (Olympic gold medal). I never knew Michael Phelps used HN! (I'm glad I'm not the only one who made this mistake)


One member of the team I'm in (a freelancer) actually has a bronze olympic medal, so I wouldn't consider it impossible... =-)


Is it real? ;)


I haven't seen the medal, but she's on WP, so it must be true!


The first application I ever wrote, theoretically saved the company $10.2 million dollars.

I was working as a systems administrator at a Big 3 automotive supplier and identified a gap in our million dollar production system. If we ever lost connectivity, the system would be useless and the off-line backup system was insufficient. Our contract stated that we could be charged $10,000 per minute for shutting down the plant. I wanted to learn how to program, so I wrote a backup app in perl.

The electric company dug up our data lines and we lost communications for 18 hours. We tried using the backup system, but it could not keep up with production and we put the plant in jeopardy. My app, which was not in my job description to create and not supported by the company, ran production for 17 hours without errors in a complex automotive sequencing environment.

I don't know that the Big 3 automotive company would have actually charged us $10 million dollars, but it would have easily been > 1 million.

Raising 3 kids as a single father, among other personal accomplishments, by far trumps this achievement, but it doesn't sound as impressive on paper.


Did you get any rewards/recognition from your employer for your work? (I understand that the feeling that your app worked great itself is a big reward).


I know my boss and his bosses really appreciated it, but that was the extent of it.


That's a bummer. I would asked for at least a small bonus (~$10,000) given how much you saved them and that it was outside your job description.


I grew up in a fishing village in the north of Scotland - when I was 19 one of my school friends insisted that I experience what it is like working on a trawler in the North Sea.

After a few days of sea sickness, hard work, lack of sleep, and fear I probably would have shot myself if someone had given me a loaded pistol.

Nothing I did since then (and I had summer jobs while I was a student doing things like weeding large fields of barley, digging ditches etc.) was anything like that.

So I learned to have a LOT of respect for people who don't have the chance to make lots of money sitting at a computer for most of the day.


I presented at the first 3 web conferences in '93, 94 and '95 at CERN, Chicago and Darmstadt.

Quite proud that the paper I presented in Chicago in '94 suggested that it might be a good to build programmatic extensibility into web browsers - possibly using a virtual machine. I remember the audience thinking it was a very silly idea... ;-)

Given the precedent of the Eolas case I wonder how much my employer might have made if that idea had been patented. Fortunately they didn't approve of me doing that work so that never happened.


I once saved a five year old from drowning in six feet of water. Boiling water. While naked.

(OK, technically speaking ~45C, not boiling.)


How has no one else asked what happened yet? Why was there a 5 year old in 6 feet of water? Why were you (or the 5 year old?) naked at the time?


I was on summer vacation with my friends to a sleepy hot springs in eastern Japan. (At the risk of stating the obvious, one is naked when in a Japanese hot spring.)

Anyhow, my friends had been badgering me for a while while in the indoor portion of the hot springs to transition to the outdoor portion with them. I told them I would come out in a few minutes. This particular hot springs, being mostly natural, has an uneven gradient -- it has a transition from 1.5 feet deep to six feet deep which is about as abrupt as falling off a cliff. The transition is marked with a log suspended above the water and a warning sign outside the door.

Anyhow, while I was still gathering up my courage to go outside, a little boy splashing along in the two-foot end of the spring approached the gap in the pole that permits access to the deep end and, before anyone could warn him away, vanished.

I only have two coherent memories of what happened next: one, I remember thinking most strongly that I was disregarding the advice in the Boy Scout Manual by entering water to remove a drowning victim and, two, as soon as we broke the surface he spit boiling water in my eye. This made me happy because it meant I didn't have to attempt rescue breathing.

What made me substantially less happy was going from being the gangly white guy in the corner everyone was making a pretense of not staring at to being the gangly white guy in the center of the room who everyone was making absolutely no pretense of not staring at. I handed the child to his father (didn't say anything -- my Japanese totally failed me out of embarassment) and bolted to the corner. Then folks heard the commotion from the lady's side of the springs and came over to see what was happening. I bolted out, got changed, and searched the vicinity for icecream while waiting for my friends to finish their baths.


Is 45C hot enough to cause injury? (Assuming you don't drown, that is.)


42-45C is the temperature of the very hot onsens in Japan (at least according to the thermometer reading at an onsen I visited there)... So no I don't think it'd cause injuries...


just to put in perspective for the non-metric aware in here:

human body temperature ~37C water freezes at 0C and boils at 100C


45 degrees Celsius = 113 degrees Fahrenheit


It won't cause injury but it's not exactly easy to jump into.


* Graduated university at age 16, Math PhD at age 20 (RPI)

* Performed with New York City Ballet

* Sang with Placido Domingo

* Founding investor in Napster

* Credited as a pioneer in social networking, founding pioneering one in 2001, which heavily influenced Friendster which led to myspace, facebook etc.

* Acted in Sundance Feature Film competition selection

* Now doing next big thing, hehe ;)


You, sir, are an inspiration. Graduated at age 16? Wow. I only managed to drop out twice (undergrad) but some how ended up in graduate school (took my first midterm today (MS CE)).


Thank you. The biggest items helping me with this were 1) never enrolling in high school, 2) RPI gave me credit for coursework I had done but had not officially received credit for outside the system, and 3) careful management and fine-tuning of graduation requirements, along with a slightly higher than average courseload. It would have been nice if I'd thought ahead a little more as I was not well prepared for grad school applications, with my second year being my senior year.


P.S. a big part of #2 was Johns Hopkins U's CTY program, plus courses I sat in on at Skidmore College, to give them some credit.


Just out of interest, what was the one in 2001?


Thanks for asking -- Ryze. We don't do a lot of P.R. on it these days, so many don't know of it, but in those first years it was mentioned multiple times in NY Times, Wall St. Journal, industry pubs, etc.


* I've traveled to several continents

* I've seen the olympics on TV

* I've built a start-up from scratch and it's indexed by Google

* I use consumer eletronic devices used by over 10m

* I've watched feature length motion pictures [Many Titles]

* I've had a lot of funny life experiences

* I've seen pictures of Vladimir Putin


haha only just noticed what you done there, good post.


* was a guitar prodigy in my teens

* almost got booted from college for publishing the president's dirty laundry on Paul Schrader's dime

* had 3 top 40 songs with my band on the radio (alt top 40)

* founded a pr agency at 26

* had my own newspaper column before 30

* got a client 25 minutes on cnn int (valued at 6 million us)

* was the first to publicly attack the junta after the coup in thailand in 2006

* was interviewed on live tv for an hour without a script (hellish)

* taught myself a handful of computer languages and secured early funding for an internet startup

* got to brag about it all on hn =)


Very awesome achievements. Congrats. I particularly like the guitar/music stuff. Anywhere I might be able to hear those songs of yours? And by prodigy, was that specific to a style? Like classical etc?


I studied classical but was interested in guitar noodling a la Steve Vai. I played some of his stuff live around 17. I studied under a student of Segovia (or a student of, I can't really remember) and "learned faster than anyone he knew." My parents drove me 500 miles round trip for lessons. I don't have any of that stuff but could send you my punk-doo wap band's ep if you really want to hear it. It's pretty rough around the edges but we had a lot of fun.


Wow, I would love to be able to play like Vai. Makes me think of the awesome battle in Crossroads. Neo-classical is pretty amazing. As for the EP, you mean you'll email it? If so sure. moollaza@gmail.com (Thanks!)


Oh man, I had that movie on vhs and watched the guitar battle scenes countless times. About the ep: we were an acquired taste so be prepared but yeah happy to email it to you.


Rode a bicycle (that I constructed from parts) through the jungle of Congo for 2 weeks. Got a rare form of Malaria. Rode it back.


Needs more upvotes for figuring out how to ride a rare form of Malaria.


* I've arranged big underground raves with international DJ's

* I've successfully started a bar in Ibiza from scratch

* I learnt PHP, javascript, SQL, CSS and HTML from scratch without any help

* I hold three patents

* I've done three startups

* I survived an English boarding school

* I bought a boat that I live on, which I've totally refurbished and redone without ever having had a screwdriver in my hand before.

* I have been asked to star in a pornmovie, but declined

* I've had a short but glorious career as a male stripper

*I had fun doing all of it

:-)


   * I learnt PHP, javascript, SQL, CSS and HTML from scratch without any help
I saw a few "taught myself [such and such]" in this thread and wonders what that means exactly. What do you mean by "from scratch without any help"?

I wouldn't believe you didn't read anything at all about the languages because you can't just guess stuff like that :), but did you pick up a book and learn? did you read the documentation? If so, isn't that some kind of help?

Basically, does "taught myself" mean "not going to a formal class"/"not having anyone teaching me in person"?


> Basically, does "taught myself" mean "not going to a formal class"/"not having anyone teaching me in person"?

Essentially, yes. Although, I've seen people who "learned" how to program from taking programming classes, and I'm starting to believe that, ultimately, the only way to learn to program is to learn it of your own volition, outside the context of an official class.

I've seen code from grad students in computer engineering (!) which was buggy, uncommented, poorly formatted, unindented, untested, poorly designed, and sometimes meaningless. Meanwhile, people who went out and learned how to program instead of having the knowledge taught at them manage to produce much better code, consistently.


Sorry for not making myself clear. What I meant was without any classes, courses or people to help. Google was my best friend :-)

Basically my approach was to find a project I wanted to do, then simply do it, and ask Google as I went along. There were a few problems along the way, primarily in the beginning where I didn't have a clue as to why things didn't work and didn't have sufficient knowledge to know the right search phrases. It took me a long time to find out that your indexpage has to be called index.html for instance.

Later I found out that the project I was doing was actually much more complicated than first anticipated (it involved the entity-attribute-value model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model and was rather ajax heavy) and I had some problems finding out how to tweak code, use objects properly, etc. It was a great learning experience though - and maybe a good product will come out of it.


* I paid off my parents mortgage (age 20)


I paid off at age 24.


Can you please elaborate? (Either of you.) Thanks!


My dad took loan to build our house and for my sister's marriage when I was in college. When I started working at the age of 21, within three years I was lucky enough to pay those loans back.


I paid off my parent's mortgage at 29. Moved to the US from India when I was 28. Getting rid of mortgage was the best way to "save" money for the family.


That's awesome. Same age looking to do the same :) haven't yet :(


I'm gonna brag about my co-founder @fanjiewang. This is what I filled out on our YC apps.

* Co-starred in the film Air Hockey (2005), which was played at the opening ceremony of 2006 Air Hockey World Tournament hosted in Las Vegas (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2390531/).

* Faculty upper year scholarship for University of Waterloo Computer Engineering '04 (for ranking 1st).

* Finished 1st place in Sir Isaac Newton National Physics Competition '03.

* Finished 1st place in American Computer Science League Competition '02.

* Finished 1st place in Pascal National Mathematics Competition '00.

* Broke the record for the fastest goal scored (3.57 s) in a group qualifier for the U17 World Cup while playing for the Chinese national soccer team '99.

He has done quite a bit of stage work and he sings as well. Apart from being a really smart and talented guy he can work harder than anybody I know.


* Grade 9 (age 14) I Raised $3500 for the Stephen Lewis Foundation (Fighting Aids in Africa), I was the 2nd highest fundraiser (A gr.12 beat my be $50) But b/c of our fundraising we (the Gr.12 girl and I) got to hand Stephen Lewis (the United Nations' special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa) a giant cheque for $40,000

* My parents are from South Africa, emigrated to Canada during Apartheid, and my relatives were good friends of Nelson Mandela's and played relatively important roles in the Anti-Apartheid movement. While imprisoned on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela wrote a letter (or two) to my Great Aunt. There's a copy in a biography I read. I believe he also went to at least one of her birthday parties. Later, when he was in Toronto (1998) I got to meet him, and sing ABC' and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with him (I was 7 @ the time)

* My great uncle used to work with Mahatma Ghandi, when they were both lawyers in India. There are pictures somewhere in India's archives of them together.

* Last week while in the grocery store with my dad, a woman near us yelled that the guy running stole her purse. Myself and another guy immediately ran after him (another guy joined us on the way) and we chased the culprit into the parking lot. He gave up and I sternly asked for the purse back, then I handed it to the lady and a bunch of people called the police. (I didn't want to brag about that one, but now seemed like a good opportunity)


I have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've see C-Beams glitter in the dark by the Tannhauser gate.


"...All those moments will be lost in time; like tears in rain. Time to die."

FYI Rutger Hauer actually wrote that last line in to the script. Most memorable scene in the movie if you ask me.


ok the "you people wouldn't believe" part soured me on this one. Loving all the other achievements though, find them inspiring (or that may just be my mid-life crisis kicking in)


It's a quote from Bladerunner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannhauser_Gate#Blade_Runner


I stand corrected.


This all sounds kind of lame compared to the other comments, but you asked:

- Converted a car to electric drive when I was 20

- Was a contestant on a reality show pilot that aired on Discovery

- Built a motorized rotisserie out of two old bicycles to cook ~100lb of lamb for my friend's wedding

- Built a weight-controlled electric longboard (3wdm.blogspot.com)

- Built my own Mazda 323 GT-R (not sold in the US) out of imported parts and a US-spec AWD Protege

- Gutted and renovated a 1914 house, including all wiring, plumbing and heating, not to mention stripping eight layers of paint off of every last bit of the original woodwork and windows.

Although countless other people have done it before me, I most proud of the last one. A project like that completely takes over your life. I was working to the point of complete exhaustion on it during every moment that I wasn't at my day job for well over a year.


Not much compared to others here...

* Won the Bank of America Computer Science award in high school.

* Have only worked in my field of study and interest (comp sci)

* Had a $20/hour job at age 18, which was my second job. First being one at $15/hour.

* Two years later I asked for a 50% raise, got declined, quit, they came after me and they have been my client to this day.

* I survived a horrible rip tide/current after accepting death without the help of a lifeguard.

* Wrote the most efficient language generator based on a given grammar in discrete math class.

* Taught myself enough about programming/servers/etc before college, that by the time college was over, it had taught me nothing new.

* Know how to speak 2 languages fluently without an accent in either language.


I've been locked up in a Russian prison while travelling. Met the local Mafioso. Ate great Borscht.

Haven't seen a winter since 2006. I chase the sunshine around the world by doing mini-migrations to avoid the cold.

I learn a little bit of the local tongue everywhere I go. Can say 'Thank you' in around 30 languages.

I met up with my step-dad after 25 years of separation. An amazing guy and someone I definitely want to get to know better.

My other great achievements are a work in progress though...

EDIT: added a missed item


I survived being hit in the head with a running 110cc chainsaw. Minor flesh wounds only. Is that cool? I'm not sure.

A friend of mine won the Nobel peace prize and then lost it in a bar afterwards. I wish I could say that.


Are you serious? Please tell both of those stories.


Yes, with a bit of exaggeration. My friend is not a laureate, but was a key part of the organization that shared the peace Nobel about 15 years ago. He went along to help pick it up. He received a personal memento, a small medallion. He tells a good story of talking to a small dapper Norwegian man at the reception and finally asking him what he did. "I'm the King", was the response.

They went out celebrating afterwards (edit: not the King!) and he lost his memento. I like to imagine him calling the bar the next day and asking if any Nobel prizes had been handed in.

"Did you find it? Great. What? Chemistry - no, sorry, that's not it. Peace."

I worked as a treelopper for a while, and was cutting down the waste in the trailer. I was moving my feet around on the stack with the saw idling at arms'length. The Stihl 076 was idling too fast and caught on something, lurched forwards, cut through the steel trailer and bounced into my forehead, all in an instant.

Lots of blood, 15 stitches, but it turns out skulls are hard enough. Now I have a faint Harry Potter-style scar.

I've done some actual cool stuff too, not just surviving an accident, but I think the thing I am most proud of is self-diagnosing myself with depression later in life and learning to manage it. I wish I had worked it out earlier, but at least I'm still around and self-aware.


That cracks me up - probably because I took drinking too seriously for many years. I can at least imagine people in that situation. I guess it's kinda sad but also fun to have won and misplaced something that serious.

That actually happenend to someone I went to high school with - he wasn't so lucky but after several surgeries he just kinda looks like a hard ass. You're definitely lucky.


I don't think he was completely trashed or anything, he just lost it whilst he was in the bar having some champagne or whatever. He actually wasn't that worried about it.


I was pleasantly surprised when after 2 yrs in the game industry (promo games industry before that) and my first lead development role was on ESPN X Games SnoCross for 2XL Games and ESPN which just happened to be the first game shown on the iPad on Jan. 27th, 2010, up on stage by Scott Forstall.

We had no idea they were showing it and I was just watching the keynote and was blown away. So in short I was lead developer of the first game shown on the iPad publicly.

http://wireless.ign.com/articles/106/1064149p1.html


I've successfully conditioned every manager I've ever worked for to accept rolling in around 10:30 as normal.


Keep pushing it. I've made 1pm now the usual time to expect my arrival.


keep pushing it, I'm working from home 80% of the time.


keep pushing 100% of the time which now fits in a very nice 4 hour slot


keep pushing 100% of the time from home, and moved to another country - with even more freedom.


I thought that was the norm where in the bay area? no?

I always aim to come at work at 10, yet always, I end up coming at 10.20-10.25.

I am always punctual and late at the same time. The Mediterranean clock on me still running even in the west coast.


I think this is relevant to this (sometimes justified) accomplishment boasting here.

"A truly rich man is someone whose children runs into their arms even when they're empty"

"My daughter one time said... We were leaving church, like a church party. We were driving home, in the car. And she didn't want to go home. She was like 3 or 4 at the time. I don't want to go to Mommy's house. I don't want go to Mia's house.

OK, we'll go to Daddy's house. OK.

We pulled into our house and she started freaking out crying. Why? She thought my house was the office.

And that's when I realized I needed to start pulling back.

To step it up, be a baller at home"

- Josh James, founder of Omniture

From video originally posted by adammichaelc (I highly recommend the entire 1-hr video for inspiration and a kick-in-the-seat-of-your-pants)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164815


- I quit Google after hearing Steve Jobs Speak.

- I won an IBM thinkpad from IBM.

- I wrote a program that could sing.

- I was slapped by a girl at the streets of Kolkata for wishing her good night. I was drunk.

- I am doing what I love.


I quit Google after hearing Steve Jobs Speak

Eh? Why?


I meant his Stanford Speech. It made me realize there is no better time to start a company then now.


> > I quit Google after hearing Steve Jobs Speak

> Eh? Why?

Reality Distortion Field.


I woke up on time this morning.


I built a personal point scoring system where one of the awards was "waking up on time." So +1 for that. +3 if you floss your teeth tonight.


Interesting. Is it posted somewhere? Can we see it?


Would you be willing to be a test-case? Send me an email, tony@tonystubblebine.com and include some habits you want to change. I'm doing testing with a small group right now and hope to branch out next month.


AWESOME!


Hacker News > Lists > Most Active Theads > "Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)"

187 Comments in 9 hours

haha I guess everyone's favourite subject ultimately is themselves


that, my friend, is something that every startup out there should know (and aim) from the start :-)


I wasn't going to, but reading a few of these inspired me... then reading a few more depressed me (mine aren't so glamorous), but I'll do it anyway.

* helped my mother raise my brother and me. This past New Year, I was able to fly my brother up to live with me for a week, showing him what you can accomplish with hard work and dedication.

* wrote an essay that received a comment saying that the post had helped the commenter overcome something he had been struggling with through years of therapy and self-doubt.

* overturned our high school's regulation that allows only seniors to take classes at the university.

* taught myself Calc 2 in high school and got a perfect score on the AP exam; my best friend and I were the first people at my school to get above a 4 on any AP Calc exam. I didn't consider this a great accomplishment until I ran into my old HS math teacher a few years back and learned that she now tells our story to all of her Calc students to motivate them.

* started a rock band in college, played some really cool venues, did one show with a band that now gets airplay on Sirius XM, and won a few competitions.

* landed a girlfriend (of 2 years now) who is out of my league.

But I think my greatest accomplishment is that I seem to have made my parents proud.


When I was thirteen or so, I got a job offer for independently inventing AJAX. Everywhere I looked at the time said you couldn't read data from the server using Javascript, but I realised that if you opened a new window to a separate page it could be done.

I didn't take it anywhere, and later (after people discovered xmlhttprequest) I learned that even at the time I could have used an iframe, which would have been nicer. I assume people were doing that before I made my discovery, but I don't know for sure.


* Good friends with the man who was the head of the Missile Intelligence Agency during the Cuban missile crisis. He also worked with Von Braun on the Saturn V rocket. (Interesting story, by the way.)

* Turned down a potential offer to Westpoint.

* Achieved the 99th percentile in Standford Achievement Test every year I took it (5 years), each in different subjects. However, I don't have the grades to support it.

* Touched the Stanley Cup.

* Learned PHP when I was 13. C, C++, Java, etc. came soon after.

* I'm a programmer by trade, but I am going to school for management.

* I've recently become friends with several of my childhood heroes.


My dad was responsible for the blue diamond marshmallow in Lucky Charms.

As for myself, I have zero debt, no outstanding loans at all, including no car payment and no mortgage.


Nice! Those things are so darn magically delicious!


* Wrote a 30 day blog that was read by thousands of people and inspired many (several of whom saw fit to befriend me on Facebook)

* Work full time as a software engineer with a 6 figure income without having gone to college.

* Organizing the Seattle Alt.NET Conference for 2010 (looking to be around a 100 person conference this year)

* Was accepted into a class for gifted students in elementary school.

* Had a highschool reading level in 1st grade.

* I've never known how it feels to not be able to learn something.


I think your blog was one of the most memorable things I came across on HN.


* I have been to all the states(28 states and seven union territories) in India

* At one time I have worked on 4 start-ups at a time

* I have donated Rs2000(Almost $50) to a begger

* I have programming my self and taught my college professors


I've done nothing.


sure feels like it reading some of the replies to this thread :/


"It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years." - Tom Lehrer


Ditto.


* standard "taught myself" a lot of various tech skills. i like to solve problems with an arduino where applicable.

* had a brief career as a professional martial artist many years ago. you could also technically say that i was a professional magic: the gathering player, too.

* i technically dismembered my left arm. it got better.

* i'm not an olympian, but i know quite a few, including medal winners. on a related note, i train and compete on the higher levels of sport fencing, and used to do the same for other martial arts.

* i'm working a full-time job, trying to bootstrap a startup, and working on writing a book.

* my canonical bacon number is 3. non-canonical is 2.


* I started programming computers at 6 and I still love them :)

* I traveled all around the world in the french navy (http://carnet-escale.chez-alice.fr/JDA/escales/carte.JPG)

* I left the french navy to do IT despite having a lifelong contract there

* I'm about to move to the country-side with my family and bootstrap projects (that, I'm really proud of :-)


* I know 7 languages. (5 of them I speak perfect)

* Everyday I read 300 pages (book & articles) of writings, and scan (eye scanning) 300-400 articles online. Pro day.

* Now I study my second university. First was 6 years medicine, second is also medicine, I am in 4th semester and I am 23 now.

* I went 5 years to piano school.

* I went 2 years to painting school.

* While I study medicine, I learned graphic design and it's already 5 years that I work as a graphic designer in a very big design firm.

* While studying medicine I've learned myself - Marketing

* I was born in USSR and now I found myself in Germany.

* In 2003 I became a muslim.

* After 3 month I am planning to start a startup.

I saw that HN people are so SMART! so great brains in one place. wow.


I know 7 languages. (5 of them I speak perfect)

Which languages do you know? (When I was a kid, I wanted to learn 6 languages but it didn't work out. It bothers me less now that I know a little CSS, HTML and XHTML.)


I mean human languages, not programming. They are

-German

-English

-Turkish

-Russian

-Azerbaijani

-Arabish (lower intermediate)

-Ottomanish (not so good at speaking)


Thank you.

I knew you meant human languages. I know a little conversational German, took French in high school and college, and took two classes of Classical Greek in college. I know a few words of Russian. As a teenager, I wanted to be a simultaneous translator, but I never got the opportunity to seriously pursue it. I feel better about only dabbling in human languages now that I also dabble in computer languages and it has allowed me to communicate with more people than learning French ever did. :-D


I remember having a list of things I wanted to achieve when I was younger. Let's see:

- Win the nobel prize. (not yet)

- Write a book. (done)

- Travel the world (not totally done, but I live in South America now)

- Be Time magazine's man of the year (it's a bit of a cop-out, but done: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00....)

- Have my face on a stamp (not done, but that's easy these days)

Looking back, I was probably lacking ambition there, too focused on achievements that display what others think of me. Maybe I should make a new list.


I create adventure. I leave slain dragons in my wake. I build monuments, plant flags, discover wonders, and lead armies.

I sing duets, dance tangos, and play concertos.

I cook banquets. I wheel, make deals, and strike bargains. I purchase fruit in large quantities. I partake and imbibe. I articulate, expound, and drive home the point. I maintain a strong moral fiber and act with integrity.

I forge trails and bushwhack through jungles. When I am not walking, I am running. I sail and drive and fly and ride and crawl.

I write encyclopaedias. I learn, study, forecast, ponder, and calculate. I know the answer.


* Worked on the special effects of Starship Troopers.

* Built an ecommerce site that has handled over $2 million in sales.

* Went snorkeling with a couple of American actors in Australia during my honeymoon.

* Ran the website for a non-profit film festival for the past 6 years bringing movies to a town that is about as far from Hollywood as you can get.

* Currently working on two startups ... one funded, and one of my own.


* I wrote a book on ActionScript when I was 14

* Dropped out of school the same age (8th grade)

* Wrote another book on Flash when I was 18

* Worked as a remote consultant from ages 15 to 18

* Still working as a remote consultant for startups (I'm now 24)

I had a great start but I think enjoying success (and money) too early in life can be extremely distracting. I stopped achieving when I started making over 50kUSD a year. Also got into a lot of debt. Not too clever after all.

Best thing I did, tho, was quitting Flash and getting into server-side development. Learned Python and then Ruby, now back to Python (but still doing lots of Ruby).

I think the biggest lesson I learned is that no matter what you do, make sure you use at least SOME of your time doing something for yourself. Start getting businesses out the door as soon as you can and don't stop until you're successful with one of them. All you need is to get yourself to start -- understand Parkinson's Law and the 80-20 rule. It gets easier over time.


I infiltrated HN. For almost 2 years I was part of the top 100. I am not technical.

I have lived 13 years within a 5-minute-walking distance from the beach. I still can't swim, but I always go deep.

I was a bartender in a private club and got to mix drinks for several individuals. I met Senators, actors, tech founders, multinational executives daily. I missed Angelina Jolie one afternoon by 10 minutes because I decided to go home 10 minutes earlier.


* Bought my first house at 21 (Not outright, but I was the only one of my friends at the time near owning a home).

* Skipped college and immediately started working full-time ... for myself. Nothing beats not having a boss to answer to.

* Ranked a German company between #1-3 in Google.de for 19/20 very competitive keywords (Work I was proud of).

* Web & print design for several top musicians (Work I was proud of too).

I enjoyed reading all of you're accomplishments. Keep it up :)


* I biked 5000+ miles across the US, in high school

* I've traveled to 6 out of 7 continents

* I've managed to stretch undergrad out into a seven year fiasco


Is Antarctica the missing one?


* Owned my own incorporated business at the age of 15 (Looking back, it was kindof dumb. It was essentially just freelancing with a shitload of paperwork attached). I dissolved it at 18 when I went to college.

* Self taught every programming language I know (Started with BASIC, then JavaScript and PHP, did some windows programming in VB, then later VB.NET and now doing asp programming in C#. I've also toyed with Objective-C/C/C++) I'm really impressed by some of the comments here. I've had a better understanding of these languages than most of my professors (which probably speaks more to the quality of my school than my programming ability)


* I lead the charge in 2008 to win the Best Act Ever award for Rick Astley at the MTV EMA's

* I was the youngest competitor at a car rally event here in Australia, competing against the likes of Sir Jack Brabham. (side note, we managed to get the porsche off the clock at nearly 300 km/hr)

* I designed a forced induction cooling system (originally for the same Porsche - the waste heat was then distributed to the fuel rail as a warmer), which then subsequently sold the idea to a racing team here in Australia. I'm pretty sure they shelved it.

* Some years ago, I accidentally set naughty bits on fire while trying to cook Ramen.


It is sad that when thinking of my own achievements, I first tend to evaluate my 'virtual accomplishments'. These are tasks related to programming, design, etc. that have no actual existence in the real world. These are related to creativity. However, when referring to real life, I have nothing to mention that is not common. There is nothing real that makes me anything more than normal. I guess that is what draws me to the creative world that exists in my own mind... because there I can accomplish a lot without interference from the real world.


* I've met the following videogaming luminaries: Shigeru Miyamoto, Alexey Pajitnov, Ralph Baer, Al Alcorn, Nolan Bushnell, Stephen "Slug" Russell, and Steve Jackson.

* I found unreleased Atari and Colecovision games at a flea market in 2008 on bare EPROMs.

* My writing has been used to teach at Harvard, yet I flunked out of college.


Lived in and managed software teams in 3 different countries.

Logged over 2000 offshore sailing miles.

Learned to code when I was 7.

Sold a work of art at auction when I was 8.

Tied for 2nd place in a senior high national chess championship.

Have survived 3 near-death experiences.


Wow, after reading through this thread I'm pretty impressed with some of the folks here.

As for me:

* I worked on software that was used to design a small part of one of the sexiest consumer electronics products in the world.

* I built a browser game five years ago that's stil running, with a few hundred active players.


* I wrote WebRPG back in the Java 1.1 days, with a very thin distributed object graph for all communications, and it mostly worked :-)

A highlight of that experience was having Gary Gygax hang out in our booth at GenCon - http://web.archive.org/web/19980205004902/www.webrpg.com/?li...


I play in a band, and last night we posted our first youtube music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-KbQv9qB9o


* I don't brag


Except to brag that you aren't bragging? Thanks chief


Raymond Smullyan (my favourite guy to quote around here) told the following story in one of his books.

A particular fellow was famous for his modesty. One day he started signing all of his correspondence "He who is modest." This irked one of his detractors, who wrote back to ask, "How you be modest if you sign your correspondence so flamboyantly?" The result came back swiftly: "I no longer think of my modesty as a virtue."


Come on. It was clearly a bit of meta-humor.

See also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Knaves


Yup, recursion excites me. Viva la GEB :)


Though, not something I did directly.... Two teachers have named their children after me, is what I'm most proud of.


Why did they do so?


  * I've been to 5 high schools
  * Went through 9th grade twice
  * Dropped out of school entirely
  * Self-taught everything I know about computers and technology
  * Work for a large media company doing the job I set out to do for a decent wage
Technically i've achieved all the [other] goals I set out for myself as a kid. Time for some new goals...

* Not that this is impressive, but finally began working out 5 months ago and continue to stick to it 4 days a week. This is the longest i've stuck to anything besides a job/relationship and I am in the best shape of my life.


* I was the computer science grad student of the year back when I was in grad school

* I am a member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon http://upe.acm.org/

* I've been to Tokyo and competed in the web service composition challenge

* I have climbed 2 out of Colorados 53 14ers so far. My goal is all 53 in CO and then the North American continent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteener

* I have surfed big waves in Costa Rica


Not that this is something to 'Brag' about:

I died at age 5/6 (am now 26)...well...technically I had a cardiac arrest and my heart stopped beating for 15 - 20 minutes.


Wow, I now have to upgrade all my goals :) As I always find myself becoming a teacher no matter what job I do (I finally gave in and am now an English teacher) my proudest moment was during my technical training for the US Air Force as an enlisted man (Computer maintenance and telephone systems engineer, which I went for because I had always been a 'software guy' so this allowed me to play with big iron): During our basic electronics training segment our lecturer took off sick and so we had a substitute teacher who was trying to use the original teachers notes, but knew nothing about the subject. After 2 classes of confusion, I offered to take over the class and taught it for the remainder of the 2 weeks. The best part was that it was the only segment of the whole course where everyone scored +90% on the final.


I single handedly posted a submission on HN that will allow me to identify the most HN users of any post ever! :)


Mandatory up-vote. This could become one of the best thread on hn ever. Nice idea niqolas.


Trying to raise a start-up since last two years with a laptop, which is broken in the middle and I have to use a support each time when i work on it. Needless to say it's also a v v v very slow one.


That sounds like a horrible decision. If there's any way you can scrape together even like $400 for a cheap, but actually functional and fairly fast, computer, do so. It's a poor workman who blames his tools, but partially because a good workman will realize when investing in good tools is well worth it.

It sounds like that's taking a significant productivity hit on you, which is not worth it.


haha...I sure would have, if I could.

I think you misunderstood my point by assuming it as a decision. Im from india and those things dont cost cheap in here specially when i wasn't earning anything had only debt to pay to.

(P.S. I wish I could delete my thread now, wasn't worth it. Completely stupid!)


I initially opened this thread with trepidation, as I don't generally like bragging (from others or myself). However, I find myself quite enjoying the responses.

It's reaffirming to read of these abilities and how they were NOT sidelined by mainstream or environmental pressures.

I became friends in college with a fellow who is one of the brightest people I've ever met. And a great "explainer" and story-teller, to boot. His grades suffered at times, and he nearly left once or twice, because he was so simply and totally into his own interests (some very technical) as opposed to some of what was going on in the classes.

Half his life some, particularly conventional people might call "a mess". On the other hand, he's an engineer on the CMS at CERN.

As for myself, I was considered very bright, but struggled -- mostly with conventional social settings and also with very heightened sensitivity to environmental stimuli. (E.g. I can't tune out neighboring noise; my brain doesn't filter it from my attention.). A couple of physical injuries with chronic after-effects sidelined me for a long time. (Injury I can deal with. Having no recourse against chronic symptoms is something else.)

Nonetheless, I've had my moments. Such as pretty much single handedly converting a billion dollar cost accounting system from a hard coded legacy environment to instead interface with an underfunded SAP implementation.

Pretty much ALL the inputs changed. Things were handed "over the wall" from the SAP implementation with no negotiation and very little in the way of instruction. No one taught me a thing nor provided me any tools or budget beyond my salary. The method proposed by "the other side" of the wall would not have worked at all. So, I rolled my own.

It worked. It worked when raw, detailed order records replaced summary reports the manufacturing facilities used to provide (leaving me to processed multiple hundreds of MB of essentially raw data with product identifiers floating anywhere within a free form text field supporting any number of simultaneous and varying data points). It worked when headcount was reduced from four, for a while five, people down to just me.

Not only did it work, it became much more accurate and full-proof.

I like reading here how other people simply did things that were "impossible" or certainly not expected. And that it's not a matter of somehow placing oneself into some "abnormal state of being". It's who you are, and getting done what interests you and/or needs to be done.

I still don't fit in to mainstream society. I burned out, hard-time, in my last job mostly fighting an environment of distraction and complacency. Reading other stories here provides a small boost; there are other people who "make it" being something other than conventional. And by "make it", I mean in their own eyes, as opposed to someone else's measure.

Somehow, for me its been a difficult and necessary lesson that a lot of convention is a straight-jacket for bright people, and that criticism that is leveled against them is often hypocritical and self-serving even while it is espoused as being "for their good".

P.S. Even when such criticism and suggestions are well meant, they may simply not fit. Trying too hard to please or accommodate the other person becomes self-destructive.


I lived and worked in Afghanistan, great country, guys. ^^


Strange life experience: I've juggled 5 balls on the flight deck of a 747 while 35000 feet in the air over India.


I never really feel like I've done anything, but here's some moments of personal accomplishment:

  * drew a weekly comic strip that published online during college.
  * discovered a corner detection algorithm using radon transforms.
  * built operational sensor networks for the military.


* Taught myself pascal at 12 and many other languages since * Skip a grade in primary school * Got a 82(top 10 uni in UK) for MSc dissertation * Discovered the British museum algorithm while meditating * Sold tamarine balls when I was 5 for a quarter


Rather rediscovered british algorithm independently


* I used to take shits in an outhouse and swim in the river where that same shit was dumped in. Though I didn't do this for long--eventually we got a toilet.

* Appear in the background in a movie scene with Judd Nelson (John Bender from the Breakfast Club).


hah! No big feats to brag about here, but I'll join the game anyway :-)

* started my first 'gig' translating books/magazines, printing them in a borrowed dot-matrix printer and selling around the town (at age 9). Also wrote original pieces about videogames and stuff (sold around 100-200 copies, heh)

* got my first programming-related 'prize' at school (age 11): won a couple of books because of an RPG game I did in LOGO (self taught) for a science fair

* rooted two ISPs back in the 90's - one by going through their garbage bins and finding password info, other by cold-calling at night and convincing the security guy to hand in some info. No harm done, but it was fun fun fun

* founded and leaded a programming 'association' (PBJug, a Java User Group) - the first one in my hometown's region (now with 500 people signed up)

* got a couple of articles published as reference material on PhD and Msc thesis of people I don't even know. I'm a college dropout, btw

* had access to a lot of prototype mobile phones from two different makers. Now THAT's something to brag, for a gadget-addict

* programmed an easter egg into a very popular mobile phone - you'd see me (and the rest of the dev team) by pressing 666# while in the file browser app. They've added easter eggs on new phones after that, to keep up with the 'tradition'

fixed a bug in a finance system that saved 4mi euros from one customer. Got a "thank's from noticing" from middle management and that was about it

* went from nothing (born in a small town w/ a relatively poor family) to live and work abroad, in some very respected companies (IBM, Siemens and the like), despite everyone saying I was crazy for even trying.

* went from working to high profile companies to starting up, despite everyone saying I was crazy for leaving those jobs behind

* founded 4 companies so far, all on software (different areas - one still open, just starting the 4th one)

* survived from death at least a dozen times: one from drowning at sea, one car crash, couple of very strong electric shocks, mugged (with a gun) twice, jumped into a pool with some electrical wire hanging on and almost drown/got electrocuted. Still alive and very proud of my nine-lives syndrome

* travelled 100k miles in a single year

* lost 40kg in 6 months

* drove at 200km/h in a German highway. Priceless!

* married an amazing woman and got the cutest dog on earth (named Frodo) :-)


I played at CBGB.


I once read that bands should not list CBGB as an achievement because of the sheer number of acts that perform there. It makes me wonder if that is intended as a humorous comment.

Regardless, my musical career never took me that far.


It's both serious and facetious.

You're right, about 80 million bands played there, so in one sense it's not such an amazing feat.

OTOH, it's just fucking cool. :)

I played there a few times; not sure how many bands got asked back. Getting that first gig was easy. Walked into the club, ran into Hilly Kristal, said I had a band. "Can you bring in 300 people?", "Oh, sure", I lied.

I found out we were playing when I was looking through the Village Voice to see what bands were around and saw Chinese Forehead[0] listed for the next week. :) Apparently some big name act canceled and they tossed together some showcase thing, and neglected to actually tell us. Pre-cell phone days, I guess.

It was a rush, and it was real accomplishment for me. It also cemented my desire to not be a spectator, of trying to get off my ass and get on stage, whatever that stage may happen to be.

It's not the same as becoming a dot-com millionaire or climbing K2, but all the same it I'm quite proud of having written and performed my songs at a world-famous dive. :)

So, for people looking at the list of amazing accomplishments listed in this thread, do not be discouraged.

Pick a goal; work until you reach it; repeat.

[0] For the curious: http://www.jamesbritt.com/chinese-forehead/


I paid a large portion of my tuition by building 4 of the University Department websites. UofT is Canada's biggest university.

It was nice to pay them with their own money :P


* I was hit by a bus while walking on the sidewalk in Brazil

* I'm a scratch golfer

* I speak portuguese and spanish fluently

After reading some of these I feel that I haven't done much with my life :(


I created an appointment system and all its related subsystems from scratch in 7 days. The online part is on passport.com.ph


And I thought developers don't brag...


Where on earth did you get this impression?


The ones I know and work with don't so I guess I was taking that as a good sampling, but I was wrong. It is one thing to show-off something you created, but another to just "talk" about it.


http://www.podblogr.com


Built an off the grid house.


I brew my own beer


* keep trying


* I rented out a warehouse, filled it up with 1/2 dozen hackers and musicians, built some bedrooms, a stage, a sound system, a recording booth, a server closet, got a fractional T3 installed, and threw bi parties which covered 60-70% of our rent, essentially lived rent free for three years.

* Built an application hosting & management firm with 4 employees and $1m+/year of gross-revenue, sold my half of it earlier this year

* Worked as the only production sysadmin at Napster before the $100m investment, left shortly afterwards.

* Once bought Joey Ramone a beer at CBGBs and spent an evening talking with him, a year or so before he died.


Shamelessly copying that warehouse idea is very tempting.


Do it! I've lived in 3 warehouses now, and am looking for a new space this summer when my apartment lease runs out. The key to warehouse living is to find an unassuming, out of the way warehouse (so as not to attract attention from the authorities), with a landlord who knows what you're doing and is fine with it, and to establish really good relations with the neighboring businesses who will otherwise be annoyed that some punk kids are throwing parties all the time.

I was just in one a few nights ago over in Oakland that a friend is living in now. We did some exploring and found an old boiler-room, remnant of an old structure that the warehouse was built over. You'd never find something that fun in some yuppy live/work loft. http://twitter.com/mhalligan/status/10614020589 has a photo of their main living space.


I'd love to see some more pics of these warehouses, I've always wanted to live in something like that.


Here's an old (and silly) set from a wake we threw at our warehouse in 2003 or 2004 for a guitar player that had died that morning. http://www.flickr.com/photos/halliganfamily/sets/72157603829...

if I dig around I can probably find more, and I'm hoping to do a shoot at that oakland warehouse this weekend, especially the basement :)


I've read this thread half-way trough :)


Keep going! We're all with you!


Sold my web app for 5 figures as a sophomore in college.


I used to shoot hoops with MJ


Wow, singer, dancer, and basketball player too. He will be missed.


MJ == michael jordan


This is interesting. Were you neighbours or something?


Yea, I slam dunked on him once.


* I am the Webring master of IEEE student branch of my college. (first freshman to do so).

* I am the webdev for the alumni committee of my college (the first freshman to do so).

* A turn to man for circuitry for the robotics club.

* Beat MTech Students in debates and Treasure Hunt in a recent techfest at our college.

OK nothing glamorous in there but Just wanted to add something.


* two chicks at the same time


[deleted]


cool story, bro.

^5


Upvoted


Two chicks at the same time!</e-peen>




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