How to Think Like a Medieval Monk (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/how-think-medieval-monk <comment><USER2> I work with about a dozen Cistercian monks at a school run by Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey[1]. I started here 10 years ago after working 22 years as a software developer, and it's been the best job I've ever had. I manage the IT and I teach computer science and theology.

The things discussed in this article are still a part of the modern Cistercian life. In fact, the crests for the abbey and school feature the word "mors", which is Latin for death. However, there is much more to their lives than these meditations, especially since the monks of this community work as educators either at our prep school or at the University of Dallas.

[1] [http://www.cistercian.org/](http://www.cistercian.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish that meditative practices like this were more common in modern-day Western Christianity! You can still see a lot of this type of contemplation in Eastern Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, but not so much in Western Catholicism.

Also, I disagree with the writer that practices like this tend to "distance" yourself from death. I think that ascetics (Christian or not) are extremely, extremely aware of death in a way that average people are not. And I think that to these people, it's not some "immortality standard" which is just a checklist of rules, but a complete and all-consuming lifestyle that gravitates towards a single principle.

<comment><USER4> Prayer is similar in many ways.

Even the poses associated with prayer, hands pressed in front of the heart center, are quite common in physical meditative practices.

There are codified names in yoga for all of the poses in the islamic prayer ritual as well (tadasana (mountain pose) and balasana (child's pose)).

These are particular orientations of the body known to the ancients to align the mind towards meditation. It's not an accident. Nor is the fasting requirements common to various traditions, which are meant to quiet the gut, and thereby the mind, making meditation much easier.

Even group singing/chanting can be considered meditative. Many monk traditions of course incorporate this as a formal meditation.

So it's not too far off. Modern life obscures the original intent of course, but the meditative elements are there for any adherents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It always amuses me to see articles which talk of monasticism as something of the distant past. These traditions are alive and well. Also, a lot of these features exist not just in monastic practice but also in the practice of lay Christians of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

</comment><comment><USER6> Related to the Cistercians, there was a map posted on Reddit not so long ago detailing their expansion in Europe during the middle ages: [https://i.redd.it/bwirmwctdf501.jpg](https://i.redd.it/bwirmwctdf501.jpg) . The /r/europe discussion can be found here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/7lfx2l/cistercian_o...](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/7lfx2l/cistercian_order_exapnsion_in_europe_during/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I do a lot of this stuff as a yogi. Very interesting.

A while back - maybe ten years ago - I'd do a meditation where I imagined myself on my knees facing an executioners gun and allowing my thoughts to visit that moment. Quite illuminating.

It's long been a part of the Japanese samurai culture as well - to meditate on death every day.

</comment><comment><USER7> > meditate on death

Years ago I read a story. As I now recall it, a mother drew a picture of her child, each day, as they headed off to school. For she (correctly) knew, that was the last time she would ever see them alive. The child who returned in the afternoon, was invariably a different person than the one who had left that morning, never to be seen again.

One hears advice like "consider that this may be your last day". But it never has been, and for most isn't likely to be. And one-shot it-will-happen-someday processes aren't great for iterative improvement anyway. So I like the story's twist on this.

There will likely be someone tomorrow with your name on them. They will likely be a person very similar to you. Though given the vicissitudes of life, they may have different, even very different priorities than you now imagine. A disk crash, an injury, a phone call, an opportunity - things change. You can give forward - a good night's sleep, a new bit of insight or wisdom. And you can weigh their wellbeing in your decisions, as you do all those whom you variously care about. But for you, this day is it. Was it. You do not get another. _You_ will not see another. As usual, immortality lies in the lives you have touched, now including, some future people, who though they share your name, really aren't you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is the 'why' explained anywhere in this?

</comment><comment><USER9> Link seems to be down.

<comment><USER10> <!-- insert rant about the "challenges" of serving static(!) websites here -->

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16060256](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16060256)

<comment><USER11> Yeah although ipfs looks cool until we have a p2p based web you really need a cdn service for static sites that take a lot of hits. I wonder if Amazon is worried about ipfs because if that gets big there won't be a need for the S3 service.

<comment><USER10> _> you really need a cdn service for static sites that take a lot of hits_

No, you don't. HN traffic isn't that large. Even a Raspberry Pie should be sufficient (with good internet connection, though). See the above link.

You'll need a CDN for videos and maybe huge hi-res images, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR

1\. Meditate on death everyday when you wake up. Face the fact that you will die with help of a belief system that helps calm anxieties about death. Termed Terror Management Theory (TMT), it helps reduce existential anxieties. In the framework of the christian afterlife of resurrection and judgement, it also makes you more motivated to do the tasks that promise a better afterlife.

2\. Through ruminating on the suffering of others and explicitly realising emotions of empathy repeatedly would overtime make such reactions a second nature applied in real life.

3\. Attributing boredom (or rather distraction) to an external malevolent force helps better combat it.

4\. Performing 'living funerals', meditating on their life as if they might die now, before going to sleep to help gauge their life and maybe how happy they are with the direction.

<comment> saiya-jin Fear of dying is just so distant to me, I don't understand why people make such a great deal out of it. That doesn't mean I have some suicidal thoughts, in contrary I love my life. And I am an atheist/agnostic, so there is no magical fairy tale land after this life, nor does the wheel spin one more time. Just this time we have now, and that's it. And it's perfectly fine and correct way of things. Only exception I would understand is fear of leaving behind people who depend on you, especially children - but I don't have the impression that is what fuel most of the fear.

I believe in mankind, as long as I give a bit of positive energy/actions in it and leave things in a bit better shape that's enough. Anyway we achieve some form of immortality via our kids, have to work hard on this topic since I believe I can be a good parent and provide loving environment for them.

I guess it helps me being active in potentially dangerous sports and activities (climbing, alpinism, paragliding, diving, ski touring etc) where you are facing your built-in fear of death on very regular basis, and being successful in it lies in great part in constantly overcoming that fear in smart ways. Of course I take great care in doing stuff as safely as possible, within unavoidable amount of risk. But if you are 100% safe and have really everything under control, there is simply no adventure.

When I compare to my fiancee who is hardcore catholic and should logically look forward to meeting her creator and master of it all, she is way more afraid. I presume emotions > rationality even long term.

<comment><USER13> Hey. I feel that I should say that a lot of your recent comments were dead. I read them and I couldn't see any obvious reason why. I vouched for a few and I hope that might make the HN system reconsider, but you might want to test any new posts in a private browser window for a while just to check that they're actually getting posted.

I feel that I should say to people who are downvoting this comment: You're using the downvote as a disagreement, rather than to filter the content you would like to see on Hacker News.

Content on Hacker News should be: relevant, considered, well-written. I don't see anything above that isn't any of those points. Just because you disagree with something, doesn't mean you should downvote it.

<comment><USER14> I don't think they are downvoting as a disagreement in this case. The answer seems self serving and less about fostering discussion about the information presented so much as self-aggrandizing.

It read, to me, like "I don't see why medieval monks cared about death since I don't." Then there was the dollop of "I am atheist/agnostic," which again didn't seem to be usefully on topic.

That isn't to say you shouldn't discuss these things, it is an interesting conversation to have... But look at where this comment was placed; on a summary of the article.

The whole thing just felt like something that deserved a place on Reddit's "IamVerySmart" subreddit rather than on Hackernews.

<comment><USER13> > It read, to me, like "I don't see why medieval monks cared about death since > I don't."

I didn't see anything self-aggrandizing in what was written, merely someone describing how they personally related to both the comment and the article. I can't see a reason why it wasn't relevant since the post above it is basically the same sort of thing, just with different conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> TL;DR imagining yourself dying every day, meditating on it, will change your brain in a way that will make you a better person. This technique is about one thousand years old.

<comment><USER16> Death contemplation can be found in the buddhist scriptures, dating as far back as 2500 years ago. So a similar technique is in fact far older.

<comment><USER17> I imagine any human or protohuman, a hundred thousand years before history, sitting before a fire in the wilderness, contemplating death. It's 'progress' that lets us avoid having our mortality rubbed in our faces daily.

I look at the care with which humans were once buried and recognize how far we've removed ourselves from the essential.</comment></comment></comment>


You get teleportd, we get teleportd, everybody gets teleportd - <AUTHOR> http://teleportd.co/

<comment><USER2> name is confusing. *d is usually reserved for deamons, this is some app.

<comment><AUTHOR> nah man, no deamons :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Fantasy Quantum Physics in the app

<comment><AUTHOR> you got close buddy :D</comment></comment>


Show HN - <AUTHOR> http://tonecheck.com/ Hi, i was wondering what the HN community thinks of this email tone check application? Do you think this can be done better with open-source?<p>Disclaimer: I am neither a founder or an employee at the company. Just someone who had a similar idea. <comment><USER2> 1\. If you can, consider changing the title to "Show HN: [DESCRIPTION]"

2\. It's an awesome idea and I installed it for Gmail, but I feel it doesn't do a particularly good job at this stage (unless of course one introduces direct offenses using words like moron, idiot, etc).

I'll give you one crude example, where the software miserably failed to detect potentially upsetting language. It's intentionally over the top.

"That's not what I said at all. You guys don't understand what I'm saying. I wish I had smarter coworkers. Your mothers were clearly too busy sleeping around with large animals, instead of teaching you how to listen. I'll talk with your manager about this, because you clearly don't get it. Fuck this."

It would be an incredible product if it could catch much more subtle issues than that.

For example: "Did you even bother reading my email?" should be red flagged, so that it can be corrected to something like "Did you have a chance to read my email yet?" or "I wasn't very clear in my previous email. Allow me to explain further."

3\. This would be an amazing tool for any textbox on the web (via browser extension). Its use would certainly be encouraged here on HN for commenters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the detailed feedback. 1\. Oops too late to edit it now. 2\. Hmm that level subtlety will take time to evolve i guess. My understanding(from the api results) has been that they use an elaborate model. 3.Cool idea, never thought of that. They do have an api and i think they can persuaded to give a free developer account for HN. Where can i propose this as a feature? Or perhaps i can learn arc and create a wrapper.Any idea where i can find the source for HN code?

<comment><USER2> Regarding point 3, I don't suggest that they make it HN specific. Rather, via browser extension, append that functionality to any textbox the user is writing in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very neat. I like the name quite a bit, and I like the idea. It's always good to have a reminder ;) Does it run client-side, or server side?

I'd appreciate a textarea version to test with, as a demo, before I either give you my Google Credentials or download an app.

</comment><comment><USER4> A very interesting product. Integration with Gmail seems to be working pretty well. I know I would use this, along with my friends / colleagues for both personal and business emails. It would be interesting to perhaps see a web app or mobile version where you could paste in the contents of an email or simply a browser plugin which checks all text entered into web pages, rather than just for emails. But I'm sure you've considered this and there are probably many reasons why you haven't (yet) gone down that route.

I suspect a lot of work has gone into making this a genuinely useful product, so congratulations on achieving that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting.

I'd like the ability to tone-check emails that have already been sent... As well as tone-check emails from other people.

Edit: lol Apparently I've already started using your brand name as a verb. Congrats!

<comment><USER5> I just sent my first email with it, and even though it appears to check in realtime, it hung up on some process where I had to click again to get my email to go through, canceling your check.

I dunno if you're just overloaded, but it's not a bright first try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lovely splash page.

The feature list _very much_ lacks a "supported languages" list.

I know that the USA is the world, except that, well, it isn't.

I like the pricing, btw. 10$ is an amount I'd be willing to pay for this (if you'd support Dutch).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with the original company/product(lymbix.com). I just have been following them for some time now. I am thinking of building a open-source approach with a different approach though..

<comment><USER7> Hello Aangie,

I'd love to hear about this open-source approach you are mentioning. Could you please email me at bcromlish AT gmail DOT com?

Thanks!</comment></comment>


How the NSA converts spoken words into searchable text - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/ <comment><USER2> I've worked on similar problemsss starting with Microsoft's speech SDK back in the 90's. This is more of a pain the the ass than it first appears to be. I was secretly excited that maybe NSA has cracked a difficult nut here. (NDA be damned, I'd like to see this in the commercial market)

While the whole spying thing is disconcerting, I wonder how much cool tech they have that could be put to commercial use. wondert if theres a path for a government agency such as NSA to share tech breakthroughs with the public sector. Nasa does this to some degree...

<comment><USER3> I thought that all NASA technology was open to the public... Isn't that how SpaceX started?

<comment><USER4> NSA, not NASA.

<comment><USER3> FYI: I was replying to this part of the comment: "Nasa does this to some degree..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I rather assumed the tech transfer for this went in the opposite direction: that a reason Google, and Microsoft, and Apple were developing, and providing for free, voice recognition on consumer devices was that they wanted to get the technology to a point where they could sell, or license, it to the NSA.

<comment><USER6> That's a very strange way of looking at it. Those companies would want to sell such a service or product to anybody and everybody, including the NSA. You might as well say that the reason Dole grows pineapples is that they want to sell those pineapples to the NSA.

<comment><USER7> You could use that analogy, but only if the NSA really really liked pineapples. They really really like spying on people and therefore like the technologies that allow them to do so. And they have a lot of money and power that would appeal to a company that might want to dabble in the gray areas of legality with regards to privacy.

You might argue that Facebook works to perfect facial recognition and identification technologies to sell them to the NSA, along with that nice full database of people and their pictures. That would make more sense than pineapples.

<comment><USER8> I think the pineapple thing could be a major insight. After Microsoft, the NSA's famous mission statement was to put a pineapple on every desk.

The DoD explicitly want to "deter war and provide security for our pineapples" and NASA infamously put a test pineapple into space in 1963, long before a test pilot.

Of course we must not forget the clearest endorsement of pineapple in American Life, in the most famous text of all, where Jefferson (himself secretly addicted to its juices) said "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Pineapples"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Followup article: [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/11/speech- recogni...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/11/speech-recognition- nsa-best-kept-secret/)

</comment><comment><USER10> There is an easy API for this now: [http://Clarify.io](http://Clarify.io)

We use it to allow our customers to search their calls and voicemail messages.

</comment><comment><USER11> I just assumed they had dragon naturally speaking running on a pentium and windows 95

<comment><USER12> The floating point bug prevented that project from succeeding.</comment></comment>


General Motors starts taking orders for its electric bicycle - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/general-motors-starts-taking-orders-for-its-electric-bicycle.html <comment><USER2> I can't help but feel as though they ignored the huge range of existing examples of electric bicycles and instead assumed they were entering a greenfields market.

They are positioned very poorly. It's an unattractive folding bike that doesn't fold and costs too much. People who buy that style of bike do it because it folds, which is also the reason why it compromises on tire size and aesthetics. Anyone wanting an e-bike in that price range has a lot of much more interesting and practical bikes to choose from.

<comment><USER3> The Uni Moke is a bike that GM should pay close attention to:

[https://urbandrivestyle.com/products/unimoke-urban-utlity- el...](https://urbandrivestyle.com/products/unimoke-urban-utlity-electric- bike)

<comment><USER4> I'm all for putting function before form but man is that bike ugly! It looks like something a bunch of first year mechanical engineering students slapped together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Chinese managed to achieve parity with 50cc mopeds in mass market mopeds, the plank now has to go to 150cc. Once 150cc is taken, the whole of South East Asia will fall for it.

China for example managed to switch to electric motorcycles long before gasoline motorcycles were banned in big cities. People chose electric moped over gas powered ones for their maintenance free nature, even when switch meant a downgrade.

More importantly, Chinese mopeds with smaller engines were borderline undrivable, and in that category, going electric was an actual upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are very few electric bikes or pedelecs that don't look awful.

Here's a great counter-example, though: [https://www.coboc.biz/en/products/one- soho/](https://www.coboc.biz/en/products/one-soho/)

<comment><USER7> Wow they're beautiful !

I also like (and own a) [https://www.vanmoof.com/en_us/](https://www.vanmoof.com/en_us/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> $3200 - $3800 for an electric bicycle?

That seems crazy expensive to me. Can someone in EMEA explain if it seems worth the cost?

<comment><USER9> I've paid that much for an ebike, but it's a high-end machine that will go 25 MPH and lasts forever if maintained properly. I expect GM to get creamed in the market here, this bike looks very cheap for that price range. (You _can_ buy ebikes that cost $10,000, if you have infinite money there's always someone who will take it.)

<comment><USER10> Just curious: when spending that amount of money is it specific materials/features you're looking for that the lower end bikes don't have or the reputation (quality/durability/other) that makes it worthwhile to you?

I knew a few people into old school (i.e. manual drive) bikes that would pay that much for competition-grade bikes made from state of the art materials to shave every last ounce off the bike's weight. Just trying to understand what it is about the e-bikes that makes this kind of pricing worth it to enthusiasts.

<comment><USER11> There are a few things that quickly drive up ebike prices.

1) Battery size. Look at JuicedBikes' CrossCurrent S vs CrossCurrent X. While the X does have a slightly different motor, the big difference is the battery going from 614Wh to 998Wh. That 384Wh improvement is $600. Yea, part of that is probably the 750 vs 650 watt motor, but given what battery packs often cost, I'd say most of it is the batteries. We're talking around 63% more range, but it costs you.

2) Components. Low-end (but still reasonable) ebikes tend to use Shimano Altus/Acera components which are what you'd find in a $500 Trek/Specialized/Fuji. Higher-end bikes often upgrade to Alivio/Sora/Deore components. Likewise, hydraulic brakes might be an upgraded component.

3) Mid-Drive vs hub motors. Cheaper ebikes often use hub motors in the rear wheel. They're often a bit easier to do and cheaper than mid-drive models. Mid-drive motors can be nice because the motor can take advantage of the gearing as you shift and seem to be a bit more efficient (better range for the battery size).

For example, a RadCity goes for $1,500 while the Yamaha CrossCore is $2,400. The Yamaha has Sora components rather than Altus, hydraulic brakes, a mid- drive motor, better range, better pedal sensing (the RadCity doesn't have a torque sensor), considerably lighter weight (43.5lbs vs 63lbs which is a huge difference). The non-electric part alone might be $300 of the difference.

Ultimately, what's the difference between a Honda Civic and an Acura ILX? The Acura is a third more expensive.

I don't want it to seem like I'm disparaging the RadCity. There are certainly cheap/crappy ebikes out there and I don't think Rad Power is making cheap/crappy bikes. There are definitely ebikes out there that come with really small batteries and a poor motors and some really low-end parts. Those aren't really worth looking at. However, I think the RadCity is a good example of the best bike at $1,500 and I think the Yamaha is a good example of a great, affordable mid-drive bike. You get better range, significantly lower weight, better pedal sensing, better breaks, better derailleur, better shifters, 3-year vs 1-year warranty, top torque of 70 newton meters vs 40nm from the motor, etc.

I think there are certainly upgrades that both cost money and can be worth the money. However, I think there are cheaper bikes that certainly have some good points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > With ride-hailing companies and similar businesses spreading, some industry > watchers wonder whether broad swaths of future generations will even > consider car ownership at all.

So, a future where most of the people with extractable value only use robot taxis and e-scooters.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm curious why there aren't more "nontraditional" transportation options somewhere between a full-size car and a bicycle. I'd love a small/efficient single-seat vehicle with temp-controlled cabin for under $5000.

<comment><USER14> The Renault Twizy fits your description more or less: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy).

<comment><USER13> Ah, very cool. Sadly, it's Europe only and I live in the US. Looking at related links, it seems all the best options are Europe only.

<comment><USER7> Except for the temp controlled cabin

> The Twizy may be winterized with winter tires and adding flexi side windows > to enclose the cabin. Heating would be provided by plugging in electric > blankets to keep the driver warm

The twizy is horrible for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is GM actually building these bikes or are they just slapping a label on an OEM product?

<comment><USER5> I will be super surprised if it's not the later. GM can't make toasters themselves these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It looks like a horrible bike if you have to actually pedal it, the wheels are tiny! You might as well get a moped or something instead of that, which would stick out like a sore thumb and be a good target for thieves. Also where do you lock it up if you have to? Or do you just fold it up and take it inside? For some reason it doesn't seem like it was made by a person who's ever ridden a bike.

<comment><USER9> Foldable ebikes have to have small wheels, so they can be carried easily when folded up. For a non-folding bike, I think they're just being dumb.

<comment><USER17> Smaller wheels are stronger and less likely to go out of true with abuse. That translates into fewer support issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This GM bike is hilariously over priced.

My city is swapped with these things, at half the price, with cheap and plentiful corner repair shops.

I was once shown a Chinese B2B site, with a dashboard mix-n-match for various e-bike configurations. $500-$1500/bike wholesale price range.

If someone knows of anything like this, please post the URL.

</comment><comment><USER19> Are there any specs on this? Seems expensive, unless the specs are amazing.</comment>


Ask HN: Angel Investment Pre-YC? - <AUTHOR>

I might have applied for YC for Summer 2011, and my team may have been approached by another angel investor.   Have any of you YC companies accepted investment before YC?  It seems like I'd need to incorporate, hire lawyers, etc before YC (assuming I'd be accepted).
Any advice would be appreciated on the best way to proceed, assuming YC participation this summer. <comment><USER2> Quite a few of the companies we've funded have already raised some money. It's not a problem if you raise money on a convertible note that YC's investment doesn't trigger. You'd certainly need to incorporate and get a lawyer. Whether it would be worth the cost and distraction depends on the amount being invested, and the terms.

<comment><AUTHOR> great to know.. and yes it's terribly distracting. thanks for the heads up!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle maternity leave for a critical member on a tiny team? - <AUTHOR>

If you have a small team, less than 10 people, and you have a critical member who needs to leave for over a month, how do you handle this? The laws protecting maternity leave seem to only apply to companies of greater than 50 people, but it seems morally wrong to deny someone this ability on a smaller team too. <comment><USER2> Well, anyone on your time could fall under a bus or experience a catastrophic medical emergency, so why not start with a general contingency plan for unavoidable absences? Maternity leave is a limited and more predictable absence, so if you have a plan to deal with the unexpected then accommodating maternity leave should be comapritively easy. Brainstorm with everyone for a few weeks, you don't have to mention right now that you're planning around someone's pregnancy unless everyone already knows, but make sure you're not putting your pregnant employee on the spot in a way that could be construed as discriminatory/hostile work environment, if some other member of the team started making disparaging comments about it.

You should have some sort of disaster preparedness plan in place anyway. There is such a thing as key person insurance but I think that's designed to address permanent loss of a team member and I have no idea about the economics. It probably wouldn't cover this situation but it seems like something to be aware of anyway.

It's nice that you are taking this issue seriously rather than waiting until the law says you have to do so.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was relatively recently involved in a similar situation: my wife's former employer said they will not offer her paid maternity leave of any length, despite them mentioning in that they would accommodate her when she was getting hired. After she used all her vacation days and sick days to take just barely 6 weeks (about half of what you really need to recover from childbirth with no complications), she started looking for a new job. Found one quickly, and with a nice salary increase too.

The moral of the story is that you should accommodate your team member in any way possible or this critical person will leave after their maternity leave for good. If they are so critical to your team that you feel you cannot lose them for a month (about 1/3 of what you should give them), then can you really afford to lose them shortly after they come back?

As for how to handle this in terms of salary: you should offer short term disability insurance to your employees that covers maternity leave. It's too late now, since you typically have to hold the policy for over a year before maternity leave is covered, but do this for the future. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this is a good (but hard) opportunity for building the rest of your team. You're finding a real vulnerability in your team's structure, and being proactive like you are is a good way of fixing it.

First, figure out exactly what makes this person so critical - it may seem obvious, but break it down into specific tasks and skills. Maybe get them to write down the things they do for each of these that took the most time to figure out. Second, evaluate who else on your team can pick up a specific skill or task, or who would best be able to grow into that particular role element (rollette?). Finally, spend some time and sweat encouraging the rest of the team to grow into these areas - make sure to show them you appreciate their taking on the challenge. If no-one can step up for a specific rollette, you may need to start recruiting.

Kudos, by the way, (as anigbrowl pointed out) for wanting to do the morally right thing. Good luck

<comment><USER4> (As a bonus, ask your departing teammate to take the opportunity to be away from work to NOT think about their current job. Get them to daydream about what they would love for their next step to be.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd ask this a slightly different way: how do you mitigate the risk of having a critical person on a small team? Maternity leave is just one way in which having a small 'bus number' ( [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BusNumber](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BusNumber) ) may smite you.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1 month mat leave? Leaving aside the fact that this seems really short, people often take 1 month holidays (I certainly have), i.e it seems a short enough time not to fill it, as a contractor will probably not be that productive in a month, and will cost you a lot. That said, a new mom coming back to work after just a month is probably not going to be firing on all cylinders just yet, so be patient :)

As for whether you should offer mat leave even if you don't have to - absolutely, it will leave a bad taste in your teams mouth if you don't, and will probably make anyone considering having children resign

</comment><comment><USER7> What you do is have them do proactive documentation, arrangements, etc. ahead of time, and then, as able, have them do a small amount of work from home that is most critical and irreplaceable. This shouldn't be more than 10 hours per week if you've planned for it.

The founders should be willing to take on the extra critical work if her minimal contribution during the period isn't enough. If this takes more than a small amount of their time or she will not be able to do anything (hospitalization, complications), then you should be hiring another person or a contractor for the role anyway.

</comment><comment><USER8> have you looked into finding a contractor for the work that needs done now. Also, your kidding yourself if you think someone with a new baby is going to pop right back into things with out missing a beat in a month.

<comment><USER9> ^this Managing a maternity leave is much different from the 'getting hit by a bus' scenario. if you have a key man risk and lose someone due to accident or resignation, you hire and deal with the pain of getting them up to speed. With maternity leaves, you're legally required to maintain that position for the person to come back to. Hiring a permanent staff isn't an option usually. Contractors are best bet, however for 1 month maternity leaves; it doesn't leave much time for the contractor to become proficient/worthy.

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't try pushing this person back into things right away. A start up is a big deal, and maybe even something you'll regret doing wrong. Missing time with your new born baby, that's something you'll really regret for a life time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > critical member on a tiny team?

Have you talked with her to get a sense of what she's thinking and what an ideal future work scenario might look like? Be sure to communicate her importance to the team.

Cover the salary on-leave, it buys tremendous goodwill. But be fully prepared in case she doesn't return from maternity leave. If you haven't been there yet, it's a life changer on a variety of levels.

If retention becomes an issue-- consider allowing her to work virtual office and/or shift to part-time for the next several months.

<comment><USER11> Parent made the important point (no pun intended): There's a non-trivial chance she won't return to work. Having a kid changes the perspectives of the new parents - going from "take" to "give" \- in ways that can't be undone.

Don't make the paid leave contingent on her returning, or you'll have negative feelings about her participation and possibly about her peers on the team. Mentally, call it a severance package, even if she intends to return. Let her and the money go, and focus on overall contingency plans, as mentioned by others.</comment></comment>


Simplifying Parallel Applications for C++: An Example using RaftLib (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cat-dev-urandom/simplifying-parallel-applications-for-c-an-example-parallel-bzip2-using-raftlib-with-performance-f69cc8f7f962#.ax1lzrq1n <comment><USER2> Great presentation of the problem, code to solve it, and performance analysis. A super enjoyable, not-lengthy-at-all read! Certainly makes me more interested in RaftLib (even though I don't do a lot of C++ programming!).

</comment><comment><USER3> So why would I want to use a relatively unknown library still in alpha instead of Intel TBB, which also supports dataflow graphs?

<comment><USER4> > So why would I want to use a relatively unknown library still in alpha > instead of Intel TBB, which also supports dataflow graphs?

Not you specifically because you probably don't run applications on super computers with millions or even just hundreds of processors, but for those interested in scaling above multi threaded programs with Intel _Thread_ ing Building Blocks, it could be an interesting library.

<comment><USER5> Hi! I'm the primary author and maintainer of the library. Thanks for the interjection. The intended application for RaftLib is to make something that will scale, just as you mention. I wrote this post a long time ago when I was just trying to get people interested in using it. It's a simple example that shows you can take many lines of standard parallel code, and write a much easier to read (smaller) version in a very short time that performs just as well or better than the manually managed parallel code.

A long time ago I was a biologist, then bioinformaticist. I wrote some code that would scale to a single node, and to a few dozen cores. In doing so, I realized how much I hated writing the same boilerplate code over and over again. TBB, c++11 threads, OpenMP, and MPI all basically have the same level of boilerplate and gotchas. I wanted to make something that was relatively easy to use and easily integrable with C/C++ code. Go was the only thing that came close, but it was brand new at the time.

It occurred to me while working on the AutoPipe system as a grad student that I could do something even better than a simple coordination language and at the same time subsume the functionality of a lot of parallel libraries. With stream/data-flow processing, I can do the exact same things I can do with OpenMP and MPI, but I can do more. The state encapsulation allows a whole host of cool optimizations, like identifying bottlenecks and duplicating actors dynamically (there's a whole host of reasons we'd be limited in OpenMP, c++11 threads). You can also compile an encapsulated function to another hardware platform entirely, or use high level synthesis tools to go to an FPGA (I'll be going there again soon too with RaftLib). The only thing that has to be constant across optimizations, is the connectivity of the DAG. By maintaining a port interface, just like you would hardware components (see Arvind's work from MIT...he's famous enough I just have to say Arvind :), we can compose really complicated applications. The port interface, it turns out, is also perfect for distributed compute.

Awhile back, I also had the realization that iostreams were perfect for this paradigm. Once you get your head around the concept, it seems quite natural. If it doesn't take off as a library, oh well. I enjoy working on it, and using it so I'll likely keep developing it in my spare time.

In the interim, I'll get back to exascale hardware stuffs :).

<comment><USER6> If I read your charts right, your app's single core performance was much better than pbzip2's, which is quite surprising. I thought these apps were severely optimized... Any comment?

<comment><USER5> Yup, it was quite a bit better on the upper end especially. Looking at the snoops on the bus using PAPI RaftLib does a better job at keeping the cache lines from bouncing.

The benchmarked version also has a dynamically resizing FIFO which uses utilization of the queue itself to guide the sizing. This means that the FIFO can better adapt to dynamic behavior found in most applications run on top of an operating system (most all these days outside of HPC). Looking at load stalls, the RaftLib version has fewer, but not quite enough to account for the results.

If you look at the single worker thread case, then jump to two threads..you can see a fairly big jump. RaftLib by definition is a pipelined programming system. The read file and compress are done perfectly in parallel. The bzip2 code doesn't quite pull it off in a perfectly pipelined fashion. It's close, but not quite. This results in less overlap of execution and communication. If I'd run on Linux (thread affinity on OS X is well, fun last time I checked..if not impossible to do manually), I'd also add thread affinity to the list which most people don't bother to optimize. Hot caches and synergistic cache accesses are quite beneficial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good luck my friends. Many have fallen at this pillar of parallelism before you.

<comment><USER5> thanks!, and meh.

<comment><USER8> Hard problems can be very exciting to solve!

Never give up until you feel yourself that advancing is not going to work!

Looking forward to the beta and the full release of your lib! The C++ community needs this !</comment></comment></comment>


Textmate 2 and why you should never rewrite your code - <AUTHOR> http://kerr.io/textmate-2-and-why-you-shouldnt-rewrite-your-code/

<comment><USER2> Wow, how long did it take to write this article, given the news of Textmate 2 going open source is only hours old? If I was cynical, I'd be guessing that the topical headline was a fairly shameless attempt to gain attention from website aggregators.

On the subject of rewrites, with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to point out when it was a bad idea. But clearly it doesn't always have to be that way. After all, it never hurt Microsoft on occasion, and Apple.

As almost always, context is key.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any examples of Microsoft throwing away their codebase and starting fresh? I believe that is what Apple did with the OS9 to OSX transition. I can't think of too many examples where starting from scratch worked out though.

<comment><USER4> Windows NT? The Windows 95-98-Me series' kernel was thrown in the bin, replaced by the NT kernel when they released Windows XP.

<comment><USER5> NT was created in parallel, and run in parallel for a long time. Eventually the benefits of NT outweighed the 9x kernel, and computers were fast enough that the extra overhead was acceptable. 9x was EOLed and XP went with the NT kernel.

They were two different products that ended up converging enough that sharing code made sense.

<comment><USER6> If there is any lesson from OS X and Windows, I think you've hit on it, exactly. The way to replace isn't to stop one and start another – instead, you need to build in parallel and have a smart migration plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gotta call you out for a sensationalist headline and over-the-top one-sided article. People rewrite their codebases all the time, and quite often it's a very good idea.

<comment><USER8> In other words, this is a prototypical HN submission. Progblogging is so bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've submitted like 3 articles to hacker news, I'm clearly not a pro.

<comment><USER9> I think mattacular wrote about the run-of-the-mill programming blog that gets submitted to HN. They _feel_ more substantial than one of those spammy "125 free icon sets that'll turn you into a Design god", but they're mostly half- baked regurgitations of Software Engineering folk-wisdom, rehashed from a dozen other blogs which quote some testimony from a famous book.

No code, no maths, no algorithms, no statistics, no nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lessons I took away from the Mythical Man Month:

Version 1: Get to market, prove your product, make a big mess

Version 2: Make a ton of mistakes, screw everything up trying to clean up the mess but get sidetracked with all the great ideas you don't have time to implement

Version 3: Scale back, get smart, and build what version 2 should have been in less time

In my experience, most companies either get completely discouraged or worse yet just wreck themselves on version 2. The nice thing about iterative development is that the V1 - V3 spectrum happens fast and your failures are smaller.

</comment><comment><USER11> And yet Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape. Who would have thought Mozilla would become relevant again five years after Netscape died? I'm starting to think open source projects are a lot more hardy than startups because they can't run out of money.

<comment><USER12> It's possible that Firefox would be more mature or popular than it already is if they never did the rewrite.

<comment><USER11> 1\. There's no way to confirm or falsify that counterfactual.

2\. Even if we stipulate that Firefox would be more mature/popular without the rewrite, I think there are many decisions that might have had an equal or larger impact. For example, the design choices they made for their plugin architecture made it harder to compete when Chrome came along, and have had deep influence on their ability to do frequent unobtrusive releases. If you admit one counterfactual you must admit them all. Was the rewrite really the biggest turning point in their trajectory?

3\. If you'd offered the firefox creators the level of success it has today, they would take it in a heartbeat. Quibbling about levels of success is a luxury you can only afford after you have managed to not die. (<http://paulgraham.com/die.html>) That was what my comment was concerned with.

Conventional wisdom (<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>) makes the far stronger claim that rewrites kill; if we retreat to arguing levels of success I will happily declare victory and go home :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> I prefer an alternative interpretation: if rewriting your code is an existential risk, you weren't writing it right in the first place.

Startups need to value flexibility. The longer they stay flexible -- even in the presence of growth -- the higher their valuations get. So the conclusion seems inescapable: find ways to make rewrites utterly banal. This may seem hard, but I think it's possible. Part of the answer might be replacing compatibility concerns with automated tests to a far more comprehensive level: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596>.

One benefit of Google's NIH syndrome that I think people don't focus on enough: because they built the entire stack from scratch they had no backwards compatibility overheads in the early days. (Of course this is no longer true.)

<comment><USER14> Agree. I work for a highly successful startup that has gone through several major rewrites on subcomponents and we're fine. Rewrites are not in and of themselves a universal evil - but writing shitty code is.

<comment><USER15> Sounds more like a large refactoring than a rewrite. Or at the least you already has a service-oriented architecture with a well-defined interface that _allowed_ the rewrite to be sane.

My rule of thumb has always been to break things down into the smallest discrete tasks possible. If you stay on top of your architecture this almost never turns into a total rewrite, but sometimes there is no choice but to get your hands really dirty in a major refactoring. In these cases it's critical that each escalation is well-justified and not just trying to capture more "low-hanging fruit" that the dev team is brainstorming in high-level discussions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the idea he's trying to convey is that rewrites are a bad idea IF you already have a nice clean, simple product that works, with a large code base. I've been on projects where the entire code base was essentially trashed, except for some specific reference materials, but the code was terrible, and that was actually a pleasant experience.

</comment><comment><USER17> Except that TM2 is vastly superior in almost every way to the original, it might be 'too late' but it is a great editor.

Perhaps TM2 was possible as a series of small changes, maybe it wasn't. But I think we should be grateful for the time spent on TM2, and that it is now open source so we can learn from it, and maybe even make it even better.

<comment><USER18> Maybe the real lesson here is, don't get in technical debt. Do it right from the start.

<comment><USER19> If only it were that simple. The problem is that you don't know what the 'right way' is until you've done it once and discovered all of your the mistakes and pitfalls.

The temptation then becomes to start over and do it right after having learned your lesson. The problem with that is that often, in addition to taking to long too start over, you just end up making a whole new set of mistakes.

<comment><USER20> > The problem is that you don't know what the 'right way' is until you've done > it once and discovered all of your the mistakes and pitfalls.

Isn't that what experience is? (As opposed to talent.)

<comment><USER21> But experience can't always prevent mistakes and pitfalls because you can't always predict the future. This is especially prevalent in the land of startups where you can think the most important thing is X, you build a bunch of stuff for it, then 3 months later the most important thing is Y, then a 3 months later the most important thing is Z, and all of the sudden you have a bunch of technical debt.

Even if you could build X, Y, and Z "right the first time" those 3 month transitions may become 6 month transitions, and now you're out of business. (to be clear, those numbers are made up as an example)

There are obviously best practices to be followed so you don't have big screwups or an unneededly bloated system, but sometimes these problems can't be prevented because you can't always predict the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> T-R Are there really no instances of rewrites succeeding? Are we sure that projects that failed doing rewrites wouldn't have failed more painfully if they'd continued dealing with the cruft of the old codebase?

It's possible the problem is more in how these projects went about their rewrites, than just the fact that they did. What was the scope of the rewrite - did they simultaneously re-architect, redesign the UI, and try to implement all their hoped-for features (second-system effect)? Did they try to re-use old modules (temporarily or permanently - did they not reuse enough, or did they invest too much time making old code compatible)? Did the entire team immediately switch over to working on the rewrite, or did it get too few resources?

It might be worth investigating how a rewrite could possibly be done successfully, instead of assuming that the only option is to slowly refactor.

<comment><USER22> > Are there really no instances of rewrites succeeding?

The most famous instance of a successful rewrite was IBM's transition to OS/360 [1] in the 1960s, which was not just a complete rewrite but a completely new system to replace all the previous ones. (The "360" comes from the number of degrees in a full turn.)

Who spearheaded this huge effort? A certain Frederick P. Brooks, who used his experience with the project to write _The Mythical Man Month_, which coined the term "second-system effect" [3].

Of course, while the 360 project was _ultimately_ successful, they made all the now-familiar mistakes that Brooks documented in his book -- it was an extremely expensive and time-consuming project that was only possible thanks to IBM's enormous resources and strong leadership.

\---

[1] [http://www-01.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/pdf/360Revolution_...](http://www-01.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/pdf/360Revolution_0406.pdf)

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Netscape rewrite became Firefox.

<comment><USER24> Which still killed the Netscape brand and the sluggishness of that rewrite contributed to IE becoming dominant.

<comment><USER15> Yes but who are we to say that the Netscape 4 codebase was refactorable? Maybe they would have lost momentum and simply died with nothing to show for it at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was involved in a complete project rewrite, it was mostly a success but it took a long, long time. The biggest issue is you have a clean slate but a legacy code base that you still need to support, bug fix and frequently improve. Big time sink right there.

</comment><comment><USER26> > _Look at it as a living organism that can perhaps be healed, and can > evolve._

What life we can see now is only survivors and most of gene line actually failed.

</comment><comment><USER27> Grub2 is a complete re-write

</comment><comment><USER28> It's scary to me that someone thinks it's ok to clone a website so precisely. This is an _identical_ clone of the svbtle style.

<comment><USER29> It's a wordpress plugin: <https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle></comment></comment>


Verizon agrees to refund customers $90 million for wrongful data charges - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/03/verizon-agrees-to-refund-customers-90-million-for-wrongful-data/ <comment><USER2> In California, if a landlord tries to withhold the deposit illegally, they're liable for 3x the amount. I wish there was a similar penalty for monthly bills like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty impressive. David Pogue has been beating this drum for a while, too; he should get some credit for calling attention to the issue.

</comment><comment><USER4> On a related note: All of you on AT&T plans, be on the lookout for unjustified charges on text messaging plans. I had at least two cases in which I was charged an extra $0.30 for text messages 198, 199, and 200 of a 200 text messaging plan.

I'm not sure how to explain this bug--or theft? Perhaps their famous "AT&T Free Msg's" (promoting services, for example) get counted once you pass your limit? Either way, this is wrong. And I know they are wrong because I was redeemed $0.30. I then asked them to check my previous bills because I know there was at least one more case. The service rep said I had to do that myself. The cost of doing that would exceed $0.30 very easily, so I told the guy to forget it and never did check (I also then switched to Verizon).

Anyone have a good place where I can share this story? I'm afraid others may be getting charged unfairly too. I can't imagine this happening exclusively with my account, especially if it's a bug.

</comment><comment><USER5> $2 to $6. Wow I am taking that paycheck to the bank! Everytime I got one ofthose charges I would call and get it removed.</comment>


Is it worth the time? - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/1205/

<comment><USER2> Some of these numbers are amazing. Perhaps I should spend some time improving my current time-tracking-and-invoicing system. Or pay Freckle. Certainly this chart is food for thought for anyone selling "productivity" software, whether it's a SaaS product for freelancers or an internal tool at a big business. And consider that if your tool is used by _n_ people, you can spend _n_ times as long building it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope he makes this into a small poster. I find myself making this calculation often, since as a programmer I want to script repetitive tasks, but only if it makes sense. Wouldn't mind a non-cartoon version of this either.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code? - <AUTHOR> I have been having this problem lately. When I close my eyes and try to sleep my mind wanders and soon enough I am thinking about code, programming mentally. And I wake in the middle of the night and I am still mentally coding in a semi hypnotic state. I have slight OCD if that matters. Does any one feel the same? It is as if my mind never turns off. <comment><USER4> I've been doing this for 30 years. Why? Because I work in such a way to make it happen. What you call a problem, I embrace as a gift.

Of all the things I've discussed here at Hacker News over the years, this is probably the #1 subject. Most programmers have the opposite problem of you: they have trouble turning their minds _on_.

I always turn my computer off several hours before bed. The last thing I do every night is review hard copies of code with a red marker. Many nights I dream of my project/code. Sometimes I even jump up in the middle of the night and go to my computer, write down my thoughts, or lately, voice record them.

Sometimes I am incredibly grateful for the "gift" I've received from "outside myself" in the middle of the night. Other times I'm annoyed. For every cool insight, there are many false positives: What was I thinking? But the positives far outweigh the negatives.

I don't know why this works, but I can't imagine accomplishing all I do without it. Many programmers struggle for years to turn this "mind CRON" on. You already have the gift. I suggest you find a way to embrace it and turn your lemons into lemonade. You don't have a problem; you have a gift. Make it count!

My original HN post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275)

Also #49 here: [http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf](http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf)

<comment><USER5> A lot of programmers I respect like to work on printed out code, and it's something I enjoy as well. Furthermore I'd love if we could work completely offline, with pen and paper.

<comment><USER6> > Furthermore I'd love if we could work completely offline, with pen and > paper.

Why is that? I loathe writing code on paper, seems like it'd be a serious regression.

<comment><USER7> Really?

I have the exact opposite view. I love writing it my code on paper. It makes me feel like the creative part of the equation while I leave the 'mechanical' computation to the dumb machine. Debugging and understanding difficult code samples is easier too.

I once read that Knuth(?) never used a computer and wrote everything on paper for his sectetary to type.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yep. Not so much the act of coding but weird abstract concepts around code. To the point where once when I was working with Chrome and Firefox extensions and trying to get notifications to work just right, I woke up from deep sleep, and in a daze started shaking my wife saying that the notification were attacking us because I had made an error in a loop (she related this to me the next morning. I couldn't remember it :D ).

<comment><USER9> This reminded me of a dream I used to have of getting into the car, opening up the Chrome developer tools, and using Javascript to drive.

<comment><USER7> > This reminded me of a dream I used to have of getting into the car, opening > up the Chrome developer tools, and using Javascript to drive.

An aside.

Reading some of the hilarious comments here I am inclined to think they could be compiled into a bestselling nerd comic

<comment><USER10> Indeed. Or just sci-fi comedy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I go to sleep after having worked on something complex and didn't fully resolve it, I'll almost always dream about trying to solve it. Sometimes I see code, sometimes it's more abstract, but it's always disconcerting. My wife says I mumble things like, "I'm pretty sure 'also' is a keyword unless I'm losing my mind and need to check the documentation"

<comment><USER12> The worst cases for me are with math-heavy problems. I'll see code mixed with shapes and graphs. The mornings suck, because you wake up knowing you were only half-asleep.

That's why I like to play some easy games or read a book 1hr before going to sleep. Sometimes they induce creativity though and are counter-active.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I started out in system administration and network engineering before switching to programming. I once had a dream that my cigarette needed an IP address before I could smoke it.

<comment><USER14> I had a similar dream about my pants once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is not unusual. The brain processes and organizes information when we sleep, just that we don't all usually remember this happening.

I find that I tend to think about things in my sleep on three occasions:

1 when the activity is new

2.when I am sufficiently stimulated and excited by the material.

3\. when I am worried or upset

This 'dream state'used to occur to me in the past when I actively played chess, when I was in school studying for exams and nowadays when I'm struggling with (and mastering) a new concept or paradigm in programming. Recognizing it for what it is - a process of deep archiving and reorganization, I have come to embrace it and even be happy when it occurs, since material I have processed in this way terms to be deeply ingrained in my memory for longer.

</comment><comment><USER15> I had this happen a lot when I first started out but not so much anymore for some reason.

One thing I remember that has always amused me is how I would dream about this amazing code. It was so amazing that I would simply have to wake up so I could write it down. But, the few times I could actually wake myself up, as soon as I thought about it (before it quickly faded away) I said to myself, "WTF was that? There's no way that would work!"

</comment><comment><USER16> This is true for everything in life. Do some thing alot, and your mind will start processing it while you are asleep.

I used to have such dreams about EverQuest. So I eventually realized I should play less :P

It's called the Tetris Effect, read: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect)

<comment><USER17> Yup, I had the same for Jedi Knight, Counter-Strike, Left4Dead. With Left4Dead I had it particularly bad, when I would walk to school in the morning - <USER2> half asleep from playing until late the night before, I would "hallucinate" the sounds of the game.

Even though I stopped gaming somewhere during university, I still have dreams about those games every now and then.

OT: Just like other's in this thread, I have dreamed about code as well, with a similar frustration to wake up knowing the beautiful solution was all imaginary :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yes, but not in the literal sense for me. I never see any text or code but rather some abstract version of the problem I'm trying to solve. I dislike it to be honest, it makes me feel like I'm not getting any rest, especially when I wake up in the middle of the night from a code dream only to continue in that loop while I'm half awake.

One time I went to sleep after starting a take home code test for a job interview; I woke up a few hours later having some intense dreams about it and ended up knowing exactly what to do. I finished it at 4am. I didn't end up getting the job, but they said during the interview they really liked the code.

<comment><USER19> Would you mind sharing why they (said they) ultimately chose not to extend an offer? Just curious about an anecdote from a hiring/recruiting perspective.

<comment><USER18> They never gave a reason. That said, I felt like the interview with my potential team mates (one of the 3 interview rounds that day) really did not go as well as I would have liked. I could have done better describing my current work and projects. We did some whiteboard design question and ran out of time, looking back I could have done a lot better on that had I put more thought into it. I'm not bitter or anything, it was not my best in person interview by a long shot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I was 14 in 1986 writing Atari ST stuff I had something come to me in a dream.

The ST had a notoriously slow text output system. The display was a bitmap and there was no hardware acceleration. Somebody called Darek Mihocka came out with 'Quick ST' which made the text display quicker than stock. As a newbie I wanted to beat this, so I learned 68000 assembly and did the usual optimisation - unrolling loops, precomputing bitmaps etc. I got faster than Quick ST but then he had an update which nearly doubled my speed.

I did everything I could to work out what he'd done, including looking at the Motorola reference manuals, nothing came up. I was going crazy. Bear in mind these were the days when there was no middleware, it was you versus the hardware, and if they did it better it's because their code was better.

So I went to bed one night and the 'move.p' opcode came to mind. I woke up and read about it - turns out this opcode took a 16 bit number and split it into 2 8bit codes and placed them 2 bytes apart. This matched the ST interleaved bitmap perfectly - I doubled my speed and beat Darek.

So, yeah, a dream did actually improve my code. I do miss those days where decent code beat driver, middleware and other issues.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just two nights ago, my wife came to join me, which woke me into a half sleep. I immediately grabbed something on my nightstand that reminds me of her and thrust it into the air, then I started to try to explain (somewhat incomprehensibly, apparently) the unit tests that would run against her. That's not a euphemism and the waving the thing in the air, I think, made me believe that her unit tests would run first, so I could get back to sleep sooner.

Needless to say, she's still laughing at my antics!

<comment><USER22> Mock the wife

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Insanity is when you wake up screaming that your build failed, and then realise you weren't dreaming.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have this happen to me relatively often (about once a month). The best part about it is that I make meaningful connections and actually solve problems related to the code that I am envisioning, and I wake up and I am able to implement what I dream about.

This usually only happens the night after a long day working on very mentally challenging problems, it rarely happens after easy days.

</comment><comment><USER25> Usually when I'm learning a new programming language or technique, and just at the point where I'm starting to grok it but still having challenges, I'll dream that I'm programming in that language. Usually a day or two after that, I'll feel like I've finally acquired that skill. I remember this very clearly happening when I was about 22 and was playing around with Javascript and AJAX calls. It happened a couple other times after that, I think when learning Objective-C for iOS too, and maybe once again when learning how NSLayoutConstraints work.

</comment><comment><USER26> I try not to write code for about an hour or so before going to bed. I find that if I work on code, especially a complicated problem, I will dream about finding a beautiful solution (without actually seeing or remembering what I do). It's really annoying to wake up and realize it was all just a dream.

</comment><comment><USER27> I studied for an interview with Google late last year. I did a lot of algorithm and data structure exercises along with system design work. The study was intense for me, I spent about 3 hours a day working on problems in CLRS for about 5 weeks. I would dream of algorithms a few times a week and think about problems constantly.

Unfortunately I didn't get the job but it was really interesting to experience how my mind operated when a large chunk of my attention was consistently focused on complex topics.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, next time don't study.

I am convinced that Google interviews are rigged. I got on the phone with an "interviewer" and he sounded like someone strangled his pet in front of him.

I knew I wouldn't get past then because he didn't really seem at all interested in interviewing me.

I wasn't like Homebrew Qualified but I definitely wasn't Fizzbuzz Unqualified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In CS 101 I spent all night working on my final homework, walked into class, put the printed solution on the professor's desk, sat down in a desk right in front of his and fell asleep.

I dreamt about the homework problem, and realized I had made a mistake. I immediately woke up, grabbed the paper, and made the correction. The whole class burst into laughter, but the professor didn't seem disturbed. Later he told me something like that happens every few years (he's been teaching for 30).

</comment><comment><USER29> I have dreamed of code. There are times when it feels like I am patterning the dream space (each space has its own rules, plot, feel, etc).

When I was working with Kubernetes intensely, I was moving around abstract "lego blocks" representing concepts. The space was black, 3D, no gravity. (I remember someone coming into the space to visit and I told her I'm still working on it...)

There were times when I was trying to figure out something in the dream and a different mind-thread was hacking code that maps to the plot of the original mind-thread.

I have walked in dream spaces where I took a corner off the happy path and watched the world glitch for a moment and start procedurally generating.

There were dreams about startups, working in an office (I work remotely most of the time).

Lucidity and clarity varies. Sometimes it is very clear, the visuals and the coding concepts I am working with are sharp. Sometimes they are fuzzy. It is occasionally lucid (how aware I am that I am dreaming). That "semi-hypnotic" state seems like it is not high on the lucidity spectrum. That's pretty normal if you are coding in a semi-hypnotic state while coding during the day.

I usually meditate before falling asleep, try to offload things in my day's working memory. It's usually whatever I am binging on, whether it is coding, anime, or even martial arts or whatever. For example, there was a time when I binge watch My Little Ponies and saw the ponies cavorting in the phosphenes. I'm not surprise this happens with code.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yes, when I'm utterly engrossed in a problem, like when my routine is basically eat, sleep, work and repeat. I dream about it as well.

It isn't limited to code, when I was a kid I used to wake up dreaming of Tiberium Sun, and Red Alert 2. It's lately been code though.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you think the dreams are weird how about this. There was a period when I was was spending a lot of time writing code every day. And there were some nights where I'd fall asleep then partially wake up and look at the window to see light cast on the curtain in a way that would sometimes spell a message that helped me debug, figure out a problem, or discover a new technique. Or give me an idea for an operating system's logo...

<comment><AUTHOR> Are u bill?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Only pattern-based stuff.

I first noticed this with PCB layouts - I'd be moving parts and re- routing/prettifying manually for long straights and only 45deg corners.

Also refactoring code, particularly in an aesthetic way as if making the style consistent/readable before doing something with it - shortening lines, aligning data structure entries, whatever.

It happens if I play something like tetris before sleeping or while tired, too.

</comment><comment><USER33> Try reading fiction before bed.

I used to spend time thinking about code before sleep. The long term effects is the larger problem. Not giving your mind time to do something else will eventually lead to burn out.

Credits to Tim Ferris for this routine.

<comment><USER34> Ha, I've never ever been able to start reading a good fiction book before sleeping without either ending up finishing the book and not having slept at all or passing out from exhaustion in the middle of the night after I notice that I've reread the same line 3-4 times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I had a dream that I had racked up a huge amount of money at a bar. In response to my exorbitant tab, the barkeep told me that he would not be able to charge me any money for it if I ran Kubernetes in production.

</comment><comment><USER36> Yes, this is quite common.

Different types of code dreams are common too - code nightmares where you get caught in small, infinite loops or are unable to escape oscillation between a small set of bad operations

Or happy code dreams where you float above the system and observe high levels of interaction and execution, watching data flow like water, and execution happen rythmically like beats of music.

</comment><comment><USER37> I sometimes do. It is particularly satisfying when I debug (correctly!) the code in dream which I struggled to debug while awake.

<comment><USER38> Yep. My subconscious often gives me very interesting "left field" type problem solving/troubleshooting advice during my programming dreams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I never really dream of code, but I did have a funny dream of me writing something and trying to get girls to check out what I wrote. I was like, "hey ladies, check out this code"

<comment><USER40> I think that's # 5 in "Top 10 Worst Pickup Lines ever"... ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Yes, all the time. I was a military academy cadet and I train all the time in my mind, I dream 12-24 times a year that I have managed to get back in and do basic/etc. I was a TA and I prep/teach lessons in my mind, and I also slice and dice code in my mind all the time.

I never know which I am going to get but coding is the most pleasant of them, by far. The higher my stress, the more likely it's not fun.

The fact that my current job is to untangle legacy Java code and we actively oppose any "unnecessary" changes hurts me, because I can't not untangle it in my head, working or sleeping. Resting/playing is OK though. That's why it's important.

Of course, we don't have any unit tests, because how else could we employ 2 testers per coder? And we obviously don't have any time for that useless stuff.

</comment><comment><USER42> Only when I'm stuck on something.

I find myself working on it half asleep in my bed. It pretty much always results in finding the solution or at the very least a good lead.

</comment><comment><USER43> Yep, and it's not pleasant when you're lucid enough to know you're dreaming, but not lucid enough to be able to reason properly. It's just a general feeling of trying to solve something, without any payoff.

<comment><USER44> I've had several experiences of pointlessly struggling with a dream computer, or a more abstract sort of programming-flavoured dream puzzle.

That's where you want to get lucid enough to realise that struggling with the problem isn't a worthwhile pursuit now, and go do something fun instead :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I do. But it doesn't happen very often, and I don't hate it.

The clearest memory I have, is when I was 15, debugging some hacky PHP codes for days still unable to find a solution. I dreamed that piece of code and suddenly wake up with a fix, it was a pretty nice feeling.

Also an year ago I started learning Haskell, despite reading a lot of tutorials I wasn't able to understand what a monad is. One day I woke up and find myself understood the concept. I don't remember the content of the dream, but it was a sweet dream and I slept longer than usual.

I am not sure if I have OCD, but I like coding so dreaming code is not an issue for me.

</comment><comment><USER46> Not always, but when I'm immersed into a project long enough and I'm thinking about all its problems all day long, I dream of "solutions".

But this happens only in those periods where my day is basically 100% code.

</comment><comment><USER47> When I was learning Haskell, I had a coding dream with a twist.

In that dream, I wrote small programs, compiled and executed them. The twist was that the result of the execution was presented to me in the form of physical constructs, composed of square hollow section pipes welded together.

I would then walk around the structure, examine it, and wonder, why a particular part of the structure is welded to the whole structure diagonally, instead of a 90-degree angle. Must be a bug somewhere.

<comment><USER48> I had a somewhat similar dream where I had an epiphany that everything in the universe is controlled by code, which I had the privileges to edit for some reason. I remember typing some HTML (`<span style="color:red">` and `</span>`) to create these small physical blocks. Slapping the blocks on either side of any object would turn it red!

<comment><USER49> Span shouldn't be blocs! You are dreaming wrong! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Yeah. Most teens don't have dreams about code, but I do. I fall asleep thinking about some bug, and wake uo with a solution. Unfortunately, I sometimes forget it :P

</comment><comment><USER51> I have plenty of dreams about problems I'm working on. I usually end up dreaming of a way to solve them too.

Though I did have this one dream where I was able to open up a virtual console next to anyone I saw and could program them to do whatever I felt like. I could do this with just random objects too, not just people. That'd be an interesting game idea now that I think about it.

<comment><USER52> elseheartbreak dot com

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I used to dream in code all the time. It was when I was tackling a programming problem I was having trouble with. My mind would often solve it while I sleep; and I'd be able to solve the issue quickly in the morning.

It happens less these days. Either because I am more experienced or because development tools have improved; I no longer get stuck like I used.

</comment><comment><USER54> Same here (also diagnosed OCD), this might be more related to your sleep hygiene though. No screens before bed, no coffee after lunch, learn to meditate, etc. Turning off your brain is a difficult skill to learn, it certainly got harder once my dev career was serious.

Somewhat related: I dated a cellist who said she'd read music in her dreams.

</comment><comment><USER55> Yes, I call this "terminal brain". Issues that I want to fix, or things that I've been working on whirl in my head in an abstract 2d visual state - <USER3> of the colors I'm using in iTerm, and random words repeating over and over... vague imagery of tailing a log file... it feels like my mind is creating scenarios and trying to solve many things at the same time.

I think it's both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, some days I wake up and immediately know how to solve problems, or I'll think of new things to try. I've also had many nights where I come to understand concepts from 'exploring' the whirlpool of vagueness. Solidifying the abstraction helps a lot, I guess.

On the other hand, this phenomenon can be very distracting or distressing at times. I have a terrible memory of trying to have sex and all I could think about was Redis.

</comment><comment><USER56> I would have this dream that I could access the Lisp REPL that controlled my dream, but I would accidentally use the loop macro wrong and I'd be paralyzed in front of my computer for the rest of my dream, unable to kill the process.

Actually terrifying thinking about it again. Made me very wary of live programming XD

</comment><comment><USER57> I once got really ill and went into a high fever, the whole time in my head I was debugging myself with code, was very strange.

Other then that I never dream of code, but sometimes when I am half asleep in bed I start thinking about issues and playing out scenarios I could try to fix something, or implement a new feature.

<comment><USER58> I've had this happen once, and it was not a pleasant experience. (Try setting a breakpoint on your own brain sometime and see how much _you_ like it.) Kenneth Reitz, who wrote Python's requests library, went crazy[1] (his words) and had a similar experience, though his was psychosis-induced rather than fever-induced.

> The earth represented an "ideal" logical volume of data (life), and the > universe was the collective storage LUN. I was using Amazon's Dynamo > algorithm to replicate life, with eventual consistency, throughout the > universe by watering plants in the garden. Now, Amazon actually uses > Requests to perform all internal API control operations for AWS, effectively > making my code partially responsible for the operation of the internet > itself. See the theme? [...] I was very keen to have the doctors and my > family look up the Dynamo whitepaper, to prove the legitimacy of my quest.

1: [https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/mentalhealtherror-an- exc...](https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/mentalhealtherror-an-exception- occurred)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> It's your subconscious working on a problem...

One example would be scenario where you can't remember some word, and you decide you can't remember it and stop thinking about it, your brain continues to search for it in the background (subconsciously)... and then the word comes to you like an interrupt.

I had the same thing with studying for exams (I would dream of the lecture notes and when I wake up in the morning I can perfectly recall everything).

There was a study posted at HN where not completing a task at work, leaves your brain working on it even after you leave your office, only to have the solution pop up in the middle of the night.

All of this can be a result of a stress. You need to take a vacation and relax. Recharge your batteries or you'll be feeling drained really soon...

</comment><comment><USER60> I've had this problem before. I dream as a javascript runtime vm, compiling the code as it's thought of. Infinite recursion hurts, literally. Other than that, if I'm lucid of the dream I rarely solve problems, just repeating the same road blocks over and over.

</comment><comment><USER61> Why is it a problem? Are you getting enough rest/sleep? Do you have enough control over your day that you can rest when you need to? Are you effective in your work and personal life (controlling for OCD)?

If the answer to most of that is mostly yes, you're doing pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER62> Not code specifically, but I sometimes dream about humans in some form of "modular" sense. Like if their feelings would be contained in one class/part of a program, or their torso would be accessed via methods or something like that.

As someone else mentioned, it's likely the tetris effect. I had a similar feeling while playing the game "triple" town where you want to match three bears items next to each other, I kept seeing items and people in terms of "are they next to each other" while walking around (especially when a bit of alcohol was involved).

</comment><comment><USER63> Yep. I love it when that happens. Happens especially when writing complex code instead of just rattling off CRUD. The best time was when I worked for months on a Prolog project for uni, every day, all day with very complex concepts to crack. During the day when I went outside, my brain transformed everything in Prolog clauses; cars, roads, houses, bikes, people talking to me. And at night my dreams were in code as well. I now have it when doing embedded code or game code.

Edit: Come to think of it, this 'free shrooms' experience is reason enough to not do CRUD apps :)

</comment><comment><USER64> I have done this from time to time, when I was really stressed, and working too many hours.

Once my life went back to a sane pace, where I could enjoy some personal free time, the problem went away.

Now I have a baby and I dream of diapers.

</comment><comment><USER65> Last night I dreamt about having to work in a programming environment where objects appears horizontally and operations appeared vertically like a timeline. On second thought it was more of a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER66> This is normal, and gamers also experience it. It's only an issue if it's interfering with your sleep regularly. You'll find that it's most acute when you're deep in a problem or learning something completely new. If you find yourself in a "loop," get up and read a few pages from a book that you're not too excited about (not code related, history or a novel). The dreams should recede when you're under less cognitive load during the day, which should happen as you learn in your role.

</comment><comment><USER67> Programming in your sleep or in the shower or any other place away from the computer is awesome, because it's often where you'll achieve a breakthrough (even in your sleep)! As Rich Hickey would say, slowing down and stepping away from the computer forces you to think more deeply about a problem and explore it more. I view it as a good thing, but it usually only happens to me when I've been deep in a problem for a while, so it's an occasional thing.

</comment><comment><USER68> I can't read in my dreams. I'm able to dream that I'm reading but the whole understanding of what the text actually should transport isn't there.

</comment><comment><USER69> I don't. I had dreams about my workplace, but it never happened to me to dream myself at the desk writing on a keyboard. Funny, I'm on a computer up to 10 hrs a day. I always dream about people, and I'm never alone in my dreams. Even when I'm breathing with trouble at night, I have someone trying to save me. Curious, it makes me feel less "isolated" now that I'm thinking about it.

</comment><comment><USER70> Yeah, happens a lot if I go to sleep without enough down time after coding. My dreams have me going over code that is needed to perform some kind of dream action, like sitting, walking, or whatever else. I'll often get stuck in a loop and go over it again and again, trying to get the logic right all night long. My wife thinks it's hilarious because sometimes I'll talk in my sleep about it.

</comment><comment><USER71> Absolutely. It's hard to turn your mind off when you're thinking about something complex and rewarding. Some recent study I read said we sleep to forget, so maybe this is your mind's way of making sure you don't forget the progress you've made on whatever particular thing you're working on.

I've found that watching some boring TV or having a drink (alcohol) before bed helps.

</comment><comment><USER72> The first few years in my career when I'd code for a few hours non-stop then crash on the beanbag at my desk, I dreamt a lot of bug fixes, very few of which stuck in my mind after I woke up. It's basically the last thought I had before I went to sleep which affected my dreams all my life. If that last thought is code, then so is the content of the dream.

</comment><comment><USER73> In that state between sleeping and waking I am often debugging my inability to wake. It's not as though I'm sitting in front of a monitor, but the lines of code are my entire worldview and no matter what I change the alarm keeps going off. I guess if I were a better programmer I would dream that I was writing a program to extend the night...

</comment><comment><USER74> Sometimes when I'm stuck with a hard problem, I find the simple and obvious solution in a dream. This happens most often when the problem is algorithmic.

When I struggle with modeling problems, I often solve them in the trance-like state right before falling asleep. These solutions are much more elegant than what I would be capable of while being fully awake.

</comment><comment><USER75> Not uncommonly. The first instance I can remember was during an automata & formal languages class: I dreamt of cars pulling out of parking spaces and going back in, and on waking realized that it had to do with the pumping lemma for regular languages. Last night there was a coding dream, but I don't remember the details.

</comment><comment><USER76> Once during a bout of fever I dreamt I _was_ a running Pascal program. Believe me, it's no fun being a computer.

<comment><USER77> Thank god I'm not alone :p

Almost every time I have a fever, I end up dreaming about code or diagrams. Sometimes even live CSS coding. And yes, it's awful and you can't escape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Hell yeah, stresses me out too. It probably even gave me hypoglycemia a couple of times

When I was studying organic chemistry, I had some pretty cool dreams about aromatic molecules.

Bank finance class gave me an extremely revelatory nightmare about interest rates once.

Dreams about stuff you're learning are almost always constructive though. It's a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER79> Yes, but my dreams blend together code and the other people in my life in a bizarre manner which only makes sense inside the dream itself, but is otherwise ludicrous. It is as if I am trying to debug other people, which of course never works, and thus it inevitably turns into an anxiety dream.

</comment><comment><USER80> When I'm hitting my stress limit, I dream in code. It's usually a sign that I need to slow down.

</comment><comment><USER81> Sometimes, more so in my early-mid 20s, I would dream about code/architecture issues I was having, and bizarrely, wake up with the solution. It was a trip when I realized what had happened, so I started napping when I got stuck and it actually worked a decent amount of the time.

</comment><comment><USER82> When I first started to learn to program, in the very first week, I slept very little. Not because I was up late at night working but because I was so enticed and interested in what I had been learning that my brain refused to stop thinking with that mentality. So yes, I do.

</comment><comment><USER83> Sometimes if I've been doing a lot, also sometimes I have dreams where the dream is just code scrolling in front of my eyes. This second type of coding dream generally happens if I'm doing more than 10+ hours a day of a very verbose language.

</comment><comment><USER84> I have the same problem, with often abstract crazy problems involving myself as part of the equation. It could be writing a system that gives me the ability to sleep or close my eyes, but also real problems that I worked with earlier that day.

</comment><comment><USER85> I write my best code in my head while riding my bike to/from work, in the shower or lying in bed falling asleep. Having extended times of being disconnected enables your brain to chew on things and come up with new things to try.

</comment><comment><USER86> This sounds like it's related to the Tetris Effect: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect)

I've experienced the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER87> I don't really remember my dreams, my wife says I'm coding in my sleep though, and if I'm working on a difficult problem I usually solve it instantly when I wake up... I think maybe I really DID solve it in my sleep...

</comment><comment><USER88> When I started coding I took upon a task way over my beginner skills.

I was working on a Minecraft plugin to give the player the ability to access a virtual chest.

I had to dive in the code of Minecraft so deeply that I started dreaming of creeper exploding in my code.

</comment><comment> jon-wood I occasionally do, but it always seems to take the form of finding a really good solution to a horrible bug. Then I'll wake up full of joy at having fixed the bug only to realise it was one entirely imagined during my dream.

</comment><comment><USER89> Only when deeply immersed into a problem. Day to day work doesn't really get it going for me, but if its something challenging I'll see all kind of code in my dreams, I've woken up with 'aha' moments too.

</comment><comment><USER90> Only thing causing me to lose sleep is trying figure out how to turn code into cash.

</comment><comment> awinter-py When I've been paged overnight, my alarm clock integrates itself into dream logic as something that has to be defeated so that I don't wake up. not sure if the role assignments are random (alarm = pager = evil).

</comment><comment><USER91> Yup. This happens if I was coding right before bed with a problem not solved yet. Most of the time the dream was about me typing random things into the screen that doesn't make any sense.

</comment><comment><USER5> When I was cramming for exams in university I used to dream chemical equations. I also sometimes dream of code and how to architect various stuff I'm working on, which feels pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER92> I actually can't sleep if I think about code. My mind fixates on it so much that it keeps me awake.

When I'm awake and bored, though, I do think about code a lot, and game mechanics, and such.

</comment><comment><USER93> I don't remember. So certainly was not properly documented.

</comment><comment><USER94> It happens all the time, not particularly because I am stuck on a problem. Happens the most when learning something new and your mind wanders into a playful state.

</comment><comment><USER95> Often. I have, occasionally, actually implemented what I dreamt of. To date it's only worked once. Which, when you think about it, is pretty damn amazing.

</comment><comment><USER96> When I was working on large systems with lots of interconnected parts, I used to dream about them as navigating a building with lots of different parts and wings.

</comment><comment><USER97> I'm currently doing the OSCP, and I've been dreaming of buffer overflow attacks the past few days.

It's encouraging too, because my dreams are accurate.

</comment><comment><USER98> In my first years of college I was a semester behind. I made up for that in 2 weeks of Christmas break.

That was the first and last time I dreamt of Java.

</comment><comment><USER99> I think this happened to me once. I try to read a little fiction right before bed to help get my mind off work and programming.

</comment><comment><USER100> Only once, when I was a little overworked in college. It was about the process of authentication and authorization.

</comment><comment><USER101> I dream a lot about what I could do with the money I'm making from coding. It's never enough...

</comment><comment><USER102> Yes, only when I'm working on a project and spend significant time looking at code during the day.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell I have written code practically every day for the last 20 years. No, I never dream about coding.

</comment><comment><USER103> When I'm really in the weeds of a problem, then yes, I do.

</comment><comment><USER104> I've dreamt extensively about deep learning.

</comment><comment><USER105> all the time! I dreamt I was in a builder factory pattern and had a full on battle with team create(). I was on team build()

</comment><comment><USER106> Who doesn't?

<comment><USER107> I don't, FWIW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> Electric sheep?

</comment><comment><USER109> All the time

</comment><comment><USER110> How long have you been programming?

</comment><comment><USER111> oooh yes, quite often :)</comment>