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Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

Funny part to me is that I fully assumed that this was a post about hacking Eight Sleep beds by someone who didn't want to explicitly name the company, presumably for vague legal reasons.

Then I got to a picture of an apparently real "Number Sleep Hub" and my mind was blown. WTF are we in a timeline so weird that there are two companies making water cooled beds, one is called Eight Sleep and the other is Sleep Number? It's like the RNG for this instance had a bad seed.

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Sleep Number gets its name from the firmness controls on their mattress. You pick your "sleep number" and your partner picks theirs on the other side of the bed.

You assume it's a funny coincidence, I'd say Eight Sleep picked a name that as a easy to confuse with Sleep Number as they could without getting immediately sued.

Sleep Number the brand has been around I think since the 80s? Never had one personally but definitely an old brand though maybe if you are not in the US you would never have heard of them.

Nah, Sleep Number beds are basically just an "air bladder" (aka a giant vaguely mattress-shaped rectangular bag) that sit in a tomb of foam.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pMiTq6YkJ2c/maxresdefault.jpg

People are literally paying a couple grand for a fancy adjustable airbed with some foam on top of it.

I get your point but is there a significantly cheaper alternative? As far as DIY goes, I don't think I'd be able to replicate a "Sleep Number" bed with my air mattress and foam.

The cheaper alternative is a regular mattress.

I was forced to buy one against my will. The new models are significantly better than they once were and it feels like a regular bed now rather then two air mattresses with some loosely arranged foam dividers. They've dumbed down the app and made the data reporting worse but it used to give decent stats on breath and heart rates.

I had never heard of either so thought the title was a metaphor for "how to get root access to your brain to improve sleep quality"

I sure hope these beds have tactile controls you can feel and use in the dark, and don't require pulling out a smartphone in front of your face while trying to sleep to adjust them, because bed/matress manufacturers for sure must know what is good and bad for sleep quality

The older models had a corded control with a red led display that didn't destroy your eyes at 3am.

I agree the interface should be simple to operate in the dark without being blinding, but I’m left wondering how common late-night adjustments are. I imagine it tends to be pretty “set it and forget it” for most people.

People are beginning to forget about waterbeds, thus allowing space for doing something weird with beds again, I assume.

It turns out naming things is an unsolved problem outside of computer science as well.

Also in computer science, if one looks at all stupid product / framework / language names.

> two companies making water cooled beds

Sleep Number aren't water cooled I don't think.

There’s actually another company called SleepMe (or maybe that’s the product…?) that makes a mattress cover that’s water cooled (or warmed)

As a night shifter it’s completely life changing in allowing me to sleep comfortably during the day. 100% worth the price to me

There's also BedJet, who makes a fancy-pants bed blower for between your sheets. It's running on an esp32 inside of itself to control the heater and the blower and the remote control, but they didn't quite make it as smart as I'd like.

Fortunately I can just use the ESPHome Bedjet module (https://esphome.io/components/climate/bedjet.html) and just yell out in the middle of the night if I'm too cold.

I didn't read the article, so I too thought the title was something unrelated and ridiculous.

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