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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

I wake up @ 4AM most days to get my work out in. Walking to the gym gives me a glimpse of a different America. It's mostly men, white guys in my city, they are all middle class looking dudes. Loading up trucks at the nearby grocery or beginning/ending their shift, maybe some security guards once in a while.

There's some homeless people every once in a while but for the most part they don't seem to be active. There are no cars in the streets and it feels like a movie set. Always an interesting hour, 4 AM.

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3am is when the really strange things happen. It's too late for most people to be out after a night at the bar and too early for even the earlybirds to be out and about. The last time I regularly saw 3am was my first couple of years in college when we were experimenting with things that make it tough to sleep.

Makes sense. According to the data sim, from 3:15am to just before 4am, about 96% of people are asleep. So if you're up and about at that time, you're really seeing an unusual slice of the population.

It's like the How I Met Your Mother said: Nothing good happens after 2am!

Curious, do you manage to fall asleep by 8 or 9? I'd love to get up early more regularly, but I find it tough up turn my mind off before the world quiets down.

I try to be in bed by 10 or 10:30.

So are you sleeping 5.5-6 hours per night? Is this just on work days or all the time? How long can you / have you sustained doing this regularly?

Sounds like the Jay Leno gene. Must be nice. I need a solid 8.5 hours otherwise I'm useless.

Mostly on work days (weekdays), throughout the day I have plenty of energy but around 9:30 I start yawning and the exhaustion kicks in. I don't drink coffee or anything to get through the day.

I've known a few people who were fine on 4 hours a night. just the way they were built. for me, less than 7 and I simply can't concentrate on anything all day, til about an hour before my next bedtime...

Scientific evidence matches your anecdotes. There is a very small percentage of people whose genes allow them to only need 4-5 hours of sleep each night. It's somewhere in the low single digit percentages.

For the rest of us, 7-9 hours are required for proper functioning. If we get by on less, we're functioning suboptimally whether we realize it or not.

It's a wonderful time to be out driving on the streets. You often have even the biggest thoroughfares to yourself in a quiet world.

I used to go jogging in the wee hours. There was no traffic, it was cool, and very peaceful.

But after incidents of drunk drivers, people throwing things at me from a car, the cops giving me the once-over, and once hearing a shot fired, I decided it was best to give that up and jog like a normal person.

Like everything else, there's a TED Talk on 4 AM: https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_on_4_a_m

> It's mostly men, white guys in my city

I am sorry, I am not American, though I live here. Does this not in itself contribute to the uncomfortable feelings of women and minorities in your city?

That the people loading and unloading trucks at 4 in the morning are white? How would they even know?

I'm pretty confident that the people who load and unload trucks are mostly men regardless of what time they do it or what country they're in.

This question kind of reeks of the non-American who consumes so much American media that they think their place of origin doesn't have the same characteristics like mostly men out and about at 4am operating the third shift or wandering home drunk.

And I'm not too sure men at work, regardless of race, rank very high on the scale of people you're scared to run into in the early morning, even in your place of origin.

what exactly is an 'active' homeless person

Presumably "not asleep like most people are at 4 AM".

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