Hacker News Reader

I appreciate how you describe what I've struggled to explain to others. The experience is a bit harrowing, and it's easy for a person in that position to discount the "it gets better talk". But it does, and in retrospect obviously so.

Combine your note with ChuckMcM's, and I think you'll come near where I've ended up: there are so many broken systems out there that need someone. In my case, I apply the little tricks I've learned to sidestep engineering problems. I was worried that I'd get stuck in some soul crushing drone job, and instead I found that even the simple systems are pathologically complicated. It's quite nice to know - deep down - that everything really is interesting if you look closely enough (my favorite misquote of Feynman).

Perhaps an alternate worry is that as a person who constructs systems, you'd act as the proverbial person with a (sledge)hammer, foolishly whacking every problem regardless of whether it's a nail or not. But that's just a matter of delicacy: everything improves if it's better understood, but not everything needs to be rebuilt from scratch. I guess experience just tones that down. Or the mind just gets quieter; I occasionally fear that I've lost something in that transition, but I can't seem to support that idea. It's not like the ideas ever go away, they'll just take a different weight, be less horrifically important, blend into the background noise experience and life create. Perspective changes a lot that way.

TL;DR: don't worry about losing your mind, you're neither crazy nor alone (is anyone alone and insane in a global network these days? I hope not!)

>The hard realization was that the stuff in my head just couldn't be expressed by any real world media, even of my own design. Reality sucks like that.

There is a term for this: Weltschmerz.

Ich kenne diesen Begriff.

The other good news, if it's ADHD, is that if it doesn't go away (or you don't want to wait), there's a lot of cheap medicine out there that works really well.

I'm not sure if this a good recommendation. According to this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U ADHD are normal symptoms that occur when a creative mind has to perform dull tasks. ADHD becomes bigger and bigger problem, because today, there are much more stimulants that cause things like traditional school or work to be boring.

According to the speaker, curing ADHD with pills solves the problem by reducing creative potential of a mind. A better approach would be to create an environment where people with ADHD can thrive.

(Note, that I don't have any real experience with ADHD, this comment is based only on the talk).

I have a friend. He has to be listening to music, watching television, reading some article online, chatting with people, and playing some video-game--all simultaneously, all the time--or he feels like his mind is collapsing in on him from the weight of all his thoughts and ideas and ambitions. He often gets drunk just so he can concentrate on only doing one thing--composing a song, say. Even when intensely interested in something--watching a movie with friends, say--he can't actually focus long enough to follow the plot. He ends up having to ask for a summary because he has no idea what happened.

And this is in his optimal environment, completely under his control.

He is not "thriving." He is cache-thrashing.

>According to this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U ADHD are normal symptoms that occur when a creative mind has to perform dull tasks.

Yes, ADHD denial is a very popular position. It has about as much backing in science as climate denial. The idea that ADHD meds reduce the "creative potential" of the mind is pure nonsense.

They did work some for me, but "really well" would be a stretch. Your results may vary...

But that shouldn't dissuade you, or anyone else, from trying. People have a visceral negative reaction to "ADD/ADHD treatment", as far as I can tell, because they think of it in the context of adolescent diagnosis, parents forcing kids onto drugs they don't need that turn them into robots because they aren't doing well in school, etc.

But if you're an adult--if you get to decide what does and does not go into your body--and you find out you might just have so-and-so condition and you could be much better off just taking this-or-that pill every day--and that the worst that can happen is that the pill just doesn't help--then you should forcibly shut down the ugh field[1] associated with the treatment, and just try it. If it helps, keep going. If it doesn't help, stop. If you don't like the way it makes you, stop. Just find out, one way or the other.

1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/

Depends where in the world you are from. The docs in Sweden told me I have to wait 30-90 days for treatment and that treatment itself will take even longer, and they are strict with prescription, many adults don't get any.

Yikes, that's awful. In that case, I can mark Sweden off of my "possible places to live" list.

It's actually better than 99% of the world. I just dislike it personally.

Sweden is actually on my list of places I'd like to live over all, but being able to get adequate treatment for my ADHD is non-negotiable.

There is a comment by MichaelEGR on the source link that is a good contrast to yours:

"Erik... I haven't had a chance to read much else on your blog, but I too quite likely would be considered a "delusional idealist" by society's standards. You seem to be on the path of the journeyman programmer and one day will be an expert and then some.

For some context I am turning 35 in less than a month and have yet to release my life's work which extends over 11 years of effort after my college degree. A significant amount of my efforts cover similar ground as your aspirations. I still live month to month (~$200 in my bank account right now and significant debt I incurred in following this path I'm still trying to manage). By the time that I do launch my effort I will have spent well over 15k hours on it. I often think about how life would be if I was paid my corporate contract rate for those hours.

While aggressive refactoring may occur in your efforts from time to time I suppose realize that there is an inherent truth and logic in ones work. For me it brings the only solid peace of mind in an uncertain / illogical world. It is the reason I'm writing this right now.

It sounds like you are just finishing up your degree... If possible move back w/ your family. Let me tell you... It sucks, it sucks, it sucks... I did for 3 years after my degree and faced daily admonition & nagging from my parents on why I didn't have a job. It was even harder to deal w/ their assumptions that I was "unemployable" / not good at my chosen path. Despite knowing none of that was true it's still hard when the only understanding most folks understand is your job / title / income one might gain from employment.

I even spoke at various conferences and this had no effect on my families opinion. I suppose you could say I lucked out after my first major tech conference because an O'Reilly editor was in the audience and I got an invite to the '04 Foo Camp. I distinctly remember sitting at a table chatting w/ the "Hot or Not" founders who were quite successful by that time. I remember desperately trying to conceal I was living in my parents basement, had no income, and what not.

Outside funding is going to be a bitch as unfortunately investors do not favor tools development despite how innovative they may be. You'll likely find yourself bootstrapping and need to release your work before you receive any sort of favorable discussion. The upside is that you'll retain 100% ownership.

Does it get better? I'm not going to lie... Things can get pretty shitty and daunting at times from economic to social relationships from friends to potential significant others. You may often find yourself pushed into out-group situations. I recently even faced this by general neighborhood friends of ~5-7 years.. Few people will understand why you may not show up too often on the weekends. It sucks when you stop getting invites to social events and see folks post pictures at them while you are working around the clock late into the evening Friday / Sat night. I can't even mention to potential dates that I run my own long term R&D oriented company and work nights and weekends quite often; doesn't matter if they work in the tech industry either.

Hah.. Well I have to get back to coding as the midnight oil has been burning since last night.

Don't stop... embrace the inherent truth / logic of your efforts... take solace that you can code fearlessly and without requiring permission from anyone else. You will rarely find this freedom as an employee or from inside the industry. Be bold and do things differently. It's not going to be easy by any means."

> For some context I am turning 35 in less than a month and have yet to release my life's work which extends over 11 years of effort after my college degree. A significant amount of my efforts cover similar ground as your aspirations. I still live month to month (~$200 in my bank account right now and significant debt I incurred in following this path I'm still trying to manage).

I think that says it all. The guy had a vision of something he was trying to achieve and fiveteen thousand hours later he is essentially no closer to his goal. Stallman is very idealistic but he managed to change the world. This is an unbalanced approach to life which will only yield pain. Attachment is suffering.

Oh my... Well, meh perhaps this is longer than it needs to be..

I didn't think my post to Erik's blog would be reposted here in entirety. I felt moved to post quickly on Erik's blog FWIW and didn't mince words. His post reminds me of certain aspects of thought regarding where I was at after my degree. The will to create is a mysterious thing.

As things go jrogers65 probably has no idea what I'm trying to accomplish or how far along I actually am or the personal funding I've sunk into this path (everything) over the years.. I too had a deep fascination w/ graphics & audio tech for some time and I knew in advance 10 years ago that I was choosing the harder path to innovate particularly through large scale 2D / 3D spatial audio, upping immersion in games / movies / all media in the home and venues, such that the path was fraught with a long term time span.

In pursuit of this path I assure you I probably have the best hacker den around while also supporting the R&D goals at hand. It wasn't cheap to build or now maintain while bootstrapping and is in a prime SF spot; can support upwards of ~6 initial employees; etc. Indeed this leads to a challenging month to month reality in regard to long term debt / build out costs and trying to free up time (IE rent $$$ in advance) to work in waves unadulterated at the tech at hand.

Besides relentless innovation often comes hand in hand with perfection, but sometimes there is simply just time to get things right. After the general economic dip around '08 it's clear I'm at earliest presently 5 years out to perhaps 10 years w/ my audio aspirations regarding product / market fit just from an economic angle; I can be more specific, but will save it. This general mismatch and the rise of Android being the fortuitous tech occurrence has given me the time to focus on creating middleware tools supporting the long term effort while "doing it right" and taking into consideration the next 10-15 years of software dev.

If one is going to commercialize middleware tools related efforts the bar is high when money is to change hands.. One is free to go the open / social path and release early and evolve an effort in the public eye and likely never gain revenue. This is a valid direction... I however plan to make a long term living from my efforts and the sweat spent now _should_ pay off later. It reminds me of a supposed African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.”

One can wish to get funded for something innovative / artistic / complex / before its time; one can wish to be independently wealthy and be free to pursue ones goals. Outside of those two general hypotheticals what is often left from there is just pure dogged persistence and yeah it's not going to be the most balanced life, but them the breaks. I at least love what I do and am fully committed to seeing my long term vision become reality not just for me (it already is here for me!), but for "you" / others; commercially too...

I hope Erik finds his path without losing the will to create something great; individually (at first at least) w/ commercial aims or more publicly via open source during the conception phase, etc.

In short... You do not know what you speak of jrogers65.. ;P

I hope I'm wrong about you and your endevours. I wish you the best of luck with getting your product out there.

>I can't even mention to potential dates that I run my own long term R&D oriented company and work nights and weekends quite often; doesn't matter if they work in the tech industry either.

If you don't mind me asking: why not?

Both you and the author paint a very romantic picture of your work. I can see how it would make maintaining existant relationships difficult, but this kind of thing makes twentysomethings who don't know you swoon in my experience. I'm probably not fully grasping the extent to which these feelings are debilitating. I feel like this as well from time to time, but it always passes quite quickly.

On the bright side: hang around art school kids and you will be worshipped :)

Hours later I regret this comment but it's too late to delete it, so I'll just put here that I now recognise that this is an outrageous humblebrag which adds nothing to the conversation and serves simply to boost my ego. I am ashamed of it and I'll try harder to restrain myself from giving out fatuous advice to people with real problems in future. :(

Art school students and cool.. ;P

There are always trade offs in life.. On the dating front at least. If I spent more time in general hanging out and out and about on weekends goofing around like many folks I'm sure things would work out differently. One has to consider that for me often I'm left to just generally low stakes / OkC derived meet ups.

Statistically speaking at this point I can say that coming across as passionate about ones life's work and mentioning that entails a day job at times and often night / weekend effort doesn't set the tone of being emotionally or otherwise available even though that may not be the case nonetheless it is best to can it on the first meetup... That is all.. It's bad enough being an introvert in an extrovert's world.. :)

I think the issue with the romantic ideal of burning the midnight oil while working on your dream is that it's not very conducive to actual relationship building with dates.

You may find someone special who really digs what you do, but you can only ignore them and keep them at arm's length for so long before they leave to find someone (perhaps less romantic) who will treat them as if /they/ were that important.

Certainly there are exceptions (mariner's wives come to mind) but I think this would be true of your normal random date. So, romantic? Sure. But the appeal has to eventually wear off and then there'd better be a part of you that you can devote to your partner.

I was recently (just a week ago) given notice from a doctor that i might have ADHD, I'm 24, they want to do more research.

I'd say ask people around you (friends/family especially) besides just taking a psychiatrist's or doctor's word. It is very easy to be diagnosed with something you may not really have because it's a complicated thing to tell if someone has a personality disorder and psychiatrists are a bit bias in that they are supposed to notice certain "cues."

Many teenagers or 20 somethings are stressed out from the drama and other junk that goes on during college as well. And feeling depressed is normal sometimes. If you are happy all the time then you probably have a different personality disorder lol.

I have a soapbox here:

AD(H)D is severely underdiagnosed. According to my own psychiatrist, studies have been done to find the base-rate of ADD/ADHD in the population--meaning not the people being treated for it, but the people who perfectly fit all the criteria and would respond excellently to treatment if it were provided--and it seems that only about 7% of the people who are "model candidates" for the disease, know they have it. And these are studies of adults, not children--people who have been living with strong, debilitating ADD/ADHD for years or possibly decades without any awareness or coping strategy.

Honestly, if I get Bill Gates-level rich, I'm going to dump my charity-dollars into ADD/ADHD-awareness. Disregarding how much better my own life has been since I started being treated for it, if all the people who are currently out of the work-force, can't hold a job, or underachieving at their job--who think they're just "naturally lazy"--and who could start achieving the things they want to achieve if they knew they had a treatable condition--got help--well, perhaps it's a bit optimistic, but I like to imagine percentage-point gains in GDP and drops in that mysterious "base unemployment" figure that just never seems to dip below 5%.

---

Also, just as regards "If you are happy all the time then you probably have a different personality disorder": ADD/ADHD is orthogonal to (clinical) depression--though you can certainly be depressed from all the ways your life sucks, and your life is more likely to suck if you can't stay focused and motivated long enough to achieve anything.

However, how I would describe my own state, previous to treatment, was, "perfectly content to be laying in bed all day doing nothing much at all." I had studied Zen long enough to just not be all that worried about doing nothing. There was nothing wrong with doing nothing. And yet, really, I was just avoiding setting goals I knew I couldn't meet, which is to say, any goals at all. Blowing away the fog of demotivation I was wrapped in for most of my life has not suddenly made me upset with the idea of laying around doing nothing--it can't do anything so powerful as changing your mind. But it has made me feel that much more is possible. And that has made me upset with the idea of wasting what is I can suddenly see as my potential.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:ADHD_Prevalen...

So what do you think the prevalence rate should be? How is it even a disorder if it affects 15%?

(This is a response both to you, and to the sibling comment:)

I would say that the best comparison is nearsightedness.

I imagine humans used to have, on average, pretty excellent distance-vision (we can't know for sure--eyes don't leave fossils--but "seeing clearly" seems to be something with a lot of selective pressure, as far as survival goes.)

But now that that selective pressure is taken away [have you ever thought "they're not attractive, because they need glasses"?] nearsightedness runs rampant, and just keeps getting worse as nearsighted people cross their genes together.

But does it matter? Of course not! The people affected just wear glasses or contacts. And then they're normal.

You wouldn't call a person wearing glasses an "enhanced baseline human." They're obviously the result of something going wrong, somewhere. The glasses are a crutch.

But still, we don't add moral judgement to "having bad vision"; it's not something to be pitied. We don't run donation drives to get poor people glasses.

But on the other hand, living your whole life being unaware that you're nearsighted, and unaware that if you just put on a pair of specs, you could read signs twenty feet away like a regular human being--that's a terrible fate.

  We don't run donation drives to get poor people glasses.

Actually, my church has participated in just such a donation drive. The main difficulty, I think, is that it's hard to get people the correct strength of corrective lenses out of a random bag of glasses. Just FYI, your main points are good.

Two things -

I didn't make a moral judgement on improving baseline humans, I just said it was a different lens to look through as compared to saying someone has a condition.

If ADHD is that prevalent (5-15% and severely underdiagnosed) then having ADHD is actually being a regular human being !

What is baseline or normal is highly subjective. There are enough near-sighted humans in the world to say that sight problems are pretty much just part of the human condition, for pretty much everyone at some point in life. Whether you consider a pair of glasses to be a defect fix or an enhancement is up to you. I place no moral value on either option.

Is this why you (or someone) voted me down? Because you assumed an implied criticism in my looking at ADHD remedies as an enhancement?

You'll find me the last person to argue that enhancing humans is a bad thing. I wanna live forever and have robot parts :)

> I didn't make a moral judgement on improving baseline humans

I meant more, when someone has cancer, that's bad and you pity them. Cancer is an Evil that we should Fight. Whereas we don't tend to think this about nearsightedness. It is, like you say, "part of being human." It's just a screwed-up part of being human that we universally reject and patch over without thinking too much about it. Like having worms[1].

The reason I wouldn't compare it to having robot parts, is that I don't want people to associate it with having robot parts. Because some people don't think we need robot parts.

Imagine if glasses didn't exist, and we had just invented them--with everyone already being as nearsighted as they are. There are some people who would insist--in the mode of thinking of glasses as an "enhancement"--that people should just "learn to cope" with their nearsightedness, and "use their willpower" (that is, squint).

It seems pretty clear to me that there is a distinction between "things people deserve to have to make them functional" (like glasses) and "things people could use to make them even better" (like, say, a Google Glass headset.) I want to be clear that ADD/ADHD medication should be thought of as the former, not the latter.

(And I didn't vote you down, if you're curious.)

1: http://www.radiolab.org/2009/sep/07/sculptors-of-monumental-...

Oh believe me, I know the mindset. It annoys the hell out of me.

As soon as someone mentions (for instance) hypothetical longevity treatments, some talking head pops up to tell you how it needs to be regulated and probably put on hold while we consider the societal ramifications and how fair it all is and really, philosophically aren't we all 'supposed' to live a certain length of time and that gives meaning to our lives?

And mostly I just want to punch them in the face until they shut up, because people that think like that will be the reason I can't get robot parts and live forever :)

So I can understand if you think it's important to frame the debate in a particular way, though I don't really make the distinction myself between your two categories of things.

That was kinda what I was thinking. If it's already at 5-15%, and severely under-diagnosed, maybe ADHD is just part of the human condition.

That's not to say that treating it then won't be beneficial, but it would be a different angle to look at it from - improving baseline humans through medication, rather than fixing some sort of defect.

Clearly some people suffer more from it than others. The question is, is it more like being short, which no one seems to think requires intervention, or like being nearsighted, which everyone does.

Not to mention that it would pretty fucking cool in a sim-city sense to watch what happens when you give a larger population strong stimulants. I remember watching a fascinating that posed the idea that the enlightenment was a result of caffeine becoming a regular part of the European diet. I wonder if you would see another explosive burst of productivity.

Even if it's under-diagnosed, that doesn't mean it's under-treated. The most common prescribed treatment for AD(H)D is a stimulant-- and how many adults do you know drink coffee, tea or soda for its caffeine properties?