A Day in the Life of Americans | Hacker News Reader

A Day in the Life of Americans

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I'd be interested in seeing this with the dot color representing income bracket.

This is really slick. And I'm stunned that 1 out of 3 Americans is sleeping until 8 am. I never would have expected that.

Stunned that its that high, or that its that low?

Well, I'm just going off of my gut, not real data. But I would have thought 33% of Americans still being in bed at 8am would be high.

Of course, the service industry has more flexible schedules - but over the course of the day, by 11pm most people are in bed and by 2 am it looks like just about everybody is asleep. I don't really have deeper insight other than I expected it to be either most people would be up by 7am or more distributed over the course of the day.

At noon, only 3% of Americans are asleep.

Yeah, I also felt that it was high, but the more I think about it the more reasonable it seems. I might have missed it, but I didn't see anything about what day of the week the data was gathered from. If its a mix of both weekend and weekdays, then the wakeup times could end up being an average that isn't really representative of any particular day. I also think that the location can play a large part. I typically get out of bed a bit after 7 during the week, but I am in the Central time zone, so someone with a similar job on the east coast might get up an hour later.

There's a significant time zone effect: http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~magibson/pdfs/sleep_productivity.pd...

Ya, but once you realize the labor participation rate is under 70% it makes sense that a 3rd of America may sleep that late.

Not everyone that participates has a 9-5 job.

I thought that, too, but by noon only 3% of Americans are asleep. By 11 pm most of Americans are asleep. So almost everyone is on roughly the same schedule.

No deep analysis from me, just interesting data.

I really thought Americans were more into sports. It seems weird that not more people are into actually doing sports considering your major sports industry

Sports are 2-3% for a long portion of the day. This is actually quite a lot; consider that a person will exercise for < 1h, and maybe not every day.

Do you mean sports fans or actively playing sports? Because there is a big difference.

Love that "Wake up" is 6:00, 6:30, 7:00, 7:30 precisely. So regular, so predictible.

We really need to learn to listen to our natural sleep cycles.

Well, it's a survey; the vast majority of the time I wake up 'unaided' between 06:40-07:20 (I have my alarm clock set to 7:30 as a fail-safe), but if you'd ask me what time I wake up, I'd say "around 7am", which then would be recorded as a precise value.

I was more impacted by the fact that every hour, on the hour, there's a pretty significant shift. Of course, 5pm is the big explosion, but pretty much we live our lives based on the clock.

"Leisure" is very consistent throughout the day and even at night.

There are a few which actually wake up at 3 and 4 am for leisure; I wonder what they're doing.

Hanging out on HN.

I can't speak for all of them but I'm up at 3-4 ever day because work starts at 4 and I have two non consecutive days off so on my days off if I sleep in I can't get back to sleep early enough that night. Which means that yeah on my days off I'm waking up and leisuring by 4 am.

Is that time flow using JavaScript? Pretty nifty.

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