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Comment by notfed | Hacker News Reader

> "It was a brutal year long journey of 18 hour days" [to run doom in TypeScript types]

This is some serious dedication for what at first blush may sound to many to be a completely unserious, or even useless, achievement. But I say to those people: a DOOM proof is just as worthy of praise as any other academic mathematical proof, and has the advantage of being verifiable by laymen.

Congrats on this amazing achievement.

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I don't thinks statements like this are meant to be read literally in American English.

IE US English speakers always fond of telling me how they work X hours in a day, or they went N days without sleep. Which used to really impress me, until I realised "wait... do they just exaggerate as matter of course"? And then I realised - of course they do; these are people for whom every purchase is an "upgrade"; where a bicycle for commuting in a city is an "urban assault vehicle", rich creamery butter, rich creamery type systems, etc etc.

So no, I sincerely doubt they actually worked 18 hour days for a year straight. I'm sure they worked hard, but it's just the way Americans talk.

> I don't thinks statements like this are meant to be read literally in American English.

I don't know, when I got hyperfocused on a side-project a few years ago, I was dedicating almost all my awake time to it. 12+ hours a day, every day, including weekends, for months.

Surprisingly, I didn't burn out. I was just so interested in it, I couldn't stop, and even started neglecting other things to work more on it.

I never hit such a focus state since that time in 2017~2018.

This happened to me once. It was like attaining enlightenment. My company worked with a F100 that had, as a core piece of their business, a piece of software they'd commissioned in the 80s that they still used in the 2010s to make billion dollar decisions. But no one knew how it made the calculations they relied on. This was before attorneys knew to include source code in procurement, the original devs at a third party code shop was long gone.

We were already working on something for them, and on a whim, one of their VPs asked my company if we could take a look at it.

So that's how the mathematician at the company (me) ended up waking up, sitting in front of a whiteboard, and losing all concept of time until my wife got home from work at night, not eating, not sleeping, staring at decompiled assembly and stepping through line by line for weeks. (I don't want to say months because I'm sure someone will come roast my ass for taking too long, but "months" is honestly more accurate; in fairness, I was learning every technique used on the fly)

It was a prolonged, repeated flow state that I've only ever experienced during really competitive tennis as a high schooler. Losing all concept of time and space, hyper focused on one task that has completely spread to all parts of your consciousness.

”not sleeping […] for weeks”. This is why Americans make the best marketers, you just can’t help yourself embellish with some fabrications to make a great, memorable story.

Imagine if every human had the resource security to do this for a good portion of their lives. Star Trek was fiction but we could have that if a few of us humans weren’t so greedy!

Virtually everyone living in a developed country has resource security to do this. Even in America, with its relatively poor levels of social assistance, you could live off of the dole as long as your expectations on quality of life are low.

Turns out, in the real world, people like having nice things, hanging out with family and friends, travel occasionally, etc. instead of just entering flow state to solve problems! It has nothing to do with income inequality.

People have to be comfortable to be as creative as the OP comment, so while I agree in principle, I think it's going to be harder than you imagine to build amazing things when you're living below the poverty line. The anxiety and mental anguish alone could cripple a person, even someone that isn't in the worst situations.

hi! author here! it's a pipedream, I know, but it's a hope/goal of mine to, in the next video (the "why did you do this" video) to give some fuel/motivation to people that might be feeling like you describe. do you have any advice for me for what I can say in the upcoming video to someone that might not be as comfortable, as you say. I really do have a grasp for how hard what you're talking about is, and I've tried over my life (sometimes very hard, sometimes too hard) to help people I know to overcome it (sometimes successfully, sometimes not). When you're in survival mode every day, you might look at a project like this Doom one and go "yeah right! not in a million years could I do that with my current set of things weighing me down!". anyway, don't want to ramble, but if you (or anyone else reading) has any wisdom to share on how to talk about these things in a way that's effective or inspirational for people, I'd really love to learn.

I have no advice because I’m still kinda in the bad place but I think it just takes one thing you can focus on that you enjoy and sometimes you can slowly dig out of the hole. I’ve started woodworking and the joy I get finishing a project has helped to push me forward. Just talk from the heart and you’ll make a good video I’m sure.

Good luck, your project is very impressive and I hope you are able to continue to make cool stuff!

thanks! actually the "why" video is going to talk at some length about my woodworking business, so you might enjoy that part! best of luck to you!

I really don’t think this is generally true. Assuming you’re single with no children, there’s effectively no cash assistance available where I live. You might be able to get public housing and food welfare (SNAP), but you would have effectively zero income. You could live on savings for a while, but that’s obviously not “the dole”

I think both of you are correct:

1. I've also been it a hyper-focused state where I was so intent on what I was working on I would spend basically all my time on that project without burning out. Like you, I haven't hit that focus state for a long time.

2. "18+ hour days", consecutively, is almost certainly an exaggeration, and this is where I agree with the parent commenter. For some reasons Americans (I am American) love talking about how much time they work and how little sleep they get. Realistically, very few people (except a small percentage of genetic outliers) can get by on sub-6 hours of sleep for long.

That's correct. Hyperbole and dramatization of real events was entirely unknown to the world until it was invented in a rural Nebraskan town in 1854 (pre-statehood). It's been a staple of American speech ever since. Only recently has it begun to find a footing outside of the United States. It's a similar story with Comedy, as well.

I never said it was only in American speech, just that it's very, very common, to the point where a lot of what Americans said made less sense to me until I realised it.

Different cultures express things differently. Overstating, understating, etc etc. If you want to understand, and be understood, it's important to know.

The does video starts off with some serious hyperbole (noted for anyone reading this comment before watching the video)

So much hyperbole that I thought the entire video was a spoof on the practice of making a Doom proof until about a minute in, where I asked aloud to an empty room, "Wait, this is real?"

Also, he forgot to credit the video itself, which has a really high production value! Kudos all around!

I work with Americans and never experienced this from any of them - are you sure you're not... exaggerating?

not with the youtube types. who say: I spent 670 hours trying to defeat this boss and died 555 times.

From experience, be careful if you ever called them out, just let them be.

I think you are confusing hyperbole with poetic license, and overstating the effects it has on English vernacular. I am not American, but I wouldn't go around minimizing how industrious the "great society" is.

Yeah I worked out the "N days without sleep" was mostly rubbish too.

I personally went for 3 days without any sleep in the army as part of a sleep deprivation exercise and it was one of the most brutal things I've ever done, I fell asleep standing up whilst digging a trench, ouch.

So I know when people say "I literally haven't slept in 6 days", they very much don't mean literally, they normally mean they went to bed and had a few hours of sleep per night.

> year long journey of 18 hour days

I couldn't do it, even if I had the talent. I have to work to get money!

At 18 hours of work a day, your money need are relatively low! Pair that with just sleeping at the office toilet and eating used coffee grounds and everything should be good!

Living is cheap if you don't live.

Not to detract from the achievement, that's amazing. Mostly useless, but amazing nonetheless.

the low(er) cost of living here in Michigan is absolutely a factor of the story! haha.

You are a bad trader

We already new that TS types are Turing complete so it's more of demonstration than a proof.

He wasn't being serious.

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