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Comment by burnte | Hacker News Reader

HIV doesn't kill you, but it creates circumstances where other things will. Sleep is the same. You may not die from lack of sleep, but you die from the things it can cause. Effectively there's no difference.

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I’m shocked by how careless everyone here is about their definitions, and their science. Sleep isn’t the same as HIV. It’s in fact so hard to kill something with a lack of sleep that it’s never once been observed in vertebrates outside of one specific rat study, and that rat study couldn’t conclusively identify sleep as the cause of death.

For something so incredibly difficult to do (die from lack of sleep) it’s frankly crazy that most people here are saying it like it’s fact.

I'd probably kill myself after a couple of days without sleep. Would the lack of sleep be the cause of death or the cause of the cause of death?

A knife doesn't kill you, what kills you is the blood you lose after you get stabbed.

Lack of sleep doesn't kill you / does kill you in the same sense.

Bullets don’t kill you, it’s the bleeding that gets you. Wait, no, it’s not the bleeding since you could just put an IV in, it’s the loss of blood pressure. No wait, it’s not the loss of blood pressure since we can reattach severed limbs that have been at 0/0 for hours. It’s the lack of oxygen to the brain and other vital organs. Bullets definitely don’t kill you /s

> I’m shocked by how careless everyone here is about their definitions, and their science. Sleep isn’t the same as HIV.

I do not believe this analogy really confused you. No one is saying they're the same and you're well aware of that.

As to the factual nature of the argument, I'll let you argue with Harvard Brain Institute, as I have no interest in this debate. https://brain.harvard.edu/hbi_news/why-severe-sleep-deprivat...

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