Show HN: gitdown - prevents you from coding drunk | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: gitdown - prevents you from coding drunk

github.com

60 pointsgklitt25 comments

What is the point of TDD if you are not allowed to code drunk? :D

In light of Mr Kernighan's quote:

> Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

I was advised that one should code stoned, debug caffeinated, and document drunk.

Sure, but who wants to read the FAQ section of a manual whose every answer is "Because fuck you, that's why. Wanna fight about it?"

I was like: "huh, I wonder if there is a quote about the TDD workflow being so good that you can code drunk." so I googl'd for "TDD drunk".

Turns out TDD also stands for Teenage Drunk Driving. :-/

I think TDD was suppose to stand for Tequila Driven Development. I had just heard the term this weekend from a random tweet.

Hmmm. I once coded a tiny app for a bottle of Patron. Wonder if that counts?

They demo'ed this with Listerine instead of real alcohol and it worked well. Honestly I'm tempted to buy a Drinkshield.

Unless they drank enough Listerine to become drunk, I would suggest the opposite.

It isn't measuring BAC very well at all if it is easily confused by someone who has used mouthwash.

EDIT: That's not to say it isn't an awesome project, which it definitely is :)

It's worth noting that swishing Listerine (which does contan real alcohol) will fool police breathalyzers, if you use it minutes before the test. This is why you do a long series of physical coordination tests before finally getting a breathalyzer test when being pulled over:

http://askville.amazon.com/Crest-mouthwash-make-fail-breatha...

Indeed, this is exactly what we did in our demo! We just swished with Listerine and immediately breathalyzed on stage and it worked great.

We found that the Listerine effect seems to diminish quickly after several minutes.

can you get drunk by drinking listerine?

I looked it up and it is about 21% ethanol. Which is more than most drinks I think.

EDIT: On further research it seems that they put stuff into mouthwash to make it undrinkable, in order to prevent abuse and avoid taxes and regulation on alcohol. That doesn't prevent you from ingesting it however. It's just supposed to make it unpleasant.

If it had worked maybe they wouldn't have committed this project in the first place.

Geoffrey and Alex are super sharp hackers and awesome people. Here's a video of them demonstrating the project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnBb1wmHj5k

This is awesome, there's just something that's inherently cool about building things that take physical input using hardware other than a mouse & keyboard.

Sensational, useless.

Killjoy.

This is pretty cool, but why would anyone want to program drunk? Maybe I'll program for a few minutes over the occasional glass of wine as I am gearing down for bed, but full on drunk? No...

You program sober?

Similar project from last year from my friend Adam: https://github.com/akdetrick/ballmer

Well, looks like we weren't the only ones to have this idea!

I think our project fits more naturally into a standard git workflow because the script is automatically called as a git hook. His project does have us beat with displaying messages as rainbow ASCII art though.. :)

When I read the name, I think of Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to say "get down"

When I read your comment, I couldn't help but think of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn3Xp2jkTZQ&t=116

I need something like this for my phone. Nice work Geoffrey and Alex!

This is genius.

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