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Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

Eating a meal takes a lot of time. You've got to prepare it, clean up afterwards, and take your mind off of whatever you are doing. Or you have to order it, and then still usually there's some cleanup and interaction.

The liquid Soylent is about as disruptive as drinking water. That's really useful to me when I'm sucked into a programming challenge or research task. Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep. A meal is really disruptive during those times, because I just want my head fully integrated into the problems I'm working on.

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    "Good morning," said the little prince.

    "Good morning," said the merchant.

    This was a merchant who sold pills that had been
    invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one
    pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to
    drink.

    "Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.

    "Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said
    the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts.
    With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every
    week."

    "And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"

    "Anything you like..."

    "As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I
    had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should
    walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

IS either opinion incorrect? Why can't we agree that some people don't want to take time preparing food, and others do?

It's not about the food. It's about slowing down and taking your time. When you start taking tablets to save time drinking, o soylent, to save time eating, you for sure do not slow down. Why it is important to slow down and unplug is another big topic, but that is absolutely essential.

"New technology usurps romanticization of older technology" is not a new and surprising concept. One could replace "pill" and "spring of fresh water" with any technological advancement which took over some earlier activity that a subset of the population found and still finds enjoyable to do. Typewriters and computers, bicycles and cars, making a fire using sticks verses using a stove to cook food even.

In my experience no one who treats that idea as novel ever seems to offer a litmus test to tell if the value of technology trumps the potential enjoyment in doing something manually. Does rimantas use stone or metal tools to cook? But the feeling of spinning the tree branch in your hands against the kindling! How greatly rimantas has lost in their fervor for convenience...

It has nothing to do with technology and tools.

I used to do that as well when I was younger. Obviously not with Soylent, that wasn't around then. It works well for menial programming tasks where time is the limiting factor. Incidently, those are the problems where you can for the most part jump out and right back in without too much overhead. But when facing a hard problem, getting up and away from the computer, and cooking a meal always mean I'll solve the problem faster and better. Simply because I let the problem alone for a while. I even use non tech coworkers for sparing, explaning the problem, and answering their questions means I'll have to think about the problem in a significantly different way - often revealing insight in the process. YMMW

> I used to do that as well when I was younger. Obviously not with Soylent, that wasn't around then.

Is Soylent ramen for rich people?

Oh, hey, this is my favorite so far. Can Soylent just be a shitty food choice, full stop? I think yes!

Maybe, except it seems better to your body than most normal meals you eat ;).

Stealing this shamelessly

If Ramen were nutritionally complete to a reasonably modern understanding of Human nutrition

A thousand times this. I remember staying up late to finish programming problems when I was young (and stupid). Now I find the most effective way of solving hard programming problems is to spend an afternoon attacking it and then go to sleep at a normal hour. Magically, an elegant solution - usually quite different from work in progress - appears in my brain while I'm showering.

I do my best work while sleeping, I just need to figure out how to bill for it.

Agreed - for really hard problems I've never found that pounding away directly is effective. I load up on the required information and then intentionally go and do something else (ironically cooking seem to does it for me but overnight and in shower also works) and out of nowhere a solution will appear.

At that effort level I was hoping you're working on curing a disease or at least something more important than the cloud. :-/

I'm honored that you dug into it.

I'm working on decentralization, which I think is a very socially important goal. The cloud is not my ultimate objective, but it's one of the very few short term use cases I see where a decentralized system seems to have the potential to utterly dominate a centralized one.

Decentralized tech is very new. It's very hopium, and it's very poorly understood, both by zealots and by non-believers. I think that decentralization is going to change a lot of things in fundamental ways, and I think I can move the field forward faster by building a tangible, provably working, provably superior use case for decentralized tech.

Cloud storage is not as glamorous as starting a new world order, but the most important engineering is often the most mundane. People probably felt similarly about the Internet back before the world wide web was invented.

What are you specifically working on decentralizing? Do you have an end goal in mind for what a perfectly decentralized world would look like? Eg. a SBC in every home & office running a mailserver, webserver, etc

Edit: I think decentralization is great (like say IPFS), but I would not risk health or put off others to dedicate all my time to working on it, social interaction is an everyday need!

Ultimately I would like to see that people are allowed to maintain full control over their access to money and information. As tech improves, those things are getting more important, and right now the trend is to increasingly outsource the control (especially for information) to centralized entities that likely don't have your well-being as their primary objective.

There are a vast number of things that fit under the umbrella of tech that needs to be decentralized to give you full control over your money and information.

What part of that stack are you working on? Blockchain currency, low level networking, distributed filesystems, p2p websites, ...

I'd give up now.

Hari Seldon of decentralization, I tip my hat.

> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep

In all seriousness, this is tremendously unhealthy. Get up and go for a walk, a light jog, something. The health consequences of even just being sedentary for that long are terrible (to say nothing of the psychological consequences of deceiving yourself into thinking that work is the only thing of value in life).

> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep.

I know this is HN, but that sounds awful.

If that's a regular schedule for you - Don't you feel you're missing out on living life?

Telling someone they're "missing out on living life" just because they don't do the same thing as you is really condescending.

I don't think it was meant that way, I didn't take offense.

When I'm really sucked into a problem is one of the few times that I feel fully alive. It's like being in a flow state for multiple days, pushing every cognitive resource I have to reach a solution.

I think it happens less than once a month, and almost always lasts less than a week.

I do wish that I went hiking more often, camping more often, and I wish that I had more social interactions that were free of social and business undertones.

You sound like me 25 years ago. I assume you are still young (20-30?) but I would urge you to take a look at your lifestyle and habits now, with a view to changing it to incorporate more of your hiking and camping and social interactions that you mention.

I once felt that living like you currently are was sustainable and that I would be impervious to the long term effects, but now that I have hit the half century mark, I am finding I suffer from all sorts of back and shoulder pain from sitting for extended programming sessions lasting days. I also have rapidly degrading eyesight, and high risk of glaucoma from staring at screens all day every day, and I have other health and digestive issues from not eating regular healthy meals, or drinking enough water back in the day.

It is highly likely that the lifestyle you are accustomed to will turn around and bite you one day. Make changes now so that you don't end up the same as this old programmer. :)

Mathematicians get a similar mental state from the release of dopamine that rewards working on and successfully solving ever more complex problems. I've also seen engineers comment similarly about it, and it sounded quite like what my great grandfather described when working on a complex math problem over a span of time.

That being said, make time for yourself, all consuming projects will make you discontent with life in general.

I wondered if maybe I was missing out at some point, but after pushing myself to do other stuff, what I quickly realised was that I do what I do because it is what I enjoy.

It is not necessarily less "living life", just different choices.

Of course, that assumes you do it because you're working on things that excite you and interest you because you enjoy them.

> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep.

That sounds extremely unhealthy from both a physical and a mental standpoint.

Ok so why specifically Soylent and not one of the many alternatives?

>You've got to [...] take your mind off of whatever you are doing

Exactly the reason we should enjoy actual regular meals, preferably with other people.

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