I can see that we are getting a little influx of traffic from my Lifehacker comments and such, so I wanted to give visitors an idea of what Team Hack-a-Day is about, and encourage them to stop by our forum and chat room as well.
Our main focus is participating in Stanford University’s Folding@Home Project, which is a distributed computing application which allows Stanford researchers to utilize unused computer cycles to further their research into diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, etc. This is done by downloading the Folding@Home software package and installing it on your computer. It is an incredibly easy process, and I encourage any visitors that are not currently participating in the project to do so. A (somewhat dated) installation and configuration walk through can be found here.
For those of you wondering why or how we became organized around this project, you can read the full details here - for those of you who want the quick and dirty version, here goes. Several readers of the Hack-a-Day blog decided to start participating in Stanford’s Folding@Home project, and one skilled gentleman that goes by the name BillytheImpaler put together a great how-to guide to help others get folding. Many people joined in, and once the community began to outgrow the Hack-a-Day comments section, a user by the name of PocketLnt started an online forum for the group. With an unofficial blessing from Eliot Phillips, the founder of Hack-a-Day, Team Hack-a-Day and our web site were born.
As time went on, the group grew in magnitude as did our Folding@Home contributions. Team Hack-a-Day is now ranked number #29 in the world for its contributions to Stanford’s Folding@Home project with a total of over 80,000,000 points.
Our forum is full of people from various backgrounds with two things in common: our love for technology, and our drive to help rid the world of these protein-related diseases any way we can. Take a look around, I guarantee you will find something of interest.
