Poll: How late do you stay up? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: How late do you stay up?

39 pointsRaphael68 comments

The stereotype of a hacker would be to stay up into the wee hours, perhaps with the only light being the glow of the monitor. But is this the case? Please round to the nearest 2-hour multiple. (Let me know if you need more options.)

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I'm a 10PM sleeper - the morning is a really under-appreciated hacking time. I've found, generally, that 12AM and later hacking sessions both aren't sustainable and aren't as productive as they seem at first glance. Plus, I'm usually so excited in the morning to get working that I have no trouble getting up (around 5am - 7 hours sleep) to start hacking.

Personally, when I was doing the 4AM hacking sessions, I was working on a million problems at once and trying to build rome in a day. Since switching to regular hours, I've learned to appreciate progress, small steps, and sustainable delivery, and have launched 3 side projects somewhat successfully (and higher quality).

I too am a 10PM bed timer, only recently though, it forces me to use the time before bed more productively.

Before I would waste time browsing news.yc, digg, watching videos and reading blogs/news.

Now I try to catch up on blogs whenever I have the chance and place more attention of developing stuff.

Just out of interest; how old were you when you switched to 10PM ?

I am 21 now. I switched a little over 2 weeks ago.

What happened to your social life?

Social life starts way before 10PM. Not everything social is a late-night party.

You miss out on parties, but that's not all. Because sleeping just after dinner is unhealthy (it becomes the equivalent of the late night snack) you also have to move dinner forward to something like 5pm or 6pm. Result - you won't be able to eat with friends anymore.

When you go to bed at 10pm you don't just trade a few night hours for morning hours, your entire schedule has to shift. Don't think that's worth it.

No one has to eat the early-bird special because they get a good night's sleep. Listen to your individual body, not the generalized recommendations of others.

A normal 10pm bedtime does not preclude late nights now and then, anyhow.

Well, to answer your question, not much.

3 out of 4 days Im home around 530. I skateboarding or play basketball with friends for about an hour, eat dinner around 7.

Ill then get down to writing code til around 10, then troll blogs/yc for 15 minutes, shower and end up hitting the sack around 10:30 - 10:45.

Then there is pillow talk with my gf, which probably the pinnacle of my 'social life'. Then Ive got the weekends to hang with friends and stuff.

Does that satisfy your curiousity?

Thanks for the response. I wasn't curious for specifics, I was thinking about the tradeoff between productive and being social in general. That by optimizing your hours for productivity you might lose out on a lot of other stuff.

Glad it works out for you.

I switched over when I recently got a new job. I need to be up at 5:30 to get to work on time, and if I don't got to bed by 10, the next day sucks. Friday, and Saturday though I tend to stay up later.

When I tell people that I wake up usually around 3-4 in the morning, they think that it's from my alarm clock. It often is but at least 1/5 of the time it's because, like you said, I'm just pumped about doing something I'm excited about. "Gotta get that proposal together" or "I need to finish the code on the shopping cart module"...

I consider myself to have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome), though whether it should qualify as a "syndrome" is debatable. I don't need more sleep than the average person, I just need it later in the 24-hour cycle. I wouldn't be surprised if many/most hackers are the same way.

I also think I am in that category. I think it also relates to physical activity (or lack thereof).

So I go overboard on exercise and it helps partially correct that.

This is an interesting look on it... didn't know it was actually a classified disorder. While my sleep cycle is pretty mixed, for the most part I can't sleep during the normal phases of the 24 period. Further, I don't have an exercise problem... I just do it whenever I feel up to it. My sleep cycle started to change rapidly when I worked the graveyard shift for my first professional job... did that for about 3-4 years, which really messed me up sleep-wise.

The one thing I love about night-hacking is the serious lack of distractions. It assists me greatly in concentrating... at least in my neck of the woods there is less distractions.

I read an article that blue light can cause delayed sleep. Apparently, it interferes with the evening release of melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep. The article speculated that the common perception that hackers are night-owls could be caused by staring at a monitor with blue backgrounds, etc. I don't know if its true.

Emissive light sources in general interfere with melatonin. I have a severe melatonin deficiency and I find that avoiding TV, monitors, and bright lightbulbs for an hour before bed helps tremendously in my ability to sleep, in conjunction with a synthesized melatonin medication (Rozerem). Books (and I imagine eBooks with eInk) are fine, but the laptop is not.

DSPS makes maintaining a normal 24-hour schedule painful. (Imagine having to get up one hour earlier every day! That's how a 24-hour schedule feels to me.) I have it and it takes a lot of self-discipline to hold down the 9-to-5 schedule. But it is possible with the right techniques. More info on my experiences at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=205179 .

Coding at night is often better for building large pieces of code because there's no interruption.

Where I work you can watch the SVN commit messages in the dev channel coming by until about 5:00 AM several times a week. I'm on the dev team and do this myself about every other week.

This doesn't mean we're a bad company whipping every last bit of productivity out of people. It just means that sometimes you're on a roll, you're in the zone and you have to keep going. We get that. It's fine. Just don't show up at the office the next day.

Talented developers often are slightly anarchic, neurotic and just a wee bit obsessive. Even the most straight-laced "I only work 9-to-5" developers sometimes make a 4:00 AM commit because "I couldn't sleep and just figured out how we could re-use the token substitution in the webservices interface variables by mapping them to the corresponding domain entity attributes and applying the usual validation rules to them!"

Yeah, we're a model of sanity where I work :)

Generally speaking, as a developer you can start work between 8:00 and 12:00, but if you're just starting here the start time is 8:00 to 10:00 because you need supervision, education and time in pair-programming.

Seriously, morning is the new night. Most hackers I know stay up late, so they're in the office. When I need to concentrate without distractions, I just go in in the morning.

I am in bed by 10 PM and asleep before midnight. The delay is waiting for my girlfriend to wind down. The difference is that until 3 years ago I lived in NZ and finished work at 6PM at the latest. I then commuted home in 30 minutes, and had dinner by 7:30PM. Most of my friends and colleagues did the same. I am still in that routine, except that dinner has been pushed back later, as my girl does not get home until 7:30 at the earliest from work. Her reason for this is that she works for a US company that does not seem to start it's day until 10:30 AM. I can still be home from work on time, because like in NZ my colleagues and I all start around 9 AM.

So I get the feeling that our sleeping habits are becoming driven more from work than social lifes.... especially as you get older.

Currently I am on the East Coast working, yet am still mentally on West Coast time... so I wake up at 3:30 AM and got to bed at 7 PM. And have a headache because of it.

I'm actually in the process of reducing the amount of sleep I get. For most my life, I've lived by an 8-9 hours/night schedule. This summer, however, I took a behavioural neuroscience course and one of the things I've learnt is that most people can reduce their sleep down to 4.5-5.5 hours with only minor side effects.

After starting this experiment about 2 weeks ago, I'm down to 6.5 hours now with no side effects. So far so good.

Can you share a link or describe this a bit?

I think what he is describing is talking about quality of sleep rather than quantity.

I'm no expert, so I'm really just regurgitating something I read awhile ago, so please bare in mind that it is probably not 100% correct, but the seed of the idea is there. I'm more or less going to describe what I've done based off what I've read.

The body only needs a couple of hours of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep to feel fully refreshed, anything over that and you're essentially wasting time.

I'm surviving pretty well on about 4-5 hours a night, it really depends but I find that if you exercise first thing in the morning as soon as you wake up, you do not miss that sleep.

I've actually purchased a recumbent exercise bike so that I can read blogs and forums in the morning while I exercise - this helps me compress my time so that I can get more done during the day.

The most important thing I've found is to ensure you have a consistent pattern for sleeping, otherwise my body will invariably want more sleep as it tries to get back into some sort of pattern.

To aid this, I've had my doctor prescribe me 10mg Temazepam which I think is a fantastic drug. I'm not on a high enough dosage to get hooked, but if need too, I take 1 tablet and it knocks me out fairly easily and unlike other drugs it is not one of those ones that will keep you asleep.

Hope this helps in some way.

I'm no expert on this either; I just studied this section of the book pretty thoroughly :)

What you say is correct, but about SWS ("Slow Wave Sleep", or stages 3 and 4 -- stage 1 being when REM occurs). These are the main recouperative stages.

Eliminating REM sleep (e.g. by waking someone up at the start of a REM cycle then letting them go back to sleep when the cycle would have ended) has little or no effect on alertness the next day, but doing the same for SWS cycles results in symptoms of sleep deprivation.

It has been hypothesized that REM sleep plays a role in strengthening memories, but evidence for this is spotty.

Regardless of how many hours you're asleep, reducing the amount of time spent asleep reduces the amount of REM sleep, but not NREM sleep, making you a "more efficient" sleeper.

The main evidence for long-term sleep reducton comes from studies by Friedman et al. (1977) and Mullaney et al. (1977). In these studies, which covered eight subjects over a period of several months, two reduced their sleep down to 5.5 hours, four down to 5 hours and the remaining two down to 4.5 hours. Below about 6 hours, the subjects reported daytime sleepiness, which increased as sleep was futher reduced. A follow-up study a year later showed that the subjects were sleeping 7-18 hours less per week. With only eight subjects, I'm a bit concerned about the generalizability of this study, but I think it's good enough for my purposes.

Thanks for clearing it up :)

I read some material on this subject several years ago and have been putting it into practice ever since, so the specifics get lost in the day to day usage.

Don't know how you all pull those 4am nights. I used to be able to, then I got a real job that I go into the office for.

But even though we start at 10am, I am in bed by latest at 11pm, wake up at 6:25am every day (yah even weekends), and do all my catching up (blogs, email, etc) twice a day, once in the morning with all my extra time, and once at night sometime after dinner. (Ok and a little bit during lunch hours at work)

I bet you're on your lunch break now ;-)

I have worked until 11:35 PM for the last 20+ years--but it suits me and I enjoy my time awake while my family sleeps. I have always been nocturnal and most productive after dark. Most night's I'm in bed between 4-5 AM. I usually tell people I live on Hawaiian time. I'm in Connecticut.

My sleep schedule drifts forward gradually. Right now, I go to bed around 6pm and wake up around 2am. Tomorrow, it'll probably be an hour later. A couple weeks from now, I'll be going to bed at 6am.

I do find that I'm much more productive when I'm awake during the night. It's probably because there aren't any interruptions and I couldn't run an errand if I wanted to.

I really thought I was the only one. Seriously.

I call it my "sleep clock", one day I'm awake from 10am->11pm, and a week later I'm awake 10pm->11am.

Not good though when you have things planned, you have to make sure your in the right timezone when you need to be.

http://www.xkcd.com/448/

Good afternoon from Kiritimati, Christmas Islands, Kiribati! http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=274

(from the London Timezone)

I'd need a "none of the above" option. I'm not so much a night-owl as an "I don't sleep on a fixed schedule" guy. Often that means I'm awake all night, but not predictably.

Ditto. Though not "not on a fixed schedule" as much as "random bouts of insomnia."

I generally stay up until about midnight; despite being a bit of a night owl I still find that I get tired quickly unless I grab some caffeine.

One hacker I know, however, doesn't fit this list at all; he has a ~24-36 hour day (the second derivative of the length of his day is limited to about an hour, however). This means he might be sleeping in the middle of the day for everyone else.

I have a 30-36 hour long day, and the only way I was able to rein it in and get to where I could sleep normally (I have a sucky non-programming related job that demands I be conscious from M-F 9-5) was to completely change my diet to a more hunter-gatherer style diet and start exercising after work.

On the plus side, i am now the strongest person at my workplace, which amuses me greatly. (Two guys will work together to pick up a 50" TV, I'll pick it up by myself just to freak them out, lol.)

How did you manage that, how many times per day do you sleep?

How did you change your diet? I like the side-effects :)

It is the case for me, but only because I have so much during the day, as a high school student and an athlete. Otherwise I wouldn't push my body like this because its not good for anyone to stay up like that. I just can't keep myself away from making cool things though ;)

Guess that stereotype fits me at anyrate

When I'm on-site consulting I'm a 8PM sleeper. I've found that early to work gives me good productive time to "boot up" and be as perky as possible for the clients. I'm usually up by 4 and on-site by 6ish. If working on a startup, I code for an hour or so in the morning and 3-4 in the evenings (after working 10-11 hours)

When I'm off-contract and working solely on my start-up? Then it's a lot tougher. I've found even as an old fart that I easily push myself into the wee hours of the morning. In fact, I find I'm more productive if I structure my coding -- actually making myself NOT code while I do other things like hit the gym or sleep. But it's a tough haul to do so.

Also I think a follow up poll to this is how much caffeine and sugar do you inhale daily.

If I have a choice around 2-3. If we are crunching at work, anywhere from 2AM - 8AM.

I honestly find that I focus the best in the mornings because everyone else is asleep and I don't have as many distractions.

I work a day job and hack work at night, plus i have a young child, so on a normal day i work for an hour or so when I first get home from work, then dinner/fam time till 9, then skype team meetings and solo work till 12. Then bed. Then up at 5:45 am. This has been a bit rigorous but we are getting it done.

4am is a good quiet and calm time - no distracting noise, no noises, moving cars, speaking people...

No distraction is nice. I wonder though what impressions my customers have if they get emails from me at 5am...

My problem with going to bed at 4am-6am is that it's usually quite hard to get a good midnight snack. At least where I live and going into the kitchen is no option because I'd wake up my whole family. I usually end up eating a powerbar or cereal which probably isn't the best.

4am on a good night; means I've got good momentum going. 2am if there is nothing special happening.

If you're talking about coding, then yes I agree.

Yeah, that is my coding practice. I'm not too good at sustaining other work until 4am.

Same here. I do that all the time. Though sometime its kind of very tiring the next day.

I'm pretty much completely nocturnal. I work the night shift, so my standard bedtime is 9am, and I wake up at 5pm. Occasionally I flip my schedule around, just so I can get some sunlight in my life and run errands.

I had to vote for 'none of the above', since I often stay awake until 26:00 -- I find that if I work 18 hours and sleep 8 hours out of every 26 hours, I can get far more work done.

My most productive time is when the rest of the world is asleep.

Usually until 4 am, but once i stayed until 6 am, went jogging and went to sleep in 8 am, woke up at 8 pm and 2 weeks i've been fixing my sleep schedule because of that.

23:00

Not enough options! I stay up till 8am, sometimes 10am. Other days 1pm! I live around the clock :) Best schedule for a hacker.

Meh, the bell curve has spoken.

It varies a lot for me. When I'm in an exercising phase, it's arond 1 am. Right now, it's 5-6 am.

Frequency around 20:00 - 2:00 should have been one hr. My bet is it peaks at 01:00.

I am very often up until 4am or so... but I'm not a hacker -- I'm a blogger.

I cycle my timezone. It takes a few weeks for each cycle.

I try to end at 2:30...but almost always I end at 3:30

23h30min I will mark 00h since it is closer.

where is 23:00? Having kids kind of keeps you regular.

Is 3.30 AM now!

00:00

I'm asleep right now!

> perhaps with the only light being the glow of the monitor

No way, bad idea, eye strain.

I voted for 06:00.

But then, I don't get up until 2pm, because my partner works the late shift (Because it's quieter!).

Depends i'd say 2:00

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