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.)

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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.

Nice! There are also companies that sell bike maps if you want to try your own execution with someone else's planning.

I recently unicycled 300 miles across Africa. Photos here: http://www.matthewwegner.com/africa-unicycle-photos/

This was a vehicle-supported tour organized by Escape Adventures, who are absolutely awesome. They usually do bike tours; this was their first unicycle tour. I'd highly recommend them for any foreign tours: http://escapeadventures.co.nz/

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.]

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.

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

I think even for an in-shape cyclist, having a van to carry your stuff would be nice. I've ridden with a loaded down bike before, and it's kind of depressing: your formerly light, agile Ferrari gets turned into something with the handling characteristics of a dump truck.

Awesome! I'm planning a ride from DC to NY this September. Not exactly across the US, but it'll be my longest ride.

Congratulations! It sounds like a crazy interesting trip. What was the best part of the trip? Who were the (mostly older) individuals who did the trip with you and what were they like? Close but not intimate or good friends? Did you have time to go off on your own?

Definitely the people. I thought that it would be all about the sightseeing and the cycling, but since the company sets the route and they care more about keeping you en route and safe from cars, sightseeing opportunities are limited, and of course, vast swathes of the country are just boring corn and soybean fields. The cycling turned out to be more difficult than I thought it would be since I didn't really know how to maintain the right posture to keep my butt and shoulders from aching for the first couple weeks, but once I figured that out, it became pretty fun.

But I think I discovered a lot of role models on the trip (I'm only 21). Surprisingly, this is only the second group of people where I've felt like I've fit in really well. A few people adopted me as a sort of surrogate daughter, and I've become really good friends with them.

Most of the people were quite well to do--we had a lot of retired engineers, doctors, and a real estate lawyer. We had a couple crazy wealthy people, but they behaved like anyone else. On the whole, they were very gracious people, very kind, and generally good-natured. Some of them acted like they were 60 or 70 or whatever, and some of them could have fit in at a frat party if they looked younger.

I didn't really have time to go off on my own much. I really sucked for the first four or five weeks, and I barely came to the next motel in time for a shower and the overview of the next day's route. Also, they usually put us up in motels located in strip malls, so we were often a couple miles away from downtown. Even if I'd been inclined to get back onto my bike, urban riding is still something I don't want to do if I don't have to. Even if you're a strong rider who's able to fit in side trips and still get back in time, the sightseeing opportunities are limited.

Congratulations! I'd highly recommend this to anyone with a few spare months.

Wow. I find the idea of driving around the country a bit much. You biked, thats pretty amazing. You need a beer, or two.

That sounds pretty amazing actually.

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.

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

A spaceship sends messages to a logging system I built

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

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

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.

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

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/

That's about 14 million tons of carbon dioxide that won't be going into the atmosphere every year. Not too shabby!

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

"No Comment"

shudder :)

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

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

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.

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

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

hehe, no we're building out the prototype.

release early, release often?

Especially when practicing.

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 :-)

Oh dear, I didn't mean to brag.

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

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

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.

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

That's a neat hack

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.

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

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.

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.

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. :-)

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.

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.

What about the placebo effect?

Have you looked into healthy fats?

My skin likes pastured (grass fed) butter, coconut milk/oil and very dark chocolate. Vitamins D3 and a DHA & EPA (Omega 3s) source like fish (krill oil) should do the skin well too. Also green and white tea w/ lemon no sugar killed acne.

Favorite health blog: wholehealthsource.blogspot.com

I do a lot of organic butter and coconut oil. I talk about that on the site. It's not the only thing I focus on, but it is one of the things that has been helpful.

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.

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?

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.

Would you mind talking about this with me?

jpwagner [at> mit <dotty] edu

Thanks!

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

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.

I actually had a lot of trouble with too much ego boost in the days after. I hope I'll handle the next impressive achievement more modestly.

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.

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.

Persuaded my girlfriend to be with me.

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

that got a vote out of jealousy

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.

Can it be viewed somewhere online or otherwise?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

:(

Single handedly created http://Tripntale.com

"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 :-)

So what was it? So intriguing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

:)

got ie6 and ie7 running on the same windows install.

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. :)

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

Personal bookmarker and web-history search.