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Comment by cmg | Hacker News Reader

Your comment made me go search for a short article that I'd seen in the past [0] with a text version at [1]. "Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming"

"While stimulated by the LSD I was able to get the entire system wholly in my mind at the same time. I spent some time mentally visualizing various aspects of the compiler, the language and the processing which would take place. I did discover three or four design inconsistencies while being stimulated by the effect of the LSD, and I made notes for later checking."

[0] https://maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_24.pdf [1] https://slidelegend.com/use-of-lsd-25-for-computer-programmi...

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He probably just felt like getting the whole system in his head?

Shouldn't LSD trivially make people score higher on IQ test otherwise.

maybe “felt like” is the important part?

just spit-balling here as a non-lsd-user, but I do have the experience of “writers block” when I feel a program I wrote is too complex, I feel like it would be better to scrap it and start over

perhaps the effect of LSD is more anti-anxiety of approaching the problem despite its complexity, not improving your IQ, but lowering your inhibitions that otherwise prevent you from problem solving

(I am on the side of things that drugs in general turn parts of the brain off, rather than somehow making you superhuman, but maybe there are parts of the brain we could do without from time to time)

I've said the same thing about smoking sativas, so to learn that others have capitalized on this sort of 'increased visualization capacity' of LSD is not surprising.

> (I am on the side of things that drugs in general turn parts of the brain off, rather than somehow making you superhuman, but maybe there are parts of the brain we could do without from time to time)

They do neither as a rule. They just twist thinking around as they mess with your brains chemistry. Sometimes that puts you in a better place for a given activity, sometimes it puts you in a worse place. I think that, as society wakes up to the lies promulgated by the War on Drugs, we will revisit these positive interactions that are otherwise collectively forgotten.

Agree on the sativa. Back when you had to use a code name if you mentioned it on the phone, I and my friends at Tymshare, Apple, General Magic, Grid, Tandem, etc. called it "programmer's fuel".

Many here are familiar with the term "fire an event". I coined that in the late 1980s when I was at Cooper Software working on a program that would become Visual Basic. (Our team did the "Visual" part, and Microsoft added the "Basic".)

Our system was event-driven just like pretty much any GUI app or system. Under the hood, of course, we used the Win16 SendMessage, PostMessage, GetMessage, and PeekMessage calls.

But we had a habit of using creative names. In fact Alan Cooper once said that "one of my most important programming tools is a thesaurus."

We had already decided to call them "events" instead of "messages" for whatever reason, and now I needed a way to talk about sending them.

At my previous job we had "SQL triggers". I started thinking along that line but wasn't getting anywhere.

So I turned to a trick I often used when I felt stuck: I started firing rubber bands against my computer screen. I kept a stack of them on my desk for just that purpose.

(This was an IBM Monochrome Display with a sturdy glass front. Do not try this on your modern LCD/OLED displays.)

I still wasn't getting anywhere, so I fired up a doobie. I flicked the lighter a few extra times and looked at the flame.

And then it all fell into place: Fire a rubber band. Fire up a doobie. Fire an event!

Wow, what a cool story. I use that term on the regular, what an interesting history!

I must also confess I haven't felt this way about sativas in a long time. Not sure what happened but sometimes it makes me kind of sad to not feel that big brain effect. Been meaning to microdose LSD but it's hard finding a reliable connect

On another note, a young tweenage me wrote his first program on my uncle's copy of VB3. I wanted to write a terminal-type app that could dial a BBS and interact with it. I got about as far as getting the modem to dial.... I'm sure there's an angry BBS operator out there somewhere who got sick of this kid dialing his number and then never initiating the handshake. So... thank you for helping to create the tools I used to do that!

Oh my gosh. Thank you for sharing that. It means so much to me when I hear that my code helped someone build a business, have fun in a hobby, or even get in a little trouble. :-)

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