Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
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
252 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] thread* 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.
I'm even more interested in trying out tarsnap!
I'm even more interested in maybe considering trying out tarsnap!
:)
Ok, back to centering that bloody div.
oh, this isn't the css-bashing thread? whoops.
You can add as many column divs as you like.
Note that the html { height:100% } is needed when in HTML5 mode.
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!
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. :)
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.
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. :-)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095
* 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.
Perhaps that's why you're an atheist ;)
Tao te ching is not a religious book.
"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.
(OK, technically speaking ~45C, not boiling.)
human body temperature ~37C water freezes at 0C and boils at 100C
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.
* 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.
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.
By the way; how did you manage to fix the brit? (if you dont mind me asking). That tickled me.
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 :)
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 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 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.
(Im currently doing mine with the OU and I got the impression your doing the same?)
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.
Heh, ain't that always the way.
Good luck with those exams!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
A friend of mine won the Nobel peace prize and then lost it in a bar afterwards. I wish I could say that.
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 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.
* 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
^5
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.
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 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.
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."
See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Knaves
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannhauser_Gate#Blade_Runner
FYI Rutger Hauer actually wrote that last line in to the script. Most memorable scene in the movie if you ask me.
- 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 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.
As for myself, I have zero debt, no outstanding loans at all, including no car payment and no mortgage.