
Ask HN: What accomplishment are you most proud of? - empressplay
This could be developing a piece of software, creating a website or webapp, writing a book, founding a company, obtaining a credential, or whatever else you&#x27;re most proud of.<p>Tell us about it! Inquiring minds want to know... =)
======
steven2012
My parents came from a third world country extremely poor. They struggled to
ensure that my siblings and I received a good education along with good
values. My own family is now in the top 1% of earners in the US, so our family
tree went from poor to well-off in one generation.

When my parents come to visit us, I know how proud they are and I'm proud that
I didn't squander the opportunity that they worked so hard to give us.

I'm not sure what my kids will do but I intend to instill the same values of
education, working harder than anyone else, and having good values into them.

~~~
nicksellen
Congratulations for your hard work and achievements :)

I presume you know other people with your background that haven't managed to
achieve this, do you have any insight into what the differences are?

Innate abilities? specific values? good luck? - I can imagine the general
differences, but the specifics are really interesting to me.

~~~
steven2012
Emphasis on education, but a lot of very hard work. Intelligence will get you
some of the way, but hard work is everything.

------
attheodo
I managed to tell my dad how good of a father he was to me and how much I
appreciated everything he gave me and taught me... one day before he passed
away. An honest deposit like this isn't as easy as it sounds.

~~~
daw___
I'm really happy you did. I hadn't had this chance with mine, suddenly died
from a stroke on his way to work. I really, really hope that he had the time,
in that very fraction of a second, to realize how great he was. And speaking
of "things you're proud of", I really wish time stopped for one more fraction
of a second that day to give him the chance to look back and feel proud of
what he did, one last time.

------
SuperPaintMan
I dropped out of this scene after burying myself in
technology/networks/programming for over 10 years. I didn't realize it, but my
one-pointedness on programming harmed almost every other aspect of my life.
Sure I could tell you how to do amazing things with a computer, but could I
successfully get your number? Not a chance in hell.

Instead I picked up a paintbrush, got a night job at a hotel and now I oil
paint for 5-6 hours out of my day. I'm exercising, talking to friends, being
social. And just like my terrible paintings, my other skills are improving.

I did have a close second though, a little project called Samsara that brought
zero-click downloading to iTunes. Once set up, getting new music is as easy as
plugging in your iDevice. It is written in Go, binds Last.FM, TPB and
Transmission together and runs a daemon. The gist of the program is that it
grabs your recommended music, scrapes TPB for it, Downloads it, Shovels it
into your iTunes library, and auto-syncs it with your devices over wifi. It's
been running for the past few months with no errors, and my music is fresh.
Even has an option to constrain the downloads to releases in the past two
years. InstaHipster.

I never got around to packaging it up as it was the last real project I was
working on. Just trying to find drive to work on it was a pain. If anyone
wants the code, send an email to zeropointer@icloud.com , If someone wants to
take the project off my hands and polish it up properly and release it. It's
all yours.

~~~
brador
You could link that to shazam somehow to get some real magic. Imagine, you
hear a song, tap a button, it records, recognizes, finds, downloads and files
it away into a new music playlist ready for listening at your leisure.

------
lambdaelite
My Ph.D. dissertation.

Although the sheepskin, title, and bound book are neat, the real prize is the
dissertation. After years of struggling with the unknown, I teased out from
nature a small secret that no one else in the world knew. Telling that story
through the dissertation (and defending it!) was a life-changing experience.

------
nir
Getting my first start up job. I couldn't afford to stay in college. Had zero
professional experience in anything related to software. Bought an HTML book
and got a photocopy of a JavaScript one, created a demo site on a floppy disk
(1998) and showed it at my job interview. Was hired for the lowest rung
position, worked my up to Web team lead.

I will always be grateful for my boss for taking a chance on me, which is why
all the bullshit, risk-averse "hiring process" discussions always get to me. I
try to give people the same break I got, and it's surprising how often it
works.

~~~
leesalminen
I had a similar experience in 2009. I'll never forget that one guy who took a
chance on me.

------
daeken
Overall: Getting out of my hometown. Almost everyone is born there, lives
there, and dies there. I wanted to get out from an early age, and I managed to
do it at 17, after dropping out of school to take a job.

Personal: Managing to keep my bipolar in check (more or less) and be happy. I
have a girlfriend who means the world to me; few things can match up to that.

Career: Discovering and disclosing the Onity hotel lock vulnerability. The
remediation of that bug may have legitimately saved lives; it's certainly
saved property.

~~~
tuna-piano
Honest question. I just read a bit about the Onity lock vulnerability, and it
states that the hack was released to the public before Onity had a chance to
fix it. If true, wouldn't that put people and property at risk?

~~~
daeken
Yes, it did put people and property at risk -- and also forced their hand. It
cost them an enormous amount of money to fix the bug, and if I had not gone
public with it and put substantial pressure on them, it's very likely that we
would be in a courtroom right now, as they attempt to keep it secret.

The bug existed for nearly 20 years, affecting over 4 million hotel rooms. I
know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they knew about this vulnerability at
least 10 years prior to my disclosure, having seen proof of that (in the form
of a diagnostics device for dumping the memory of the locks, produced by TESA,
the precursor to Onity). I've never seen proof that it was known before then,
but given the nature of the bug, I'd be amazed if this wasn't known when the
protocol was designed.

In short, this was the only way that I knew to guarantee that people would be
made aware of this bug. Three years later, I couldn't be more confident that I
made the right decision.

------
visakanv
Most proud of? I think the fact that I'm married to a person who loves me and
is happy to be with me.

Accomplishments I've enjoyed on hindsight– getting my band on a pretty
established local stage, doing standup comedy and getting a great response,
giving a lecture to a group of University students about ecommerce marketing
(I've never been to University myself, so that felt awesome), having blogposts
I've written get to the frontpage of HN and widely shared on Medium, etc.

But mostly– earning the respect of people I respect. It's an ongoing process,
of course, but probably the most fulfilling.

------
jbrooksuk
This is tough for me.

Career wise, I'm currently working on Cachet
([https://cachethq.io](https://cachethq.io)) and am blown away by being able
to provide software that thousands of people actively use.

Although it may seem silly, I stopped a small, young lad from being picked on
by some bigger lads. They were hitting him and calling him names. It hit home
because I remember being in the exact same situation and nobody helped me. I
got out of my car, told them to leave him alone and took him home in the car,
which I didn't think anything of until afterwards.

------
bane
Leaving a negative, zero-opportunity home environment with about $200 in my
pocket and putting myself and my wife through college, university and grad
school while working full-time in career progressing employment that's gotten
me involved in deeply impactful work.

After years of skirting close to poverty and receiving no help from either of
our families, and coming out more educated and wealthy than anybody in my
family history, through nothing but determination, hard work and a few
sprinkles of luck. I now own a great home, in a fantastic neighborhood, am
_almost_ debt free (house and all). But being able to also enjoy life at the
same time, to follow some of my passions, travel, enjoy food and art and wine.

I've now found myself in a position where I've done the career, and I'm
backing off a bit to relax, learn and enjoy pure simple work for a change.

The life I live in now has exceeded any possible life I ever expected to live
as a child. I'm incredibly proud of it.

------
walshemj
Well back a few years ago I got 1500 people a better pension.

In terms of my day job IT Fixing a 2 mill shortfall for BT and Finding a bug
that was costing total jobs 1/2 a mill a week.

------
ChuckMcM
I am most proud of my kids. They will be positively impacting the world's
issues long after my passing. And as a result of being a parent I've come to
appreciate that creating a good practice for solving a problem is much more
durable than solving the problem, because problems are never "solved" they
mutate like viruses and re-appear in a slightly different form which is
resistant to the previous solution.

------
lisper
I got over my fear of talking to homeless people by making a movie about them:
[http://graceofgodmovie.com/](http://graceofgodmovie.com/)

~~~
hugocaracoll
Great work! You should add some sort of social sharing widget.

~~~
lisper
Thanks! Yes, I should do that :-)

------
phil3k
I am proud of being married to my better half. Over the course of the last 2
years I learned that no job, money or any other success in career can make you
happier than the person you love.

------
qw3rtman
I'm a 15-year-old who wrote a fairly successful (800+ stars on GitHub!)
wrapper for Git.

~~~
ParadoxOryx
That's fantastic!

------
nish1500
I was working as an accounting intern, making $80 a month in a third-world
country. I taught myself how to code, dropped out of college, and make a good
6-figure living.

Before the age of 22, I earned my freedom, and discovered what I truly love in
life.

------
andersthue
That I after (too) many years of trying a lot of different theories, finally
found a way to manage my employees without me having to sleep poorly and be
unhappy.

I have told several others about the way I run my business now and everyone
reponded very positive (7 companies are running using the method) so of course
I am turning it into a business at www.timeblock.com

~~~
jtfairbank
Looks really interesting on the surface, but there are few actual details.
Guess I have to wait for the mailing list content.

A note: your email address signup form doesn't appear with AdBlock on. I had
to open an incognito tab to sign up. ([http://timeblock.com/sign-
up/](http://timeblock.com/sign-up/))

Finally, I'm digging the innovation coming out of the Nordic countries. Had
the pleasure of studying abroad in Sweden last year and took quite a few trips
to Copenhagen.

~~~
andersthue
Thanks, I hope it will continue to be interesting when you dig deaper, let me
know if you want to know more.

It is strange about the adblock!

If you are ever in Copenhagen, ping me and I'll offer you a cup of coffee!

------
cclements
I've been fortunate enough to enjoy success in the tech field, but by far the
accomplishment that I'm most proud of is that I was able to bring friends with
me. This isn't something that I ever would have envisioned starting out that I
would be this proud of.

I grew up in a very small town in the US with not a lot of opportunity and
lucked into getting hired by an information security firm in a bigger city
back when many companies had never heard of firewalls. I had close tech savvy
friends from back home that were struggling and was able to convince my
employer to hire them.

Since then, they've become very successful in their own right. Yes, they are
very smart and have worked hard, but knowing what I do now about the power of
networking and getting the right opportunity at the right time, I like to
think that how I was able to help them made a huge difference in how their
lives turned out.

~~~
darkmighty
That is really cool, I know some really good people that I hope I can help
some day too

------
cek
Being married 24 years with two college age kids who appear to be turning out
just fine.

------
freefouran
I'm most proud of my compiler for my programming language, it's still in the
works, but the fact that it does somewhat work and I made it from scratch
makes me happy :)

------
rokhayakebe
1) Endurance and the understanding that "this too shall pass" in both good and
bad situations.

2) Teaching myself programming (LAMP). Not because it was a major
accomplishment, but simply because it taught me everything else can be learnt,
from Economics to Philosophy to Arts to Biology to Quantum Mechanics.

------
bjelkeman-again
Getting over a hundred thousand wells mapped in government and NGO programs in
Africa, Asia and South America. And this is only the beginning. Soon to be
released as open data sets. [http://akvo.org/blog/over-one-million-surveys-
collected-with...](http://akvo.org/blog/over-one-million-surveys-collected-
with-akvo-flow/)

------
emil0r
For all time: That I still stretch myself, even when it's painful.

Right now: How far we have gotten with Realty Africa, a property crowdfunding
platform dedicated to Sub-Saharan Africa. The response we have gotten on the
ground has taken us completely by surprise and the potential market is
massive. (Shameless plug: we are raising the final money for our startup costs
at [http://igg.me/at/PCA](http://igg.me/at/PCA))

Software: reverie/CMS. Currently at the end of a rewrite, but I'm fairly
pleased with how far it's gotten. Writing a cache manager is a serious puzzle
though!
([https://github.com/emil0r/reverie](https://github.com/emil0r/reverie))

Family: My wife. She's amazing :)

------
sonabinu
Making sure my family (better half and three kids) got to do everything they
normally did while I was doing my MS program. Big shift from Finance to
Engineering and the learning on all fronts constantly, both family power and
computing power has been amazing!

------
suttree
I taught myself to code by post/mail.

I didn't make the smartest choices when I was young(er), but I turned that
around, found a career, ended up co-founding a company and making a cool game
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nethernet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nethernet))
then started a new company to help people figure out wtf they can do with
their lives ([https://www.somewhere.com](https://www.somewhere.com)).

Saying that though, the stupid robots I built, the side-projects and the
articles in Hack Circus mean just as much.

Of course, pride comes before a fall so, yeah, cheers.... ;)

------
krishna2
I got in to CMU for my Masters. Mustered up the guts to quit my job and do it
full time. Because I wasn't a citizen (or PR) back then, I didn't get any aid
and had no savings at all. I got myself five credit cards and paid my fees
with that and then managed to do balance transfers between them and maintained
a low interest rate (< 4%) and paid it all within 3 years.

I mentioned this as my "hack" in one of my YC applications and the few who
reviewed my app (prior to formal application) all said, "oh this is a known
trick. it has been used before". Anyways, I am still happy and proud that took
the plunge, did my masters and I am better for it.

------
manidoraisamy
When I was 13 years old, my dad had a heart attack and was admitted in
hospital for 2 months. My mom had to accompany him in the hospital and we did
not have an earning member in the family during that period. We also didn’t
have health insurance to cover the hospital expenses.

We owned a shop where me and my younger brother used to help my mom during
weekends. With that experience, we ran the shop and took care of the hospital
and living expenses. That's one accomplishment I am proud of till this day.

~~~
hugocaracoll
I think those are the real accomplishments.

------
wsc981
I see myself as a a producer and at the same time there's not anything I've
produced that I'm very proud of. But at the same time I feel in my future is
still my time to shine, so I keep working on improving myself.

With the above in mind, I guess I'm currently most proud of my decision last
year to become freelancer. I feel as a freelancer it will be easier for me to
reach my goals in producing some great software in the future.

------
cpt1138
Lately the thing I would honestly say I'm "proud" of is my ability to keep a
consistent A+ on the Qualsys SSL server test. I know that sounds weird, but
the effort is far outside my normal skillset. For things that come relatively
easy for me or things that I am motivated to do and work really hard at, I
don't ascribe any "pride" to that.

------
galfarragem
Most proud of? Having been truly happy during some moments of my life.

Happiness is the ultimate goal. To achieve it, all areas of your life must be
positively aligned. Even if luck might have an important role in some of these
"positive alignments", is improbable that luck is taking care of all of them.
So, it means that, at least, you must be doing some things really well.

~~~
hugocaracoll
That's an accomplishment reserved only for the enlightened ones. Maybe you're
onto something :)

------
ashokgelal
Made LightPaper, Octohub, and SpyGlass apps [1]; all side projects. Some of
these even made to the front page of HN. Also, first one from my family from a
third world country to go to college and get a degree (in Computer Science).

[1]: [http://www.ashokgelal.com](http://www.ashokgelal.com)

------
allard
Swam upstream so a few kids had a connection from their Pacific island-nation.
Two would be in this 100 —
[http://www.articulab.justinecassell.com/projects/jrsummit/in...](http://www.articulab.justinecassell.com/projects/jrsummit/index.html).

------
porter
When my grandfather's caretaker embezzled multiple 6 figures from his estate
and his kids mismanaged it...I stepped in, took over, and fixed everything.
Knowing how thankful and proud my grandfather was made the feeling of success
and accomplishment so much more visceral than anything else I've done.

------
codecurve
Either being 21 years old with a degree and a company or becoming a proficient
musician as a self taught guitarist.

------
kenrick95
One of them is having created a game, submitted to HN, received positive
feedback and stars at the repo :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8886897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8886897)

~~~
smtddr
wow, is the CPU perfect? I cannot beat it. I keep ending up in a situation
where the AI can beat me on its next turn in 2 different ways so I can't block
both.

~~~
bencoder
Try playing columns 4,2,3,4,6,2,3 - seems to play always the same up to here
but then sometimes plays different, but it's trivial to win after this state -
the AI seems to "give up"

~~~
kenrick95
It's not perfect. Yeah, I actually don't know why the AI seems to "give up"
randomly.

------
mahouse
[http://www.wowhead.com/achievement=7520](http://www.wowhead.com/achievement=7520)

:-)

------
nodelessness
Making a wordpress plugin that got 120k downloads. Someone deploying it as a
software service offering. Felt good.

------
giis
linux tool that i wrote without adequate knowledge of file-system and internet
connection. Later Receiving FOSS awards and featuring in Linux
magazine(Jun-2008 edition)
[http://www.giis.co.in/LFY.png](http://www.giis.co.in/LFY.png)

------
xasos
The fact that I have failed so many times, but thankfully live in the US,
where opportunities are abundant.

------
rikkus
Living with dignity.

