Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

Story Time. I worked for Walmart at the time and there was an entire case of 5-hour energy dutifully waiting for its turn to be given away to ambivalent shoppers passing by the vendors display. It sat there forgotten its day never to come. Abhorring waste the vendor gave the entire case to the overnight stocking crew. Most partook modestly but one brave and not so smart soul decided to consume 8 one after the other. When the paramedics came he was huffing his hard visibly pounding as he lay their huffing. Turns out the fatal amount of caffeine is truly massive but long before that you wish you were dead. He was later fired for stealing root beer.

We missed his stories where he was variously an MMA fighter, a firefighter, and a marine who served as a secret sniper assassin who trained somewhere the actual marine informed us doesn't actually exist.

View on HN

I used to be into Olympic weightlifting and worked out at a gym of people that also took it very seriously. They were for the most part the farthest thing from “meat heads” as one could imagine. Except the one guy…

He found a container of powdered caffeine someone had brought and decided that he didn’t have to follow the instructions like normal humans. Not only that, he mixed up the measurements. In the end he took what very well could have been a fatal dose. Even with a visit to the hospital his heart rate was above 200 resting for over a day. They had to work to flush his system and whatever but he said it took weeks to sleep normally again.

Here is a related story about a guy who did this by mistake. This made me scared to ever use caffeine as an ingredient in a drink.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sylqJ0NEVJw

Yes, stick with pills if you wanna take raw caffeine.

Not particularly to do with caffeine, but tangent to the weightlifting: Eddie Hall deadlifting 1102lbs / 500Kg world record and the moments behind the scenes with paramedics unable to get a reading on his heart rate, and then having it read over 200bpm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K0chGkV0IE

During my powerlifting days, me and my fellow meatheads used to get ephedrine powder from Mexico and mix with Mountain Dew before contests. I almost had a heart attack once, but I totaled over 1700 pounds that day, so it was all worth it. Not. I totally regret it now. Live and learn.

I'm not strong but I can lift 10lbs 170 times in one day, totally natty.

Worth it or not, those were some prodigious lifts.

For the curious, the LD50 in humans is thought to be somewhere on the order of 200mg/kg. So for a 70kg individual, that would be 14,000 mg (14 grams). A very strong coffee is 100mg, with energy drinks being 200-300mg.

There is a ChubbyEmu video [0] where someone has a large container of powdered caffeine, and he accidentally takes a whole scoop of it - 35 grams.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sylqJ0NEVJw

It's horrifyingly high right. That said people with some underlying medical conditions can succumb to far less. See the case where Panera Bread sold large caffeinated lemon-aid with unlimited refills

8oz of Starbucks’ bestselling Pike’s Place Roast is 150mg, and between different roasts and sizes, you can buy a drip coffee at Starbucks that has nearly 500mg of caffeine.

Heh, yeah, I was considering home brew coffee. Measurements do not apply if you get the grande quad espresso.

Contrary to popular belief espresso is not that high in caffeine compared to how much of it you would typically drink. When dilluted with milk or water back down to regular strength (by flavor) it is actually usually lower in caffeine than a typical medium roast drip. Light roast can be very high especially if you brew at 60g of coffee per liter of water that seems to have become popular with internet coffee enthusiasts.

I had to convert it I think that is around 1/4 cup per 6 cups (6 oz for some reason on coffee makers) . I use twice that but measured in dry beans. Is that really that much?

I think your conversion may be wrong. 60g per liter is 15g for 250ml (which is a small mug of coffee). At least with my coffee 15g occupies most of the quarter cup scoop I have been using. The flavor is good at that strength, but it’s a lot of caffeine. In the ballpark of 200mg depending on the beans and how well your brew method extracts it. 200mg is fine on its own but most people drink a few cups in a day.

LD50 just means that’s when 50 percent of people die right? Someone may well die long before they hit 14g but I get the point. That’s still a crap load of caffeine my word.

I believe LD50 is measured with lab rats and proportional to body weight.

LD50 is usually rat dosage unless there exists sufficient evidence to establish a value for humans.

Ethics committees frown on poisoning people just to figure out how much is lethal.

Referring to LD50 is insane, isn't it?

LD10 is plenty for me never touch it outside of a life threatening emergency.

Sure, but you have to pick a threshold somewhere. Going with the median seems likely to be the most robust measurement.

Which is to say, no, I would not feel comfortable consuming the equivalent LD49 of a substance. It is an order of magnitude estimate to give you a sense of toxicity. Which in the case of caffeine - is so high that it is nearly impossible for a healthy individual to consume that much accidentally.

Many years ago I worked with a textbook pathological liar and narcissist. His stories were many and varied.

He lived with a harem of women who pleasured him at all hours. He divorced his wife, but he was such a good lover, she begged him to reconcile, so he remarried her.

Once a customer happened to be a WWII Medal of Honor recipient, and gifted him a rifle used to kill many Germans as a gift for his good work as a food delivery expert.

One time he delivered food, and the recipient said, "Dan, you are so good at this, here is a $10,000 tip."

He could have easily received a PhD, but instead dropped out of community college after a single semester, because college was beneath him. His professors all gave him A's and cried when he dropped out.

He drank 2 liters of Mountain Dew every single night to keep his energy levels high. Without Mountain Dew, he would die.

He had been asked numerous times to manage all of the region's chain restaurants, but was satisfied to be a delivery boy, as this was his true calling.

This man's stories sound fitting of a president.

One thing I miss about high school was being around guys like this. There was always some dude who said he secretly had a top secret mission to Afghanistan over the summer and the military was begging him to officially join when he turned 18. It's interesting how no matter where you are in the US, there's a guy with a similar backstory of being a total badass who chooses to be humble and normal because the world couldn't handle his true power.

You can still have that in any expat bar anywhere anytime..

This is interesting. I've worked with people like this, met people like this, and heard of people like this. But one thing you're missing is this guy didn't claim to be a highly skilled killer or ex-military. I wonder why. That's the most common trope I normally see.

Spy as well. I've met multiple expert spies in backpacker hostels around the world.

The best part of being a spy is telling everyone you're a spy - Sterling Archer from Archer probably

In years past I would have simply looked down on someone like that.

Nowadays I'm more inclined to pity them. It sounds like he's trapped in a pretty shitty state of being, even if it's a prison of his own making.

Pity them, but from a safe distance. Many of them are very dangerous.

Basically “good will hunting “

drinking 2l of mountain dew per day is the least crazy thing in that list.

Probably the only thing that was true too.

Love it.

This is basically why caffeine is legal. The stimulation vs harm curve makes it harmful before it’s too stimulating. Illegal stimulants are safer per unit stimulation. That is until they get to folks susceptible to addiction and then they’re more harmful as a result of overuse.

Considering that alcohol is legal and THC is not (federally), I would question whether there is actually any logic behind the fact that caffeine is legal. Rather, it just happens to have made it under the radar long enough to become too ubiquitous to outlaw.

Look into the history. Caffeine wasn't under the radar, it didn't make the cut when drugs started do be banned in the early 1900s. It didn't make the cut because nobody abused it or formed a serious addiction to it, because you can't. Take too much and you feel like you're dying.

Coca-cola = coca leaves + kola nuts = cocaine + caffeine

Caffeine was everywhere too in the era of drug concoctions. Today's soda's were the health tonics of the 1800s. 7-up had lithium in it, the drug used to treat some bipolar cases.

The drugs that survived public use were the ones that were paradoxically safer and more dangerous at the same time, depending on how you measure it.

Then why did cocaine get put on the list? As far as overdosing, it seems to work the same. You will feel really bad before you get to a fatal dose. Many claim it is also not highly addictive. At least, not in the way that opiates are addictive, but more like how people are addicted to caffeine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com