Ask HN: What is something you achieved that you once thought was impossible? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is something you achieved that you once thought was impossible?

18 pointscryptozeus25 comments

For me it was SF half marathon. I had a broken knee year before that, I was able to do thisthanks to meditation, great coach and encouraging group of people.

View on HN

To quit smoking. I never thought i could do it after all those years and here i am 1 year smoke free

How did you do it ? External help ?

Not OP, but I would recommend Chantix/Champix. It's like quitting on easy mode.

Sorry for the really late reply but what helped me in the end was "The easy way" by Allen Carr

Congratulations!

Congratulations and, as someone who's allergic to cigarette smoke, thank you!

Grats, It took me a year of trying and patches to be able to rid my self of the bad habit. Haven't smoked in 5 years.

Not being poor anymore. Took years of work and patience. I remember in my teens, walking past a five star hotel or a fancy mall would give me anxiety, make me feel like someone would yell at me if I tried to go in. Now I routinly stay at such hotels. Good times!

Wrapping my head around a piece of legacy code that was written by two possibly three computer scientists, it solves an optimisation problem and reads like a math proof - that or explaining it to the marketing department.

I divorced a woman who didn't love me. Took me years but have never been happier. This is my life, i get one trip around the stars. Go.

Today I ran a 10K (10 Kms) in 50 minutes. This was my second 10K, and saw a 6 mins improvement , since the last one , around a month back. 50 mins is still an average time , but an year back I thought was certainly impossible. This has inspired me to keep training , and get to a half marathon someday. Impossible now , but surely achievable in future.

Thats is good time, you are just 3 miles away.

I think you're confusing kilometers and miles. A 10K is 6.2 miles while a half marathon is 13.1 miles.

I did a 10 month hike of the Eastern Continental Trail that runs from Quebec Canada to Key West, Florida. It took me 10 months and changed my life. I wasnt sure I could do it, so except for my brothers I didnt tell anyone. A couple of months into the hike, I realized I could do it and enjoyed it immensely.

That is a long hike ! I always wanted to do this kind of solo hike but afraid of the unknown danger i.e animals, people etc.

Danger is usually in the head :-). This is one of the lessons I learned on the trail.

If you've always wanted to do it, I would recommend doing longer and longer hikes and then just do the big one.

In my case I started with 2-3 day hikes, expanded to 10 day hikes and then just did the 10 month. A 10 month hike is essentially a series of 10 day hikes, because even in a 10 month hike after 10 days of hiking one just takes it easy or rests.

making a living out of sports betting. now trying to replace it with something else though.

This is possible?

Sure is! :)

How can I learn more about this?

Which platforms don't ban consistent winners?

wow is this sustainable ? I have recently started playing in amateur NFL fantasy ATS league. Its crazy how unpredictable things are.

Earlier this year, setting up a complete, virtual high-throughput academic lab for my field on a gaming laptop. If only I could be half my age again now ehehe.

creating a parser for a programming language in rust without reading any book.

A Rust parser? Is this for your own reviews or workflow? Or, is this intended to eventually handle transpiling and/or JIT Rust applications? Are you porting a CLI or graphics library to Rust, maybe -- or doing something to make working with Rust+WebAssembly less tedious?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com