8 ms·

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation.

• renegade-otter 5mo ago
  Yeah, when you are stuck, put away that red bull and step away from the keyboard, kids.
  • pants2 5mo ago
    This might be why agentic development/vibe coding leads to more burn out. It's been a long time since I've truly been 'stuck' on a problem and needed to sleep on it to figure out the answer. Now I just ask Claude to fix it until it's fixed...
    • malux85 5mo ago
      Then you're not challenging yourself with hard enough problems (those include the set of problems Claude cannot solve)
      • pants2 5mo ago
        Most software doesn't really have "hard enough problems" unless you're working in deep tech. The majority of SWEs are probably working on some sort of SaaS which isn't super challenging for a model like Opus 4.7. Most of the problems I face are on the product side, which I do need to take time to think through, but it's not as challenging as debugging in the good old days.
        • Toutouxc 5mo ago
          How do you go from SaaS to “not super challenging”? The part of a SaaS product that I’m working on uses graph algorithms to work with what’s essentially an interactive form. There’s some mildly university-level computer science stuff and it’s mixed with enough domain expertise that Opus 4.7 is still unable to make even small changes without breaking everything or going against the architecture. So far I’m not that impressed.
          • vovavili 5mo ago
            Are you guys hiring?
        • malux85 5mo ago
          Then get a better, more challenging job. Its your responsibility to make sure you stay sharp and keep growing, by pushing at the edge of capability and stretching yourself. At the gym, the bodybuilder increases the mass of the weights until a workout generates the correct amount of stress, because thats how they get to the next step. Or dont, stay where you are and atrophy, whatever :))
    • krashidov 5mo ago
      FWIW I've had the opposite experience. Whenever I work late the output is absolute garbage. If I work past midnight it takes me 3 hours to get done what would have taken me 30 mins in the morning, and with way less frustration and stress. Your inputs to the LLM are only as good as how fresh your mind is so I've made it a rule to not work past midnight (unless there's an emergency). In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.
    • orky56 5mo ago
      Sounds like polyphasic sleeping might re-emerge as the lifestyle solution. Instead of waiting for agents to complete, you should sleep on the response so when you arise you have the optimized prompt ready to go and a reset on your energy to prevent the burnout.
      • sillysaurusx 5mo ago
        Amusingly this is an almost-exact description of how I work on my current project, sharc. I'm porting Arc to Common Lisp, and implementing as many HN features as I can. I've been documenting as I go with handoffs: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handoff https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof... (Also thanks partly to dang, who is kind enough to find time to answer an email here and there about their current Arc stack.) At one point I was working so hard that Claude actually suggested, all on its own, that I should get some sleep.
      • TheSamFischer 5mo ago
        [dead]
    • card_zero 5mo ago
      Feasibly you could do this work while asleep, the lifestyle of the future.
• nick_ 5mo ago
  AFAIK this is called sleep consolidation.
• jvanderbot 5mo ago
  I can confirm - I woke up to the resolution to my two hardest problems during PhD. Three, if you count "I should look for this kind of inequality" (which did turn out to exist), but I think that's more of an _idea_ than a solution. The hard part is paying attention to it. With enough attention your mind will fix it.
• GuestFAUniverse 5mo ago
  Can confirm this level of problem solving. Had physics problems to solve and can remember to this day when I woke up in the library after I got exhausted from not solving the last one, that my subconscious discovered during sleep that I missed that certain vectors were orthogonal (which was the necessary key insight to solve it).
• usernotused 5mo ago
  Interestingly, I observed the same when I was practicing the drums. I would fail multiple times to reproduce a drumming part, sleep on it, and succeed on the first try the day after.
  • jwrallie 5mo ago
    Difficult parts on videogames as well. It could be attributed to slow response times due to being tired or accidentally memorizing a bad pattern, resting also could help with those.
  • nagaiaida 5mo ago
    yep, same with guitar. go to sleep fumbling through a riff even though you "know" it, wake up playing it smooth as hell
  • qup 5mo ago
    This would happen to me when I played pool. I would master a skill overnight, somehow, and come back to the table the next day leveled up--far better than I had left off the day before.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• npongratz 5mo ago
  That's awesome! I had a somewhat similar experience (shared previously [0]): > I proved a topology theorem in a dream once. > Before I went to sleep, my inability to prove it had been bugging me all day long, and I suspected it'd be featured on the next morning's (way too early) final exam for my university course. I solved it in my dream, woke up, wrote on my whiteboard what I remembered and sure enough, it was correct. I worked it a few more times to cram it into my memory before running to my exam. > To my great delight, the ability to prove that theorem was featured heavily in one of the exam's questions, and helped me do quite well on the exam overall. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40651913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40651913
• MITSardine 5mo ago
  In French, there's a saying: "la nuit porte conseil". Roughly translates to "the night advises", and it means it might be better to sleep on it. I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.
  • toyg 5mo ago
    Literally the same in Italian, la notte porta consiglio. It's in the Bible, in nocte consilium from the Book of Proverbs, but it's likely to pre-date even that by centuries.
  • 8note 5mo ago
    im english, there's "sleep on it"
  • narag 5mo ago
    In Spanish "consultar con la almohada" (consult with the pillow)
  • lesostep 5mo ago
    Bulgarian "утрото е по-мъдро от вечерта" (Morning is wiser then evening)
• hackable_sand 5mo ago
  This is exactly how I learned programming. 10-hour days practicing. Full night sleep afterwards.
• christophilus 5mo ago
  I often wake up realizing I wrote a handful of bugs the day before. They’re obvious to me in the morning even before I sit down and open my laptop. Sleep is a strange and magical thing.
  • jamiek88 5mo ago
    Yes! When I awoke this morning my very first thought was ‘you didn’t connect the ground wire for the heater’. Amazing how our brains work. Went back and sure enough I’d omitted that final connection.
• dwoldrich 5mo ago
  In my 40's I could go to bed with a complex software design or implementation problem I was wrestling with. Consciously word a cogent and succinct question that I needed answered, sleep on it, and then in the morning, I would be still and mentally ask, "well?" Not meditating or anything, just be quiet then and listen. And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer would come to me audibly in my voice in my mind. "Have you tried X?" No, I hadn't tried X, and holy smokes that was a workable approach! Sometimes, it would tell me to go back to some bit of code or configuration I had moved on from and tell me to go back and focus on that, it was almost always right that there was where I had goofed up. I experimented with posing multiple questions and follow up questions. I even asked it how it was that these answers were derived. Strange to reread the above and refer to my own thoughts as 'it'. They were bidden ideas that came from me for sure. But, I disassociate from them because I have no memory of the chain of thought that led to the responses. There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?
  • rdevilla 5mo ago
    > There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind? It's similar to what Jaynes described in his "bicameral mind." Man of antiquity "heard" disembodied wisdom dispensed to him, seemingly at random, from an incorporeal source: "gods." Today we simply regard such pseudo-auditory phenomena as "thought," which may throw light on Cartesian-style equation of "the soul" with "the mind," and enduring mathematical truths with divinity. Following the Bronze Age collapse and the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," human culture is replete with examples of people trying to hear the voices of gods, who were now being crowded out by the conscious, egoic, individualistic mental chatter of the newly developed default mode network - the crying out of the Psalms, elaborate rituals and procedures for invoking divine inspiration in the oracles, various forms of divination, augury, etc. Tarot, properly understood, is not a means for divining the future, but a debugger or reverse engineering tool for probing the internal psychological state of the querent, and hopefully coaxing out these moments of unconscious, unbidden inspiration. Much of modern esotericism is about trying to steer the brain into states of mind where these vestigial, intuitive, subconscious, nonlinear, pattern matching, Kahneman System 1 facilities of thinking, become once again accessible to conscious prompting and dialogue. Jaynes calls this "the induction," the Romans called it "the genius," Thelemites know it as "the knowledge & conversation," and it may be most broadly described as "union with God."
• SCLeo 5mo ago
  People are so different. When I was in college, if I had an unsolved problem, I could not fall asleep.
• rokhayakebe 5mo ago
  "Sleep on it?"
• sqircles 5mo ago
  My biggest road blocks seem to be knocked down with a nice walk / good nights rest, a la "rubber duck debugging." Essentially, stepping away and being able to put a fresh set of "eyes" on the problem with a different perspective, albeit it's just you resetting your own perspective.
• Qem 5mo ago
  That makes me wonder if studying may be more effective right before bed time, despite tiredness from the day, or if it's more effective early in the day, while we're less fatigued.
• mavamaarten 5mo ago
  Yup! All good ideas and solutions to hard problems, after becoming stuck, have come to me after a good night's sleep or after removing myself from the "thinking place" and taking a break. Yes I mean the toilet. Many fantastic ideas come to me on the toilet.