[HN Gopher] Blog posts, sorted by sleep
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       Blog posts, sorted by sleep
        
       Author : breck
       Score  : 126 points
       Date   : 2024-04-07 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (breckyunits.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (breckyunits.com)
        
       | ssgodderidge wrote:
       | Fascinating. I would love to see my breakdown of bugs-per-commit,
       | or words-spoken-in-meetings, compared to sleep to see if there
       | any correlations. Anecdotally, sleep seems to be the number one
       | factor that influences my productivity. More so than diet,
       | exercise, or even mental health.
        
         | marginalia_nu wrote:
         | > Anecdotally, sleep seems to be the number one factor that
         | influences my productivity. More so than diet, exercise, or
         | even mental health.
         | 
         | These are far from independent variables though.
        
         | tiagod wrote:
         | I have chronic insomnia that got worse every year. Eventually I
         | stopped being able to sleep without being absolutely exhausted,
         | usually after 35h or more awake hours. Almost drove me crazy.
         | Paranoia, auditory and visual hallucinations, extreme touch
         | sensitivity, you name it.
         | 
         | Lucky, modern medicine pretty much saved my life. (trazodone,
         | which was combined with mirtazapine a few years later.)
         | 
         | I later was diagnosed with ADHD, and after medication I find it
         | a bit easier to sleep (although I still need the other to have
         | consistent sleep). Biggest problem was my brain just wouldn't
         | shut up (and got noiser and noiser the longer I was awake.)
        
         | ramijames wrote:
         | It took me a long time to get there, but I finally accepted
         | that when I am tired, I shouldn't work. I should rest. The
         | quality of the work that I do when tired is abysmal, and
         | usually requires that it be redone anyway.
        
         | pawelduda wrote:
         | I remember when played a lot of DotA 2, trying to climb the
         | ranks. < 6.5 hours of sleep == significantly more bad plays I
         | wouldn't have made otherwise: forgetting about some important
         | aspect, mistiming an action or reacting too slow. It was a
         | level where I was often matched with competitive players and
         | one mistake often changed the result of the game. In hindsight,
         | I would've been better off just stopping for the day the moment
         | I noticed my performance is garbage, but well, the game was
         | addictive. It was almost always a bad decision to keep playing,
         | but again, I was prone to making bad decisions on such days.
        
       | mft_ wrote:
       | > I think continued progress in the wearable sensor field...
       | 
       | I'm interested in people's general experience with _wearable
       | sensors_ - of whichever type. I wear a Fitbit (mostly for sleep
       | tracking) but it 's mostly a curiosity rather than something that
       | offers meaningful, actionable insights.
       | 
       | And I'm experimenting with deliberately tracking my metrics less
       | in other areas. As a cyclist, it's easy to get sucked into the
       | metrics world, with easy access to HR and power, training plans,
       | and sharing your performances online... but I found I wasn't
       | enjoying the activity of cycling very much. A friend hypothesised
       | that the inherent comparison and competition might be to blame,
       | and suggested to try removing most of the data tracking; it's
       | early days yet though.
       | 
       | > ...is the best bet for improving human health.
       | 
       | I'd posit that avoidance of behaviours which are well-known to
       | cause dierct harm to one's health is probably a better place to
       | start.
        
       | tandav wrote:
       | It's annoying that there's no easy way to export data from the
       | Apple Watch. The only option is to export complete data from the
       | Apple Health app, which results in a large ZIP file. This file
       | takes about 10 minutes of preprocessing before the whole archive
       | becomes available. It would be much better if I could export only
       | the new records, like those from the last day.
        
         | spaceywilly wrote:
         | Sounds like a good idea for an app. I believe all that data is
         | available through HealthKit. ChatGPT it up :)
        
           | 082349872349872 wrote:
           | I believe most of us sleep fewer than 3 times per day, so
           | writing down times and doing a few subtractions and a little
           | data entry once a week should be under 1 min/day to have
           | everything digitised. (that said, https://xkcd.com/1205/
           | suggests it'd be worth spending up to 21 hours to fully
           | automate)
        
         | gcr wrote:
         | It's not quite what you're asking for, but you can retrieve
         | heath records using a Shortcut. I'm not sure if detailed sleep
         | data is retrievable this way, but you at least can get times to
         | bed, times woken up, etc.
        
         | CharlesW wrote:
         | You might find this helpful: "Share your health and fitness
         | data in XML format",
         | https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-your-health-dat...
        
         | stephenbez wrote:
         | I use health auto export and it works pretty well.
         | 
         | https://www.healthexportapp.com/
        
       | CoffeeOnWrite wrote:
       | Sigh, missed opportunity to use sleep sort to do the ordering.
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20151231221001/http://bl0ckeduse...
        
       | Liftyee wrote:
       | Could someone clarify what the writer means by "locked-in" when
       | describing the writing?
        
         | quenix wrote:
         | A state of flow and intense focus.
        
           | 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
           | Sounds like "in the zone"
        
         | sdwr wrote:
         | I take it to mean that his viewpoint is pre-decided and
         | unchangeable.
         | 
         | Weird phrasing though, I've only heard it in a positive
         | context.
        
       | elric wrote:
       | That seems like a really wide range of sleep time. 4.3-10.8
       | hours. I can't image either of those extremes being good for you?
       | 
       | The only times I ever sleep that little, or that much, is after a
       | lot of heavy drinking.
        
         | jzb wrote:
         | Congrats? I can't remember the last time I slept 10+ hours.
         | Probably once in the last few years when I was exceptionally
         | sick.
         | 
         | My range would be more like 3-7.5 hours, with (thankfully) few
         | nights in the 3-hour range. 4.5 is not uncommon, as I am a
         | light sleeper and once I wake up due to temperature, noise, or
         | whatever, I rarely manage to get back to sleep. Fork in the
         | disposal.
        
       | nicbou wrote:
       | Could it be because of a correlation between sleep hours and time
       | off? I'd be more likely to write on a Sunday, and I'd also be
       | more likely to sleep late on a Sunday.
        
       | neilv wrote:
       | I have some (imperfect) sense of how sharp I am at some time, or
       | am likely going to be in the near future, which influences when I
       | tackle tasks.
       | 
       | Algorithm that must be correct? It's not going to be working
       | through that first thing in the morning, nor squeeze it into the
       | 30-minute gap between 2 meetings. And hopefully it doesn't have
       | to be done on that day I didn't sleep well, because I can tell
       | I'm not at my best.
       | 
       | When something that needs hard thinking must be done right then,
       | I can do it (and probably still better than most people, if it's
       | something I'm good at). But I often have the feeling that I'd be
       | thinking of more possibilities, or not making "careless"
       | oversights, were I not fatigued or distracted.
       | 
       | Occasionally, I've pulled off some of my most meticulous work
       | despite being fatigued. But it felt like more exertion than it
       | should, and presumably I wasn't spotting all the opportunities
       | that I would've under better conditions.
       | 
       | That said, as someone who doesn't blog, I don't much filter my
       | more casual, off-the-cuff Internet posts by sleep/sharpness.
       | Actually, Internet posts are more likely to be a morning warm-up,
       | or a break between tasks. Maybe, if Internet posts paid better,
       | I'd start optimizing sharpness for them.
        
       | deathanatos wrote:
       | https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/work-hour-training-for-nurses/long...
       | 
       | Sleep deprivation is basically a form of impairment, but it gets
       | a "this is fine" pass from society in most cases1. I think anyone
       | who has done SRE knows this: I'm an idiot if I'm up at 4a trying
       | to debug something, and the risk of dumb errors is pretty high.
       | 
       | ... what kills me is when people schedule stuff to be done ...
       | basically, while impaired. I work in healthtech, and
       | (considerably ironically, given the article above also coming
       | from healthcare...) providers will schedule migrations at 1 to
       | 4am in the morning. SWE is difficult enough as it is, but you
       | want me to think about IPSec and CGNAT at 1am?
       | 
       | The bad reason given across the industry is always "we can't do
       | it during the day, because that's when users are using the
       | system!" Your processes are broken, then, if you have so little
       | faith in your ability to deploy new stuff. (And it _is_ possible;
       | my company, in healthtech, used to regularly do mid-day
       | deployments, because we had processed in place such that a failed
       | deployment would usually get caught. The ones that didn 't, well,
       | deploying them at 1am wouldn't have made it better. In fact, we
       | had at least one PM from an outage where that it went out _after-
       | hours_ made the outage worse.)
       | 
       | Rimworld (the video game) has an interesting system where pawns
       | have a "consciousness" value; normally is 100%, but things can
       | lower it, e.g., drinking, drugs, brain injuries. A pawn with a
       | lower consciousness value is simply worse at everything. And
       | there are days, and times -- e.g., when I'm sleep deprived after
       | a long night of battling prod -- that yeah, I am definitely
       | operating at like 60% consciousness. Everything suffers as a
       | result.
       | 
       | > _but [where I] was generating a similar amount of tokens,_
       | 
       | > _I can say, "hey, might be interesting ideas here, but don't
       | train too heavily on this"._
       | 
       | ... good grief, just no. I for one do not "generate tokens" nor
       | do I "train" on blog posts. Language like that devalues the
       | abilities of a mind.
       | 
       | 1there are a few spots, like truck drivers, where society starts
       | to care.
        
       | modeless wrote:
       | I want to see a graph of page views vs sleep.
        
       | Dibby053 wrote:
       | I think rather than less sleep causing worse blog posts, both
       | having a common cause is a more likely explanation. For instance
       | stress, or spending too much time writing careless blogposts
       | instead of sleeping :P
        
         | foobarbecue wrote:
         | Yeah... also this person writes about some pretty intense
         | psychological trouble. Seems like their manic episodes are one
         | cause of both poor sleep and aggressive writing.
        
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       (page generated 2024-04-07 23:00 UTC)