A command line script to remind you to drink water | Hacker News Reader

A command line script to remind you to drink water

github.com

52 pointsmirceasoaica69 comments

Just remember, 8 cups of water a day is a myth. It has no scientific basis[0].

It was the result of misunderstanding a 1945 study that spread around like wildfire (since people realised they weren't drinking 8 cups, and tried to). The figure includes water contained within food, which is a significant amount. If you're drinking 8 cups AND consuming a normal diet you may be drinking too much (assuming moderate weather conditions and no underlying medical problems leaving you dehydrated).

[0] http://www.bmj.com/content/335/7633/1288

It's also worth noting that you can die by drinking too much water in a short period of time [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

You have to drink few litters of watter in very short time. Your kidneys are able to remove about 1l of water per hour.

> "Using the innate thirst mechanism to guide fluid consumption is a strategy that should limit drinking in excess and developing hyponatremia while providing sufficient fluid to prevent excessive dehydration," the authors state.

2015 Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/296081.php

In short, drink when you're thirsty and you'll be fine

What a time to be alive! Me, I drink when I'm thirsty.

Nitpicking obviously, but isn't it "too late" if you're drinking when you feel thirsty (it means you're already dehydrated)? Iirc you should be drinking before you feel thirsty.

No, that's also a myth:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2016/05/09/dehydration...

In most cases, thirst is a reliable signal that more water is needed.

Too late? I've done that for thirty years and I'm not dead yet.

Our evolution has failed miserably if the calibration is that far off. Talk about your ship-stopping bugs.

No, as another commenter pointed out, what you've read is bullshit.

Nah, just playing the long game :-)

"If we prioritise for intelligence then they'll eventually just write a bash script, none of this vague hormone and 'feeling' nonsense."

Adding on to the other commentators, a certain type of headache is a good indication of dehydration.

>A student once asked his teacher, "Master, what is enlightenment?" The master replied, "When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep."

-Old Zen Tale

This is probably a myth too, but I've heard that by the time you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated.

How does this one not die?

When someone says it, they are confronted with glibness instead of evidence, so it persists.

I don't think this feedback loop is working well for everybody. I know many people, including myself, who don't get the urge to drink until they're severely dehydrated, so they have to force themselfs to drink even in the absence of thirst.

It is also well known that it gets worse with age - fainting due to dehydration is a common occurence with the elderly.

All of those elderly people with their github repositories?

I built this script, and I'm 17. Gained over 20 pounds since I started programming all day.

Paying attention to your body is a skill. Alot of people do have some degree of innate proficiency at it, but it is something to be done deliberately and practiced, and with enough deliberate practice you will eventually do it automatically with high mastery. You're still a child, so you have plenty of time to develop this skill :)

May I make a suggestion? Instead of just water breaks... take breaks. Get up, stretch your arms and hands, your neck and back. Walk around for a few minutes, even just in place. Drink your water.

You'll save yourself a lot of future pain.

I'll definitely keep that in mind. I'm planning on using a standing desk, does that do any good?

It certainly can, but you have to remember to monitor your posture so you don't slump. Good luck!

I agree. Personally if I'm hacking away at something I tend to forget about the world for hours, and it is frustrating to later realise that I couldn't do the least for my health ie : drinking sufficient water.

Until I saw that this was posted from Github, I honestly assumed that this was a cute way of describing thirst. The reality is so much stranger.

The fascinating thing about water intake is that there is no scientific consensus regarding the optimal point or how to determine it, or how it varies between individuals. It is one of those items that you think would have a good answer, given where we are in the development of the medical life sciences, but apparently not.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908954/

"Little work has been done to measure total fluid intake systematically and there is no understanding of measurement error and best methods of understanding fluid intake. The most definitive US and European documents on total water requirements as based on these extant intake data. We feel that absence of validation of methods for water consumption intake levels and patterns represents a major gap. Little exploration of even varying methods of probing to collect better water recall data have been conducted.

"Of course, the other half of the issue is the need for understanding total hydration status. We have no acceptable biomarkers of hydration status at the population level. Controversy exists about current knowledge of hydration status among older Americans. This represents a topic understudied at the population level though certainly scholars are focused on attempting to create biomarkers for measurement of hydration status."

My sister works in urology. Her suggestion: drink as often as you need to achieve near clear urine. For me, that is a bit under a gallon a day.

A natural feedback mechanism!!!

Still think the script is nifty tho.

Clearly we need to close the loop with an IoT wifi linked colour sensor.

Let's assume that's the consumption needed to optimize the functioning of the renal system. But is that necessarily optimal consumption for the whole body?

With no offense to your sister - who I'm sure is correct - hypothetically, maybe this could result in some other condition that a urologist might know nothing about.

Unless someone can prove that consumption is harmful for the whole body, what's wrong with that to optimize the renal system at least?

It's just systems theory. The optimized whole is not equal to the sum of the optimized parts.

Same as Burning Man's longstanding advice on how to avoid dehydration in the desert: "Piss clear."

No offense to your sister, but I've heard a lot of crap prefaced with "$PERSON works in $FIELD, and they said...". Her suggestion is demonstrably one of those things, as other data [and, no, I'm not finding a goddamn citation] imply that there's little basis for her suggestion.

Do you need a scientist to flush toilet? Basically, it's same, but for your body.

Basically, it's same

Your urinary tract is made of porcelain? "It's basically the same..." is the preface to a lot of urban myths about health.

Yeah man, my boss is a programmer and doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't use global variables any time he feels like it. That doesn't mean he's right!

Ha I actually made an iOS & watchOS app based on that side of the equation after thinking "what's the minimum input I can provide for good hydration reminders?"

It gives a reminder to drink water any time it's been three hours since you've peed...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pee-see-drink-more-water/id1...

Not super scientific, but less of a hassle than tracking water input and it tends to adapt well to factor in things like exercise where more water is needed. It also tends to even out over time when drinking alcohol or coffee. Urine color can also vary depending on foods, like how B12 makes it fluorescent yellow, so the time factor can be another useful indicator.

Such a clever idea.

Woah, you also made Photo Find? Hell yeah

Yep :-D thanks! Makes me really happy that you know about Photo Find!

It works most of the time, but it doesn't work if you are drinking alcohol... your body has to 'waste' water to flush it out of your system. There are probably other drugs and medications that have the same effect (and no, caffein is not one of them, at least to my knowledge).

I drink too much coffee to ever have clear pee.

Once I had written a bash script to show a bubble notification on your linux machine after every X minutes, to remind you that you needed to be working. Just like in the hollow man movie.

I had written this script because I used to get distracted a lot while working.

This seems (is) far more useful than something that is only visible in your terminal, unless that is where you spend 95% of your day. I have done something similar using Hammerspoon, just pops up an alert every so often to remind me of different things.

Having to type in not_thirsty seems like it would get tiring _very_ quickly.

I take a sip of water whenever I'm stuck on something. So I might end up having to get up to go to the bathroom all day. That prevents me from sitting all day which is a good thing.

I like how you didn't bother cutting out the part where you have downloaded movies :)

I usually take two bottles of water with me on a 25 mile bike ride. It's actually pretty common that I don't take a sip of water for the whole ride, because I never got thirsty. I suffer no ill effects, nor decrease in performance. And this is in line with all of the actual science. No one has yet to identify that drinking, or not drinking, a certain amount of fluid causes any ill effects or decrease in performance outside of just drinking when you're thirsty.

Been using this app called Fabulous for the past month. 7:30 sharp it reminds me of stuff to do daily, never been sharper in the day. Also to take breaks etc. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.thefabulous... (not mine or affiliated).

Wouldn't a cron job work better for this?

One could turn this into a generic pomodoro timer and just make getting up for a walk and water a part of the breaks.

I have a more low tech solution. I keep a bottle of water on my desk. The bottle serves as reminder, storage, measurer, and water-drinking tool. I should patent this process...

Even more low tech: After going to the bathroom stop at the water fountain (which is, by side-effect of typical plumbing techniques, usually right outside the door) and take a long drink proportional to the amount of urine you put out.

It's an extra 20 seconds to a trip you were already making.

Aren't you afraid of the feedback loops?

Pee -> Drink just a little too little -> Pee less -> drink less -> Pee even less -> drink even less -> cough up blood from lungs...

Very detailed thought. Thankfully, the human body doesn't work like that so I think I'm okay. So far nothing has hap<BARFdn091@ #( .1#

NO CARRIER

I keep a water bottle on my desk too, and its mere presence does wonders for staying hydrated. Non-routine days where I'm away from my desk and not drinking as much water sometimes leave me feeling a little parched by the end of the day, when I'll have to make up for it before going to bed.

A funny thing I've noticed is that I tend to grab for the water bottle most frequently when I'm mentally chewing on something. I wonder if this is just a plain old habit or if extended mental activity increases water requirements...

You win.

When I drink a lot of water, I sometimes need a reminder to pee. Not joking, I'm surprised how frequently it gets to near emergency stage while I'm working before it dawns on me consciously that I need to stand up and walk to the bathroom.

First they're telling us when to drink water, next, it's robots enslaving us.

Get back to work. My arms and legs aren't going to build themselves you know.

For people who work remote this is more common than it looks like. Talking to other fellow programmers I've learned that I'm not the only one who forget to eat sometimes.

A fun contest would be to see who can write the smallest piece of code to do this. As a cron job it might be one line.

What terminal emulator and theme is that (referring to thr gif in the README file)?

looks like an oh-my-zsh one

Probably Hyper. Don't use it unless you like terminals that crash anytime any program you're running spits out more than a few lines of text too quickly.

Correct, I generally use iTerm. I use Hyper whenever I need a gif/video to present something, since Hyper tends to look fancier and prettier.

Hey, the terminal is Hyper and the theme is spaceship (by Denys Dovhan), you could find it on github here : https://github.com/denysdovhan/spaceship-zsh-theme. It is a theme for oh-my-zsh. There exists a standard oh-my-zsh theme named spaceship too, so don't get confused.

thanks kindly, i have chronic kidney stones and also do not have a good sense of thirst. i'll certainly be using this.

Flatten your hand, palm down.

Pinch your knuckle skin from the sides.

If there's a peaked fold that stays for more than a second or two, have a drink.

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