Ask HN: What is something impressive you have built or achieved?

[wave]

One of the question from the YC application is "Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that each founder has built or achieved".

This might be a good question to ask everyone by posting it here because there are a lot of people in this community that have achieved or built impressive thing.

What is something impressive you have built or achieved?

[zasz]

I just finished cycling across America yesterday. I didn't go on my own, since researching the route would have been very time consuming, and I'm too weak to push both myself and my luggage up a hill. I went with a touring company, America by Bicycle, instead. I highly recommend them. Their website's www.abbike.com. It doesn't look professional, but it's run by a bunch of cyclists who know what they're doing.

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

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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.

[matthew-wegner]

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/

[BobbyH]

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

[davidw]

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.

[yan]

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

[wallflower]

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?

[cgs]

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

[lyime]

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

[charlesju]

That sounds pretty amazing actually.

[mahmud]

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

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

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

[clistctrl]

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

[Cantdog]

A spaceship sends messages to a logging system I built

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

[edw519]

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

[mkramlich]

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

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

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

[swolchok]

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

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

[dmfdmf]

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

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

[sketerpot]

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

[mkramlich]

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

[run4yourlives]

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

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

[mixmax]

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

[rguzman]

release early, release often?

[alain94040]

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

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

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

[zasz]

Oh dear, I didn't mean to brag.

[modoc]

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

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

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

[pingswept]

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

[manish]

That's a neat hack

[Mz]

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

[trapper]

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

[p01nd3xt3r]

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

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

[jpwagner]

Would you mind talking about this with me?

jpwagner [at> mit <dotty] edu

Thanks!

[jbr]

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

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

[zkz]

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

[anigbrowl]

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

[swolchok]

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.

[tobych]

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

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

[mrlyc]

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

[Keyframe]

Persuaded my girlfriend to be with me.

[davidw]

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

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

[nick007]

that got a vote out of jealousy

[mofey]

+1

[Mankhool]

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

[Keyframe]

Can it be viewed somewhere online or otherwise?

[NoBSWebDesign]

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