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.
Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
31–40 of 253 posts
Re: Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
#32Re: Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I find your story very inspiring. Thanks for sharing it.
Re: Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
#34I woke up on time this morning.
AWESOME!
Re: Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
#35I 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…
You forgot "I started Tarsnap."
Re: Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
#36I 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.
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)
Re: Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 :)
Re: Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
#38Re: Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
#39I 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)
#40I 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…
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.