
Ask News.YC: Do you experience highs while coding? - palish

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palish
Recently I had the wonderful experience of solving a hard problem in a very
elegant way. I spent hours going through iteration after iteration, each one
slightly more ugly than the last, until I stumbled upon an amazingly simple
solution that completely solved the problem far better than any of the
previous methods. I spent the rest of the night revelling in the clarity and
simplicity of the solution; I've never taken any drugs, but it must have felt
very much like being high. Does anyone else experience similar highs while
coding?

Shawn

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omouse
Some Lisp coders have mentioned brain orgasms when discovering something great
about the language.

I was bouncing around for a few hours when I removed 20 lines of Python and
replaced it with one line

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vikram
Recently, I've been on a high when I got my lisp code to run 60% faster by
changing 10 lines of code. I think I tend to experience relief more often than
high while coding. Highs are like a promise that something good is going to
happen soon. My brain is telling me I have an answer just let me find the
words.

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staunch
My favorite coding "high" is sleep deprivation mixed with dangerous levels of
caffeine. I'll sometimes work until ~5AM and be really tired, then get a
"second wind" and be wide-awake until the afternoon coding like I'm on speed.

There's also the excited "holy crap this is cool" high, which is more like a
tingling giddiness at how interesting something is. Like a child who can't sit
still the night before Christmas. Nothing motivates me more than this feeling.

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brent
I can second the first "high" (sleep dep + pot of coffee). Afterwards I
usually crash pretty hard though. I do usually find the time extremely
productive. Maybe because the rest of the world stops being interesting from
3-7am.

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adrianwaj
There is an energy apparent when giving order to chaos, which to me happened
when I really nailed how my web app would order its information presentation
in an elegant way to the public, which would in turn order people's minds in
the way they view the topic of the site, Israeli technology (I would Hope).

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gyro_robo
I tend to come up with ideas while pacing around away from the computer, and
thinking of a better way to do something is a kind of "high". Sitting at the
computer tends to be less high-level thinking and more implementation detail.
But when something works, that's a high, too.

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far33d
Yes. But they're different from being high via chemicals.

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sharpshoot
far33d, why would this be different. The same sensory pathways are initiated
regardless of the stimulus. Repeated positive stimuli generate the feeling of
addiction.

The same pleasures can be had while coding.

~~~
far33d
Coding never gave me a hangover or visual hallucination.

