Break Up the Tech Giants? No, Just Level the Field - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-11/break-up-the-tech-giants-no-just-level-the-field <comment><USER2> TL;DR _The tech monopoly problem is because Silicon Valley has convinced regulators these firms are entirely new things, not subject to existing rules. Google+Facebook+Amazon+Uber+etc should (a) pay their full corporate taxes and (b) be treated like utilities. For example, if Facebook were a media company, they 'd be liable for user content._

Uber flaunting taxi regulations is a special case (IMHO).

Outside of that, be careful what you ask for. In the US, certain utilities are absolutely NOT liable for user content. If you use a cell phone to plan a crime, Verizon is not liable for what is said or written.

I do think the emerging tech monopoly is a problem (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook), but it's not because of lack of application of old regulations to new use cases.

It's because: technology moves quickly, there are strong network effects, and law+regulations have failed to adapt quickly enough.

<comment><USER3> I love how people are now all of a sudden defending the "Taxi regulations" as if an artifical monopoly that was serving no one's best interests except for the monopoly was somehow a great thing. It's a lazy argument, especially for HN where old industries with arcane rules are meant to be broken. I guess you don't remember how shitty taxis were pre-Uber, when calling a cab 1 hour before you needed it was required, and you wouldn't know if they would actually come or not. And after waiting 1 hr they didn't come, you would be shit out of luck.

Meanwhile, in every city where Uber pops up transportation gets better. Taxi monopolistic laws were meant to be disrupted, and I'm glad Uber has done it.

<comment><USER4> > you don't remember how shitty taxis were pre-Uber

I don't remember that, because I live in a country that doesn't have awful taxis, and where Uber has little to offer except dubious insurance status.

<comment><USER3> You probably never use taxis in Vancouver then and/or you don't understand the value proposition that Uber brings. There are tens of thousands of people in SF alone that now earn money that previously didn't, and customers that have a much better transportation option that they are willing to pay for.

[https://www.bcbusiness.ca/vancouver-has-fewer-taxis-than- any...](https://www.bcbusiness.ca/vancouver-has-fewer-taxis-than-any-other- canadian-city)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _If the companies are merely facilitators and marketplaces, they should treat everything and everyone using them exactly the same._

That's a really interesting proposition and one that I think bears looking at.

Facebook and Google are effectively trying to become privately owned utilities, aka natural monopolies, for access to the internet. Facebook with their internet.org and google with googlefiber. So there is a case to make there for those companies being looked at like utilities.

However I'm not sure how Amazon fits that narrative. Amazon Marketplace is a tiny chunk of their sales revenue, despite it becoming the largest part of their fulfillment. AWS isn't infrastructure in the same way as facebook and google are trying to do.

I think it's too far a reach politically - they can't even get ISP's classified as utilities.

I think the major problem here is that because these companies don't need to operate from a fixed location in the same way a steel mill, power plant etc... would that there isn't really that many ways that the government can muscle them. They feel the pressure and they just pick up and move (legally first) or shift workers around. So regulators don't have a framework for how to muscle these companies in the same way as old industry.

<comment><USER6> Hasn't Google Fiber stopped expanding? Many people in America are still stuck with Frontier, Century Link, etc.

<comment><USER7> And ironically, if anything Google Fiber didn't create a monopoly for Google; it pushed other ISPs to increase their quality of service for consumers. I say this as someone who recently was able to get fiber-to-the-home from CenturyLink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Software patents are the real problem here_.

The tech giants have locked competitors out of using their technology using government patents. Amazon held a patent on "1-click checkout" from 1997-2017. Google has patented ALL of the good web search algorithms.

[https://qz.com/1057490/a-patent-that-helped-amazon-take- over...](https://qz.com/1057490/a-patent-that-helped-amazon-take-over-online- commerce-is-about-to-expire/) [http://searchengineland.com/google-granted- patent-for-panda-...](http://searchengineland.com/google-granted-patent-for- panda-algorithm-187573)

We as a society to move past patent regulations, they are artifacts of the industrial revolution and are abused by powerful corporations. Without a team of lawyers, a simple website will be sued out of existance.

<comment><USER9> While I agree with you about patents being the problem, I'm not sure that moving past patents entirely is the solution.

Can you think of a better way to fairly incentivize and compensate innovators while solving the problem at hand?

<comment><USER10> I think the main problem with patents is their duration. 20 years is absurdly long for the software space. It _may_ be justified for physical objects since making a hardware patent into a marketable product usually requires more investment and time to get to market (e.g. to design and build a factory producing the product), but in software, a 20-year-old product is usually already on display in some museum.

If I had to make a change to software patents _right now_ , I would shorten them to five years. Maybe less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The anticompetitive effects of the near-monopolies enjoyed by companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon preventing other players from entering their markets, and the anticompetitive effects of them using IP and tax loopholes to pay little or no tax are two different problems. We obviously need to fix the latter, but this article does nothing to address what could even be done about the former.

</comment><comment><USER12> Uber's ability to skirt cab regulations in particular has always baffled me. They've always argued that their drivers are independent contractors, not employees, and that they merely facilitate the arranging of rides & fare payments. If that's actually the case, then how are the drivers not textbook cabbies? How does a driver using an app to receive requests for rides differ at all from a driver using a phone dispatcher to receive requests for rides? I can't think of any difference that should exempt Uber drivers from submitting to the same regulations as regular cabbies other than the argument that existing regulations are obnoxiously burdensome and often protectionist.

<comment><USER13> Taxis are allowed to pick up people that are hailing them on the street. Uber works much a like a private car company does - you call them and they send a car. So it is different than a taxi. The difference between uber and a private car company is that uber can respond as fast as a taxi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Some 45 percent of American adults get news from Facebook. Google's search > market share in the U.S. approaches 86 percent. About 43 percent of all > online retail sales in the U.S. last year went through Amazon.

Why is this a problem? No one forces people to get news from Facebook, search results from Google, or online purchases from Amazon. If any of these companies does or starts doing something that is truly detrimental to consumers, the switching costs are low for all of those products, and there are plenty of competitors ready and able to steal marketshare if they can offer better alternatives.

Some people worry about monopolies, but I don't - they only have power when I choose to give them my money (unlike governments who keep power by force). I worry about society being lulled into the enticing-but-false narrative that we need more regulation in every corner of our lives.

<comment><USER15> > Some people worry about monopolies, but I don't - they only have power when > I choose to give them my money

So if you live in rural Alabama and only Comcast services your area, because they're a monopoly, and your tech job requires internet what are you to do as an individual?

1) Further the monopoly and buy Comcast internet

2) Decide to not have internet and inevitably lose your job

3) Try to compete, but fail to have the start-up costs as you're a small player.

<comment><USER14> Comcast isn't the problem, but the regulations making it more difficult for competitors to operate in many local markets _are_ a problem. The governments are literally creating the anticompetitive problems you describe.

<comment><USER15> That's irrelevant. You said that you don't worry about monopolies. They're clearly a problem, regardless of _why_ they exist.

<comment><USER14> It sounds like you're only looking at half of what I said. I don't worry about _monopolies_ themselves because if the market were left alone, they wouldn't be a problem. But I _do_ worry about anticompetitive practices enabled by unnecessary regulation. That's exactly what is allowing Comcast to abuse power in certain markets. Hence, the problem lies _not_ in monopolies, but in the government.

<comment><USER16> > ...if the market were left alone, they wouldn't be a problem.

That's an interesting claim. What evidence do you have that supports it?

<comment><USER14> Historically, if we look at societies with more market freedom vs those with more government control, it's pretty clear which ones do better. If you don't believe that, you may want to try living in Venezuela or North Korea.

<comment><USER16> It's not at all clear actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting article. I don't think Facebook or Google set out originally to be newspapers, but the author of this argues that that is essentially what they have become and they should therefore be subject to the same regulations and taxes as all ad-driven media businesses. Makes sense to me. I think we all cheered them when they were using technology to seemingly turn the archaic media company model on it's head (and give us "free" services), but when it came time to pay back investors Google and Facebook quickly adopted the same old model of selling advertising space.

<comment><USER18> I think they stumbled into being media companies out of naivety and not understanding, initially anyway, that they had duplicated a media company business model with everything except the content generation. they simply replaced the content generation part of the business model with what was being given to them, for free, on the internet by users and other original content creators.

when they dropped their initial naivety and took stock of what their business really was it was sufficiently obvious to them that they were media companies and that selling ad inventory was their business. they now fully embrace being media companies but are able to do so in a way that has, at least so far, evaded the traditional cultural and legal regulatory frameworks that other media companies deal with. I think this era will come to an end rapidly though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > If it is recognized that Facebook is a media company, it will be legally > liable for its content.

Yes, and to add to that: Facebook is _also_ a telecommunications company (their WhatsApp provides a messaging and voice platform). As such, they should open their network for competition. And they should not be allowed to harvest private information about users.

</comment><comment><USER20> There are a largish number of issues converging here. Broadly the naive idea that power and control is used for good needs to be jettisoned. It only seeks its own concentration with negative outcomes for everyone else, and thus requires societal intervention before it becomes a problem.

Neither Google or Facebook are innovative. Search is not innovation, for Google efficient, yes. Facebook is timing. The bulk of the hard work in computing is the result of decades of work by academics funded by the public. TCP/IP is the innovation. So market fundamentalists prone to come in when all the hard work is done and see perfect markets everywhere have little ground for complaints about innovation.

You can already see abuse of power in Google and Facebook. Zuckerberg's political ambitions will prevent egregious bad behavior for now but that just underlines the potential for abuse.

There are other issues too. Lobbying, inability to apply anti-competitive laws - amp is a glaring problem, and the wild west situation with tracking and user data, there needs to be some control and constraints here. You need to create a level playing field where disruption becomes possible and problems can be addressed by market forces before they take the field with them.

<comment><USER7> I honestly don't know how you can say that Facebook and Google are not innovative companies.

Googles search beat out lots of other companies. Their search was innovative, their business model was innovative.

Facebook convienced millions (billions?) of people to share their information on the internet. That's not innovative?

You're effectively saying that the person who has the initial idea is the innovator, not that one that brings it to success. I'd argue that if anything it's the successful implementor that's innovative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article mentions nothing of the most important problem we have yet to solve. Who is liable for protecting private data?

The way it works right now is that everyone is basically agreeing to publish any information when they use these platforms. If Facebook, Apple or Google leaks this information they are not legally liable. For the ad-based revenue models they couldn't be, their entire business model is selling this information!

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't the problem partly the global economy, where the US benefits from having those behemoths within their borders? If the US government would take regulatory measures against those companies, some other government would gladly take their position.

</comment><comment><USER22> Utilities:

\- Comcast

\- Verizon

\- Time warner cable

\- Power and water companies

Tech giants:

\- Google

\- Facebook

\- Microsoft

Do you want your tech companies to be more like your utilities, or your utilities to be more like your tech companies? Personally, i'd very much prefer the latter. Tech companies have monopolies granted by superior user experiences. They are deeply afraid of losing that superiority. Utility companies have government granted monopolies - they fear only changing regulation. Companies align with their incentives. If they do not, they will be replaced by those that do. I'm much more comfortable with a company who's monopoly rests on the back of my happiness, personally.

</comment><comment><USER23> There is not a problem with "tech monopolies." As new tech emerges, new platforms, new ideas, the market WILL be disrupted.

For example.

1\. Google emerged in a market where there were dominate search engines, such as Alta Vista. 2\. Facebook emerged in a market where MySpace was dominating. 3\. Facebook is disrupting Google.

etc.

I firmly believe that the market is ripe and ready always for new ideas and tech. Are you going to be able to build a better search engine than Google? Probably not because it works well. Google will be disrupted in some other way we haven't considered, maybe AI.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I do believe some type of AI has a decent chance at disrupting google. Their current infrastructure is very good, and is their competitive advantage. But if some algorithm doesnt need that infrastructure, and provides a much better experience than google, they can be dismantled. All tech companies eventually get disrupted.

<comment><USER25> >All tech companies eventually get disrupted.

Why do you believe this?

<comment><USER24> Three reasons:

1.) The inherent mediocrity in large bureaucracies. They always turn mediocre. People inherently form factions within corporations and become politicians. This destroys the old culture and creates adverse incentives.

2.) Technology is always evolving at a massive pace. Old infrastructure in a large company becomes a burden, and stifles innovation. Startups are built to seize opportunities with new technology.

3.) Which tech companies that have historically been dominant since the 80s are still dominant? Intel? IBM? AOL? Yahoo? Microsoft (maybe but still somewhat irrelevant). Apple may be the only company, but they are in a different game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > If it is recognized that Facebook is a media company, it will be legally > liable for its content, and it will be forced to keep better track of > fraudulent anonymous usage, like U.S. political ads placed by foreign > customers.

What is exactly fraudulent about U.S. political ads placed by foreign customers?

<comment><USER10> The weirder part of this statement is that they count "political ads [being] placed by foreign customers" as "anonymous usage". If it's anonymous, how do they know they were foreign?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Competition is a wonderful thing. I'm not sure new regulations are needed, I'd rather see existing ones applied where they are applicable.

</comment><comment><USER28> Good old-fashioned anti-trust enforcement would make me so happy, right now.

</comment><comment><USER29> Competitive advantage/network effect/moat too big? Ask the government to pave over it!

Feels almost inevitable to me after phrasing it this way.</comment>


MongoDB Finds A Major Adopter In Craigslist - <AUTHOR> http://java.dzone.com/news/mongodb-finds-major-adopter <comment><USER2> The link should probably be to this page:

[http://blog.mongodb.org/post/5545198613/mongodb-live-at- crai...](http://blog.mongodb.org/post/5545198613/mongodb-live-at-craigslist)

</comment><comment><USER3> This video is a presentation by Jeremy Zawodny, who co-wrote O'Reilly's "High Performance MySQL" ( <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101718> ). If there's anybody worth watching a video about switching from MySQL to MongoDB, it's that guy.

<comment><AUTHOR> For a direct link to the 34 min video: <http://www.10gen.com/video/mongosv2010/craigslist>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A bit off topic, but since Jeremy seems to be in here, I've been wanting to thank you for High Performance MySQL - it's one of the best technical books I've read in recent years, with a lot of insights that had been hard/impossible to piece together definitively by reading online articles/docs alone. It has taken a lot of uncertainty out of things for me as a dabbling db admin trying to scale.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's mind-blowing to read that they could get data in mongoDB faster than to get it out of MySQL. I wonder if their structure was so complex or if the queries were complex as well, or is mongoDB that fast? Anyway, great to see sites like this embracing new technologies and revealing the details.

[edit] I guess watching the video explains a lot more. Do watch!

<comment><USER6> Yes, it is a bit mind-blowing. The only DB boxes I can consistently get data out of at a high rate are those with Fusion-io cards in them. And we're not heavily normalized--just a handful of tables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recently went to a Google Tech Talk on MongoDB, and although the presentation wasn't very hacker oriented, I must say the setup of replication sets and sharding is ridiculously easy ([http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Simple+Initial+Sharding+...](http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Simple+Initial+Sharding+Architecture)). I started up a project using CouchDB and Redis, but was impressed enough with Mongo's scalability/ease of use that I think I might switch over to MongoDB for a bit.

</comment><comment><USER8> The big tests for Mongo are how well it behaves under heavy load, how easy it is to shard/replicate data at large scale (e.g. what Zawodny was talking about in his presentation about Craigslist having 100 MySQL boxes), and to what degree data is recoverable when inevitable failures happen (there are some big questions here with Mongo since it appears it trades off ACID compliance for speed).

It's great to see bigger users using Mongo because that's where these tests really take place. For example, it seems Cassandra got tested this way at Facebook/Reddit/Digg etc. and didn't cut it.

<comment><USER9> Pretty much all distributed databases trade off ACID for speed, it's a fundamental issue with database design.

If you've got 20 database servers, potentially on the other side of the planet from each other, if you were to be ACID compliant throughout the cluster, each write commit would be delayed up to 500ms or more.

If you're running a pair of servers in the same room, as is normally the case with a traditional "active-active" database cluster, a network delay of 1ms often isn't a significant impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not to take away from the substance of the article itself, but is anyone else surprised that they have 2 billion "documents", which presumably means active ads/listings? That seems like an awful lot.

<comment><USER11> MongoDB is being used for historical archiving, not for the live site itself. The big reason being that changing table schemas for very large sets of old data is painful with MySQL. So the 2 billion number would be any ad/listing older than a set amount of time.

The live data is < 1 TB and is still stored in MySQL.

<comment><USER6> Exactly.

The "set amount of time" typically hovers around 60 days, though our archiving process has been off for several months while the migration took place. So we have some catching up to do--somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million postings, last I counted.

<comment><USER12> I've been hearing some good things about Riak lately and their masterless implementation seems quite interesting. Did Riak ever make your radar and, if so, what were the disadvantages that made you choose MongoDB?

Were I to guess based on the video, I would say lack of a Perl client and you'd probably end up having to roll too many of your own solutions on top of it?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google's Burrito Delivery Drones Have Officially Started Testing in Virginia - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/googles-burrito-drones-have-officially-started-testing-1786595845 <comment><USER2> Hah, Burritos are probably the perfect test for this. Small, heavy enough, an even weight distribution, and, are time sensitive - nobody wants a cold burrito. It'll be interesting to see where this tech goes in say 10 years.

And... I'm now craving a burrito. Damn!

<comment><USER3> I'd also point out that Virginia tech's campus is fairly rural flat terrain so the risk of running into anything or getting shot down by miscreants is pretty low.

<comment><USER4> I'd say VT students are more likely than your average American to build some sort of burrito interceptor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.doenercopter.de/](http://www.doenercopter.de/)

Similar, in Germany :)

</comment><comment><USER6> What about Pinboard's Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, the hyperloop solution to this problem?

<comment><USER7> It took me many years to realize that Maciej was the author of that brilliant article.

For those who haven't seen it, [http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda- weehawken_burri...](http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda- weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm).</comment></comment>


Keybase Has Left the Building - <AUTHOR> https://peergos.org/posts/keybase-left-building <comment><USER2> I agree with this article, and this lifecycle of social networks is what I am trying to address with my project.

With many other services, instead of being acquired and shut down, they grow to be bloated and filled with advertising.

I allow data export in plaintext format, and I use the very well supported PGP for user identities, with a simplified interface.

The source code is up there. Though I have not yet chosen any license, I'm leaning towards GPL + Artistic, like Perl.

And it is decentralized, allowing anyone to clone and fork an existing forum, and later selectively syncronize.</comment>


BeamNG.drive: Real Time Soft-Body Physics Racing Simulator - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/app/284160/ <comment><USER2> OMG it is awesome! Any plans to OS X support?</comment>


One-Way Salesman Finds Fast Path Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/one-way-salesman-finds-fast-path-home-20171005/ <comment><USER3> There's an old, nice, simple, somewhat similar piece of work by Karp: For the cities, use one of the two usual, simple, fast algorithms to find a minimum spanning tree, and then do a depth first traversal of the tree just declining to revisit a city already visited. Turns out that in Euclidean spaces (right, the symmetric problem) this simple device has some astoundingly good convergence properties as the number of cities grows. Having lots of cities is where the usual combinatorial optimization techniques, worst case, go exponential, and the work by Karp works great in just those cases.

In effect, roughly, due to the subtrees nearest the leaves, Karp's technique also works with _clusters_ of cities maybe something like in the OP.

</comment><comment><USER4> This [1] seems to be the paper they are referring to on arxiv.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.04215](https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.04215)

</comment><comment><USER5> > The computation of the single best answer for what is known as the traveling > salesman problem is famously infeasible.

I think this statement is not true. TSP can be solved to optimality when the number of cities is small^. GuRoBi and CPLEX's mixed integer solvers can solve TSPs when the number of cities is small. In fact [1] gives the largest TSPs solved. Now solving them fast is a totally different question and I feel like this distinction needs to be made

^ in a reasonable amount of time.

[1] [http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/pla85900/index.html](http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/pla85900/index.html)

<comment><USER6> 85,900 is a small number of cities? The US has 19,354 "incorporated places", which balloons to around 35,000 if you include unincorporated towns.

<comment><USER7> You know tsp doesn't just mean cities or actual sales people right?

It can apply to lots of things like 3d printer head or other toolpath optimization and hundreds of other problems maybe millions

<comment><USER8> Obviously -- but that's not what the article is arguing is impossible.

<comment><USER9> Infeasible, not impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why can't the asymmetric version of TSP be re-coded into TSP but with twice the number of nodes, each of which have a "distance" of zero to their counterparts?

Ahhh, I think I've just noticed the fatal flaw here - it makes the graph directed. Perhaps fiddling with the notion of +0 and -0 might fix it ... 8)

<comment><USER11> It can, see eg Bill Cook's "in pursuit of the traveling salesman." I've also wondered how this approximation algorithm relates to the standard asymmetric to symmetric transformation. I should read the paper I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It appears to me that what they've accomplished is to devise an algorithm that can, in polynomial time, find a solution to the ATSP with cost no worse than a constant multiple of the optimal solution.

Can any domain experts confirm or deny my interpretation?

<comment><USER13> This is correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Worth noting here is that the approximation factor here is 5500. (I.e., the algorithm is only guaranteed to return a route whose length is no more than 5500 times that of the optimal route.) Much bigger than 3/2! But apparently it's the first polynomial-time constant-factor approximation algorithm at all for it, so...

</comment><comment><USER15> Any applications for this algorithm, besides the one mentioned in the article?

<comment> jon-wood The situation I've had to apply the travelling salesman problem to, and probably the one its most applicable in, was delivery logistics. Given a list of deliveries that need to be made, and the time windows in which they'd been booked, what is the optimal order in which to make those deliveries?

This problem gets particularly interesting when being applied to deliveries between 4pm and 10pm in London, because you have to start taking into account things like rush hour traffic, road closures, and football matches. You also occasionally have to make tradeoffs like deciding whether it's better to deliver 4 small orders a little late, or one large order _really_ late - <USER2> those situations we could reschedule those orders and allow the routing system to generate a new route.

<comment><USER16> I know this is grossly simplifying but it seems the algorithm works exactly how a sane delivery company would work.

Imagine a company in Paris that has multiple UK deliveries coming up. First let's lump together all the deliveries in London. Then let's lump together all the deliveries in South London, then let's lump together everything in neighborhood Foo in South London. Then the routes you worry about are your longest ones, like getting to London or into London in the first place. This makes the assumption that it's quicker to get from a spot in South London to neighborhood Foo than it is from South London to say Leeds.

It didn't appear to me from this article that any consideration was given to large late orders or what you mentioned, but that would up the complexity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of Google's public transport routing algorithm.

[https://research.googleblog.com/2016/03/an-update-on-fast- tr...](https://research.googleblog.com/2016/03/an-update-on-fast-transit- routing-with.html)</comment>


Show HN: (Baseball fans) Distance and Vid link of all Home Runs hit yesterday - <AUTHOR> http://www.mlbdailyhomeruns.com/ <comment><USER2> Nice job. One suggestion: for the video links, I suggest you go direct to the video file. For example:

[http://mediadownloads.mlb.com/mlbam/mp4/2016/06/09/792222083...](http://mediadownloads.mlb.com/mlbam/mp4/2016/06/09/792222083/1465442719365/asset_2500K.mp4)

You should be able to grab the full video URL, depending on how exactly you're getting the data in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ohh I like that a lot. Going to explore now to see if I can make it happen. One question, where did you grab that link from? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is great. Obviously filtering by fans and teams would be awesome - I just want to sit back and watch a playlist of all Cubs homeruns for the year.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, I can understand that. The Cubs will definitely have a lot! I'll keep this in mind while I work on updating it

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. It would be great though to be able to see any recent date.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely.. That's something I'm working on for v2.0. Thanks for the feedback :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really neat! Do you plan to add more plays?</comment>


Ask HN: When to disclose RSI in applying for a new job? - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
First time posting here, so please be gentle!
tl;dr - I have RSI in my forearms and wrists. I get flare ups that slow me down, but on average it is manageable. I am looking for a new job. When/how do I let my prospective employer know?
About ten years ago I injured my wrists and forearms really bad. It was so bad that I couldn't open a door without excruciating pain. I was working only 10 hours a week at the time, so somehow i hung onto my job and after a year was able to up my hours to 25/week. About 5-6 years ago, I was healed enough that I could actually type pretty normally, but I stayed part time until about 8 months ago. Going full time has worked out ok.
I get flare ups now and then that slow me down to the point where I will consciously try to avoid typing as much as practical. It usually takes 2-3 days for the flare up to subside, but can be up to several weeks. At my current job I telecommute, and have several hour+ meetings (ie: no typing), and some days there's just not a lot of work to do, so it has been really easy. The problem is I am bored out of my mind, and unhappy at work--I've been stagnating for a couple years now. I've been itching to find a new job, but I'm worried that when I find one, it'll wind up being too much for me, and then I'll be out of luck and unemployed with a family to provide for.
Even with these concerns, I'm unhappy enough at my current job that I have started looking, and already have some phone screens scheduled this week. At what point do I need to bring up my RSI issues to my prospective employer? Has anyone gone through a similar experience?
Thanks!
ps - I'm having a flare up right now, so forgive me if I am not very vocal in the comments. <comment><USER2> Assuming you are in the U.S., this FAQ on the Americans with Disabilities Act as it pertains to job applicants may be of use to you: <http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/jobapplicant.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd disclose during the first or second interview. Assuming whatever job you're gunning for requires a lot of typing...

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I could have mentioned that I am a software developer... so yes, there will be at least a bit of typing. :)</comment></comment>


Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme - <AUTHOR> https://trickle.app/drip/24112-polyphasic-sleep-takes-napping-to-the-extreme/ <comment><USER2> Having recently experienced raising an infant, let me tell you, getting all my sleep in <2 hour chunks is HORRIBLE, even if I'm getting a pretty reasonable total amount of sleep.

I was getting what this article suggests would be a viable polyphasic sleep schedule (total of 8 hours per 24 hour period, in chunks of 1-2 hours throughout the day and night whenever the baby slept), but I started hallucinating, got deeply depressed, and felt like I was losing touch with reality. All the symptoms vanished as soon as I started getting longer chunks of sleep at night.

<comment><USER3> Everybody's situation is different but in our case we did sleep training around 4 months and we had whole night sleep from then on - with a few minor regressions and a bit more training.

My wife found letting the baby cry out very difficult so I did have to be quite firm about it...

But my daughter is 8 now and doesn't seem the worse for it ... As far as I can tell.

Edit: only mentioning this in case anyone is in despair and wants to try something different.

<comment><USER4> Sleep training, so that's what they call it now.

My mom tells me it was standard practice back when I was born, they used to say it was good for their lungs as well, but she couldn't do it either.

They will eventually shut down in self-defense to escape the terror of being abandoned by their parents.

All I can say is it doesn't sound like a very good idea to me, no matter how convenient.

<comment><USER3> I think "convenient" may be a mild understatement. Many parents are enduring serious mental health issues because of their inability to sleep. I should say that was not our case.

> They will eventually shut down in self-defense to escape the terror of being > abandoned by their parents

Perhaps. I don't think we actually know what's going on in a baby's mind. Children appear to be amazingly resilient and also quite logical.

But as with all such advice you have to respect your own instincts as a parent and take cognizance of what the child's temperament is like. It's always different.

<comment><USER4> I have two children, I get it. But no one ever promised it was going to be easy.

Lack of sleep wouldn't be as big of a problem if we didn't force parents to work as well as raising children. Children are our future, messing them up to fit our messed up society is not a long term solution.

I agree about trusting your instincts, but that's not what I'm seeing. When a child cries the typical parental instinct would be to hold them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One unintended consequence of Covid19 related lockdown/work from home has been less commute and more hours to sleep.

This is the most regular/high quality sleep i've had in years and I'm only now seeing how badly my normal sleep habits have been effecting me. Experimenting with any non-monophasic sleep pattern sounds exhausting and I'm afraid could have serious health impacts...would love to see the science/literature evolve to a point of consensus though.

<comment><USER6> Biphasic and triphasic are actually pretty normal, historically. Modern humans go to bed _super_ late compared to our pre-electricity brethren; most people the world over would go to bed super early and have a "first" and "second" sleep, plus maybe an afternoon nap.

You'll notice this effect if you go camping. The moment the sun goes down you'll crash much sooner than you would at home, and you might find yourself fully awake at 2am or so.

<comment><USER7> > Biphasic and triphasic are actually pretty normal, historically.

Is there evidence of this? I'm not doubting - I think I've seen this suggested before. I just don't know how people figured this out?

<comment><USER8> Biphasic sleep is pretty common in Asian cultures. An afternoon nap is common in pre-schools and elementary schools, less common but still not non-existent in higher education and the workplace.

<comment><USER9> Compare also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I maintained a pseudo-polyphasic schedule for two years during high school. I think it went like this:

2:00 or 3:00 AM - 6:00 AM (three to four hours)

6:20 AM - 7:20 AM transit (one hour)

At least three 10- to 20-minute naps throughout the school day. I negotiated with my teachers to make this acceptable. One pre-lunch nap, one around lunch hours, and one after.

2:20 PM - 3:20 PM transit (one hour)

8:30 PM - 9:30 PM transit or at home (one hour)

I was dual-enrolling at the local college at the time for night classes. I was productive, but it was awful, and I wouldn't recommend it. It became a (benign) running joke at my school that I was more likely to be asleep than awake.

I got 7-8 hours of sleep, but it's nothing compared to sleeping like normal. Any disruption to my schedule was absolutely fatal for my productivity.

<comment><USER11> What made you do this? Was it to gain an academic advantage?

I don't mean to sound judgmental; I honestly find this fascinating.

<comment><USER10> I had to transit anyways, and I found it hard to work in transit. In hindsight, I had terrible sleeping habits, and eventually, it forced me to start taking naps wherever I could. A schedule materialized organically and became the norm when I gained the trust of my instructors.

And yeah, it was for a competitive advantage. Not within my school, but for college. I didn't understand how college or scholarships worked until my 10th year, which meant that I had to become competitive much quicker than other applicants.

On a side note, the worst periods were phasing in-and-out of schedule during winter and summer break (I worked a 9-to-5 on breaks), which I did three or four times.

<comment><USER11> You really put yourself through a wringer at a tender age. Not to sound flippant, but I doubt many people would be capable of that. Congratulations on surviving what you put yourself through. I hope your habits are more ordinary these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was on a polyphasic sleep schedule for two weeks when I was in high school. I had an econ class where the teacher didn't mind if I fell asleep. It worked fairly well for about two weeks. Towards the end, I was very sleep deprived, but I didn't realize it: I had forgotten what it felt like to be fully rested.

While the increased hours in a day we're incredible, mentally intensive tasks were difficult. Homework was easy, but working through AMC practice questions did not go as well.

It's a clear quantity vs quality trade-off.

I stopped the experiment early when I started having trouble falling asleep in that econ class.

Also, I felt perpetual in this somewhat giddy state: that feeling when you just catch a second wind and everything seems funny. Mild delirium. In retrospect, it seems like hypomania.

I could see a case for polyphasic sleep for a few weeks at a time if you're in a crunch to do a lot of work that doesn't require too much thinking. Recharge for a week and repeat if necessary. Otherwise, it's a really, really bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can dang change the title. The actual title is "Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme." Moreover, the article never claims that polyphasic sleep is unsustainable, just that many people who tried it abandon it due to social pressure.

</comment><comment><USER14> Having tried doing a polyphasic sleep cycle around four years ago, the one thing that I really missed was the clear delineation between days. On a normal sleep schedule, you wrap up your day with an evening routine and begin the next day with another routine. Each day is a single discrete unit you can look back on and remember easily. On a polyphasic schedule each day blends into the next. It's like one long neverending day. You can't really do most normal social activities because you need to adhere to a strict napping schedule. At first it's cool to be awake at 3am when the rest of your world is asleep. But eventually it's just a pain to not be able to go to stores or the gym or whatever until after your next nap. Looking back, it's harder to remember any specific details about the experience. I know I did it to get a ton of work done on a project I was deep into at the time, but outside of the late nights and extreme tiredness from the beginning of it, I can't remember much. The value of a long night's rest for solidifying memories, at least anecdotally for me, can't be understated. Other things like scheduling meals, managing sunlight and your obligations to others when you need to sleep, require a bit of forethought. Life's just much easier on a "normal" sleep schedule. Polyphasic will drive you nuts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love the insight about the days blending together.

I know there's lots of science supporting what you say about sleep being essential for consolidating memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Years ago I tried this, after having read a lot about it, trying multiple times, hard, as I was determined to get more done on things that were important to me. I can be very self-disciplined and almost fell asleep dropping to the floor while standing at one point. For a while I thought it helped me get more done. Today I have health problems (CFS), and these attempts at the polyphasic or "uberman" sleep cycle (~28 min of sleep per 4-hour period) is one of the two leading possible causes I think of (don't bother asking me the other one).

Out of general experiences and lessons learned over the years I have tried to write things at my simple, hopefully-skimmable web site to hopefully help someone else avoid learning some things the hard way: [http://lukecall.net](http://lukecall.net) . (Anyway, I get things off my chest there.)

ps: prior HN discussions (which I have not reviewed): [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=polyphasic+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fne...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=polyphasic+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com&ia=web)

<comment><USER16> I think alternative sleep schedules are like alternative medicine. If they were actually feasible and beneficial, they would be commonplace, and even recommended. Especially considering how often posts like this come up here, there is obviously a high level of interest.

<comment><USER17> I think what normally happens is people see the unbelievable claim of "6 20-minute naps" and think "wow that's incredible." Then they try it, fail horribly and never try a less extreme schedule. In my experience, Uberman requires a superhuman constitution, but some of the less-extreme schedules are perfectly viable.

I figured social distancing would be a great opportunity to give some polyphasic sleep schedules a try. I started with Uberman (6x20-minute naps), but that was awful. It was just a long slow crash, and it was totally unsustainable.

I recovered my lost sleep and then started Everyman 2 (4.5 hours at night + 2x20-minute naps) at the start of May, and I've really been enjoying it. I feel just as awake as I did before, but I'm waking up at 3:30am now. Only time will tell if my 2pm nap survives the end of social distancing, but for the moment it's going great.

Under normal circumstances, the failure of my first attempt would have totally ended the experiment, because I can't normally afford to tamper with my sleep for months on end ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯. But once I swallowed my pride and set some reasonable goals, I managed to have a really good experience with the whole thing. I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot if you're curious, with the caveat that anyone interested should start with a moderate plan like Everyman 2 rather than gambling on one of the extreme schedules.

[https://polyphasic.net/](https://polyphasic.net/) is a good resource for prospective polyphasic sleepers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I attempted uberman on two separate occasions and had to stop in fear that lack of sleep would permanently damage my brain. I was able to hit rem every nap after 2-3 weeks but never recovered on sleep within the 30 day transition period. I'm pretty sure it is because it is much easier if you are a vegetarian since eating meat is so heavy and messes with your sleep.

It was a neat experience though. I had the most vivid lucid dreams, flying and doing whatever I could imagine. The rem naps would seemingly last 90 minutes even though my alarm would wake me after 20. The days meshed together and felt surreal. I enjoyed it but I feel like I'd have to give up meat to realistically achieve uberman.

<comment><USER19> I also tried uberman some years ago, I don't remember how many days I lasted but I'd guess between 5 and 10. It was amazing that I was able to fall asleep, have a dream and wake up before an alarm, and feel refreshed. But still, I was severely sleep-deprived, I was starting to hallucinate, and I gave up. I was sensing some presence in the room, I knew it wasn't real, but I got scared as shit and decided to fall asleep.

In hindsight, that was stupid as hell. The shit kids read on the internet.

<comment><USER18> Haha, yeah 10 days is when it is the hardest, actually, and it gets slightly easier once the body adjusts after that. But hallucinating sounds no good!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't human sleep naturally biphasic rather than monophasic? [https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two- shi...](https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two-shifts-maybe- we-should-again)

<comment><USER21> If you count an early afternoon nap as the second phase, then yes. Otherwise, no. The whole medieval "second sleep" thing was probably a cultural thing and not a biological thing and it seems to have been limited to Europe during that time period.

<comment><USER22> Jared Diamond in "The World Until Yesterday" says that when he was on expeditions with natives in New Guinea, they would all go to sleep when the sun went down (near the equator so usually pretty close to 7pm), then wake up around midnight and chat for an hour or two around the fire, before going back to sleep again and waking up at sunrise (again around 5 or 6).

<comment><USER21> That's 10 hours of sleep at night? Or are you being euphemistically and are you including time spent on sex?

<comment><USER23> 7-12 (5 hours sleep) 12-2 (2 hours chatting around fire) 2-5 (3 hours sleep)

How are you doing the math here? I count 8 hours of sleep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I tried polyphasic sleep and exactly what the text said, I stopped because social pressure of a monophasic world. It worked, but some other things like meeting friends more than four hours was more important for me. So, I read three screen sites of text with only one argument: Polyphasic animals are sleeping longer.

I don't think thats a really good argument compared with reports from people that are doing polyphasic sleep for months.

</comment><comment><USER25> Used to work on a cement tugboat, 12 hour days 28 days a time. Unfortunately, it wasn't 12 on 12 off, it was 6 x 6 x 6 x 6. Meaning you could rarely get more than 4.5 hours of sleep at one time for the whole hitch. Depending on if the Captain had it out for you or what your route demanded, your sleep schedule could be even more irregular.

It felt unsustainable to me. You'd come off the boat a zombie, and in just 12 days of drinking and disrupted sleep later, you'd get to do it again.

<comment><USER13> Why couldn't you just work 12 hour shifts instead of 6 hour ones? Honestly, 6 hours on, 6 off sounds like complete hell to me.

<comment><USER26> It sounds like a variation on a six-hour shift system. Any seagoing vessel with a crew complement of 2 or more sailors is going to try to have one portion of the crew at work at all times. Skimming [1] I didn't see a 6-on/6-off system, but I believe, the skipper has the last word even when asleep.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchkeeping#Six_Hour_Shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchkeeping#Six_Hour_Shift)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the article points out a useful fallacy: that polyphasic sleep means you can get away with less sleep. We should probably move away from trying to get less sleep, and move toward getting better sleep. This may reduce our waking hours, but would make those hours more productive. Having 18 hours a day available isn't much help if you're a tired confused angry mess.

> Polyphasic sleep purportedly had famous practitioners such as Leonardo Da > Vinci, Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Edison, but there is scant > evidence to prove such claims. Buckminster Fuller appears to be one of the > first documented polyphasic sleepers

Roger Ekirch did some work around historical accounts of sleep and found "the second sleep" referred to biphasic sleep, and that this was common and well known.

[https://www.history.vt.edu/Ekirch/sleepcommentary.html](https://www.history.vt.edu/Ekirch/sleepcommentary.html)

And some reporting of his work:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783)

[https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two- shi...](https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two-shifts-maybe- we-should-again)

<comment><USER28> My experience agrees that sleeping less through alternative sleep patterns is possible. However, the benefits of sleeping less are spurious: While I can improve motivation and concentration in my observation, work results when inspected later do not agree, at least for the concentration. It is easier to get stuff done, but the overall quality of work and thought is diminished. I would equate the state to being intoxicated: Certain inhibitions to motivation are removed, but so is a part of your intelligence and concentration as well as the ability for self-observation and self-judgement. Therefore I would suppose that many who report improvements while sleep-deprived are just inadvertently fooling themselves. However, all this is just based on my observation, ymmv.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ever since I read Why We Sleep, I've been extremely reticent to go anywhere near sleep reduction. We don't know much about the lifetime-long-term effects of this type of sleep reduction, but what we do know about sleep deprivation in general puts the bar quite high for demonstrating this won't really mess you up if extended out to interesting timescales.

</comment><comment><USER30> For any content marketers out there reading this:

If you want your SEO'ed content to get upvoted on HN it _must_ be about a controversial approach to nutrition, wellness, mental health, or exercise.

Ideally, your thesis will be that the approach you're writing about is a terrible idea and doomed to fail. Be prepared for the "well actually" from anyone who has had even moderate fleeting success. If possible, get a small detail slightly wrong so commenters will rush to correct you.

</comment><comment><USER31> I am a long-term polyphasic sleeper. I've just always been this way. I have been told stories that as an infant I drove my family nuts with my lack of a need to sleep.

Now, I am 43 (in a few days), and polyphasic sleep has become a bit harder on me. Now, I am averaging between 2.5-3.5 hours each day but the real issue is if I get woken up. Example: a smoke detector goes off in the middle of the night. I can't go back to sleep because I will oversleep now. I am somewhat foggy for several hours after something like this.

Also, the opposite has been happening. I am on HRT and taking estrogen injections. On the day of my injection until about 2 days after I can not sleep. My body just won't allow it. Estrogen dominance has taken over. I am routinely up for 42-46 hours before my body gives in and demands sleep. I sleep 2-3 hours and I am awake. Not feeling replenished as I should and sometimes I feel like I need to be left alone for a long period of time so I don't inadvertently snap at my wife or children.

I'm happy to talk about whatever, AMA.

<comment><USER15> wow. maybe there are basic bio differences, and one shouldn't try to force oneself into this pattern... (WRT my comment elsewhere here.)

<comment><USER31> I sleep about 2 hours (say 2:30am - 4:30am) and I want a 1 hour nap when my kids go down for a nap. It's not a standard pattern that you might read about, IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I fully agree that common sense and biology would certainly suggest that trying to stick to a regimented schedule of very specific sleep in small segments for a total of far below 8 hours is probably not as healthy as just getting a good nights sleep regularly.

That said the content of this piece doesn't actually make any meaningful, substantiated argument to that effect. It kind of just lightly suggests that it's probably not healthy and that social demands ruin the viability of polyphasic sleep anyways.

Everyone is different and I don't think 8 hours is perfect but I would be interested to see a data-driven analysis of sleep patterns/length and long- term effects.

I have serious doubts that anyone getting less than 4 hours a sleep for a long period of time (weeks or more) is going to be firing on all cylinders, no matter the creative schedule they construct around it. But I'd be open to seeing meaningful data about it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Everyman sleep schedule is much more sustainable than the uberman schedule.

It basically involves doing 3 hour core sleep and three roughly equidistant 25 minute naps. It's fairly easy to move the naps around as needed, once you're used to this.

There's also a variant of sleeping 4.5 hours, and then having two 25 minute naps.

The idea here is that each 25 minutes nap is essentially "replacing" the ~1.5 hour sleep you're giving up. There's roughly 70-110 minutes per sleep cycle, you're giving up a normal sleep cycle and then making up for it with a power nap. Your body is forced to get more efficient on grabbing the necessary deep sleep during the core sleep period.

It's supposed to take about 1 month to adapt.

I personally did this schedule for 10 days straight, without even using an alarm clock. But I started getting sick so I stopped.

<comment><USER34> Did you become sick from adapting to the new sleep schedule or was it just a coincidence?

<comment><USER33> I mean, my immune system was down due to lack of sleep. I'd have to be healthier or luckier to make it through the adaptation period without getting sick perhaps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I would highly recommend "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker to get academic insight to latest research related to sleep and basic understanding what sleep is. There is a good touch on how other species sleep; and why having a nap during a day is beneficial in improving intellectual and physical capacities!

Sleep health benefits are definitely underrated in modern society..

Based on my understanding of the topic I sympathise the research narrative to move to polyphasic sleep cycle to COPE with sleep disorders I do not believe it is adequate sleeping routine to any healthy individual and doing so can be harmful to health!

And from personal note as a parent raising second infant I can confirm that having segmented night sleep over long periods of time is most de-humanizing experience with real mental threads.

</comment><comment><USER36> I did tried my best to keep to the dymaxion schedule (thirty minute nap every six hours) in college for about two months for a blogging assignment. The first two weeks were pretty terrible but it got better after that. I can confirm what was written in the article, that oversleeping or missing one of those naps would be disastrous for continuing to keep the schedule. On a positive note, I was more productive during that term than I ever had been before. I was working out, cooking my own meals, and finished all of my assignments long before they were due.

<comment><USER37> I wonder if that productivity effect is part of what enabled Fuller's gift of gab. I noticed that when I really need to bust through a lot of outward-facing sensory or communicative tasks, a sleep deficit is very helpful. For example I posted a personal-record number of blog posts while working on little sleep-- to the point that some blog readers emailed me and asked how I did it. I found it hard to recommend the procedure because there were big tradeoffs in other ways, like a deep sense of inner resilience and confidence that only returned in strength when I was rested up again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Steve Pavlina did a series of experiments on this: [https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic- sleep/](https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/)

Googling it I was surprised to find that he did it 15 years ago. Times go by fast...

</comment><comment><USER39> This "article" doesn't actually have any substantive evidence for the claim in the title.

</comment><comment><USER40> I did a month of polyphasic sleep about 15 years ago. It's doable and was an interesting experiment but is not sustainable.

Mentally I felt 80-90%. I couldn't concentrate or think as well. I felt cold all the time as if my hormones were out of wack.

Towards the end of the month I was very sleep deprived. I would fall asleep and go into REM almost instantly. I slept through alarms, something I otherwise never do. A few times I shut the alarm off and went back to sleep with no memory of doing so.

An interesting side effect was that after going back to a normal schedule I needed less sleep. For months afterwards I only slept 7-7.5h a night instead of 8h.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is there any research done on either (1) the net productivity difference between extreme polysleep (e.g. Uberman) or (2) the long-term health effects of sustained extreme polysleep?

Also, it seems like Uberman gives you an increase in available time at the cost of a significant amount of cognitive ability. If you subscribe to the Deep Work hypothesis (which I do), such a trade is extremely undesirable, even ignoring any potential health issues.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'll echo the same sentiment as many others in this thread: tried polyphasic sleep in college (2 hour block at night and 3-4 20 min naps during day) and found it to be horrible. Any inconsistencies in my schedule and I was a wreck. Was _slightly_ better than just getting the 2 hour block like I had originally been doing, but wasn't anything like getting a healthy 6-8 hours.

</comment><comment><USER43> I tried this in college. I was doing 6 hours sleep per day (3 hours and 2 90 min segments with 6 hours awake time between them) Worked great while taking 12 credit hours over summer semester. But you end up being up when everyone else is asleep and sleeping when others are awake. Not great for social life but I did get 4.0 that semester.

</comment><comment><USER44> This website(trickle.app) looks really interesting. Can anyone who weigh in on the overall quality of the content?

</comment><comment><USER45> 20 minute naps? That seems like barely enough time to lose consciousness let alone get any kind of REM sleep.

<comment><USER46> 20 minute power naps are awesome if you can get the timing right. I usually use an alarm, because if I nap much longer than 20 minutes then coming out of deep sleep leaves me feeling super disoriented.

<comment><USER47> 20 minute power naps are a lifesaver for me. If I only got around <= 5-6 hours sleep the night before, getting a solid 20 minutes in in the afternoon is enough to make me feel alert and awake until my regular bedtime. Anything over 25 minutes and I feel groggy and lethargic until the next day. Do not go beyond 20-25 minutes in one nap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's unsustainable but you don't need to sustain it forever, you only sustain it during a time of your life where it can have the most impact, then phase it out when you get diminishing returns.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed it can be effective short term. But you'll feel the effects of sleep deprivation over time and that comes with certain health risks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I've tried this a few times - mostly in my twenties.

Back then I generally only slept 4-6 hours per night and when I wasn't trying to set a schedule, my sleep schedule would shift at least an hour a day. I was also drinking quite often and sometimes would stay awake for 24 - 36 hours at a time (coffee and booze only). All that is to say my sleep schedule in my twenties was a roller-coaster.

I got lots of work done. I got lots of partying in. Sometimes (many times) I mixed the two.

I say all that to say that I had a lot of freedom to play with my sleep schedules, and I tried quite a few.

I was able to do the two hours of sleep with four hours awake schedule for 2-3 weeks at a time and it generally worked pretty well as long as I adhered strictly. Getting less sleep than that at a time didn't feel right at all. If I pushed either the awake or sleep time, my body would automatically try to escape the schedule and it would be hard for me to get it back. The hardest part was fitting things into 4-hour blocks. If it was a stretch with nothing but work - like during some nasty winter weather - then it was easy, but as it's been said elsewhere, that gets hard to do when you have a social life.

When my son was born, I decided to finally lock in my sleep schedule - for the first time since I was a teenager. I was sleeping from 4am until noon, which allowed me to care for my son at night while my wife slept. This was key to a happy marriage, by the way. We were both getting 6-8 hours of uninterruped sleep a night with a newborn!

Once he was sleeping through the night (4-months-old, sleeping 12 hours a night!), I shifted to a "normal" schedule of 11pm-7am. While switching, I became so completely stuck into a 2x4-hour sleep schedule that it took about 3 weeks for me to get past and shift my sleep. It seems my body got so used to 7-8 full hour stretches, that it fought me from changing it. I suddenly understood why people have such a hard time with sleep! In my 40+ years of life, that was the hardest sleep schedule change I've ever made!

These days I do everything I can to get 7-8 hours and because of my boy I try to make sure that sleep is at night. I miss my revolving sleep schedule. I miss working at night. But my memory is far better. My caffeine intake is almost non-existent except for pleasure. My relationship with my wife is _probably_ better. And I get to spend time with my son every day, so it's a huge win.

As a side note, this sort of sleep schedule can be hell with a significant other, as I've dealt with plenty of times over the years. I'm very fortunate that my wife doesn't mind me shifting my schedule however I want, whenever I want, as long as I make time for her in my "day".

</comment><comment><USER50> Regarding alternative sleep schedules, I tend to believe xkcd:

"Small print: this schedule will eventually drive one stark raving mad."

— [https://xkcd.com/320/](https://xkcd.com/320/)

</comment><comment><USER51> Incidentally, I've been sleeping polyphasically for some time now. Of course, there have been no real studies done on polyphasic sleep and it must be taken on anecdotal evidence alone. However, I don't feel any ill effects after a year. My schedule is tamer than others, however; the Everyman 2 consists of a 4.5 hour core sleep and two 20 minute naps [0]. Schedules like Uberman (six 20 minute naps equidistant in time, every 4 hours), Dymaxion, Tesla, and other nap-only sleeps do not seem to be stable, at least for most people who are not genetically mutated to sleep less [1].

There are quite some pros as well, such as more time for one; instantly falling asleep (got rid of my insomnia); removal of substances such as alcohol, marijuana, and caffeinated drinks like coffee; and lucid dreams with nearly every sleep. The latter is very useful for me as I can test out ideas in dreams and see how they could fare, a sort of omnipotent virtual reality.

The fact that many think polyphasic sleep is only Uberman or other nap-based schedules with ~2 hour total sleep time is disappointing to see. There are other schedules on that site that are far tamer, such as Everyman 1: sleep 6 hours at night, one 20-min nap during the day, which you could do on a lunch break. There are whole gradations from 9 hours (two 4.5 hour sleeps, not necessarily reduction of total sleep time, but it gives better sleep for some) to Uberman or Tesla (~2 hour total sleep time), which by the way is not known to be stable over a longer time period, a fact that the polyphasic community willingly accepts.

It is particularly disappointing to see because, as another commenter said, I'd like to see more research on sleep and perhaps synthesizing its effects into a compound, but if people dismiss these alternate sleep schedules, we may not fully understand what the brain is doing during sleep, as fewer researchers are incentivized to study it, thinking it's just BS, which hurts the field overall.

I do wonder though if the main advantages of polyphasic sleep are that it enforces a more rigid structure than monophasic sleep; if you miss a nap, or you oversleep, you're done for. If one could enforce the same level of scheduling in monophasic sleep, I wonder if they wouldn't have the same advantage of increased time. It's too easy to make excuses with monophasic sleep however, saying that you'll just sleep after one more drink / turn of a game / line of code, so polyphasic sleep acts as an enforcer of such a schedule, and here is where its true strength lies.

Communities I've found helpful are r/polyphasic, and its related Discord server. There are many examples there of successful polyphasic sleepers who've maintained their (non Uberman or Dymaxion) schedules for years at a time. In particular, the user GeneralNguyen is a great resource.

[0] [https://polyphasic.net/schedules/everyman/](https://polyphasic.net/schedules/everyman/)

[1] [https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene- id...](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-identified- people-who-need-little-sleep)

</comment><comment><USER52> Does biphasic sleep count as polyphasic? I've been doing it for years following the 6 hr core and 20 minute nap. (Basically this [https://efficiencyiseverything.com/sleep/](https://efficiencyiseverything.com/sleep/))

It's been extremely doable for over a year. Sure I sleep in when I'm hungover or on a lazy Saturday, but it's closer to a regular 8 hour sleep rather than 10 hours.

I'm not in agreement of this overly simple article.

<comment><USER53> How do you keep your nap to just 20 minutes though? I literally can't sleep for that short amount of time. I'll either stay awake for the full 20 minutes or I'll fall so dead asleep that I don't wake up again until morning.

<comment><USER54> For me, I tense all of my muscles for 5 seconds, then relax, close my eyes and let my mind go blank. I don't "try" to sleep, I just try to enjoy relaxing. 9/10 times, I'm waking up to the 21 minute alarm I set before I even notice I had fallen asleep. Every once in awhile, I don't fall asleep, and then I assume that my body didn't need it. Very rarely, my alarm goes off and I decide that I'm going to nap longer. In those cases, I lose the rest of my day, but it's usually because my body really needed it.</comment></comment></comment>


What Style Is That House? Visual Guides to Domestic Architectural Designs - <AUTHOR> http://99percentinvisible.org/article/style-house-visual-guides-domestic-architectural-designs/ <comment><USER2> As a lover of old houses, it's nice to see this sort of thing discussed. A few minor quibbles:

The article (though fortunately not the poster/infographic) mentions the "Victorian" style. Victorian is an era during which multiple housing styles were popular -- Queen Anne, Stick, Shingle, etc.

The stylized drawings, especially in the infographic, really obscure the characteristics of some of the styles. The Italianate drawing, for example, barely resembles the real thing.

Finally, the article and sources fail to mention that few houses truly represent one specific style. Typically, only architect-designed homes (built by the rich-n-famous) or kit homes ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_houses_in_North_America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_houses_in_North_America)) would really fit a specific style. Lots of homes of that era are best described as "vernacular" and combine elements of multiple styles. You then end up classifying it based on the predominant features. For example, I live in a home built in the 1890s that has a mix of Queen Anne, shingle, and stick elements. Though, my last home was a spot-on American Foursquare.

Nicely, the article references the McAlester book. It is the best resource I've found for classifying old houses. I have the older edition, authored by Virginia and Lee so I can't speak to the contents of the new edition. If you want some "old house porn" check out the Painted Lady series of books, too.

<comment><USER3> Yeah 'italianate' seems to describe the presence of individual design elements more than full blown motifs. But I think that's a typical concession in 'affordable homes'.

I too reccommend the McAlesters' Field Guide. Her 850 page successor text (w/ styles after 1940) is on my short list of 'to buy' books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is so neat!

I'm in what I can best describe as a single story "National gable + front wing" tract house from the 40s, and feel that the design is very pragmatic and boring. These types of houses are very common in the Bay Area suburbs, particularly in the East Bay. Those were built en masse during during the war and have a surprising degree of craftsmanship and material quality.

I muse about one day owning one of those ordinate Victorian houses, but at the same time dread all work and red tape that can come with them (Which goes against my idea of homeownership). A buddy of mine has one and says it would cost ~35k to replace the drafty windows because the city requires an approved type/style/installer (it's a historic home).

<comment><USER5> I like old things and old houses too. But a friend in real estate advised me against buying and living in 100 year old houses because of the high cost of maintenance, very high cost of remodeling, and various things you wouldn't expect right away, like the water tasting funny due to old pipes, there house creaking and making sounds all the time as it shrinks and expands, the general lack of insulation, etc.

I'm still fond of the Tudor style, but alas it does seem impractical.

<comment><USER2> You have to be prepared to deal with an old home's quirks. It is not going to have all the amenities and features of a modern house. Yep, it will wiggle and squeak and probably will need to have its electrical and plumbing checked out by a competent contractor.

It will have been "maintained" by people of varying skills, desires, tastes, budgets, etc over its lifetime. Many of the repairs I've had to do in my old house have involved undoing or fixing the previous owner's poor work.

The flip side, our house is over 100 years old and has most of its original windows. Other than some painting, glazing, and caulking they're fine & pretty weathertight. It has 12" wide floor joists ... I could park a car in the living room. And it has glorious architectural details not found in (or poorly imitated in) modern homes.

The inventory of old homes will never be larger than what we have now. Every year, old homes are lost to fire, flood, tear down, and insensitive remuddlings. If you're not willing to live in and love an old house for what it is, please, buy a new home.

<comment><USER6> Poorly done reproductions of wood work make my skin crawl. You touch a railing or some mounding and realize it's mdf that's coated in some plastic.

Just knowing all the skill that went into making the old features out of wood has been lost is sad/ disappointing.

<comment> nommm-nommm Then there's the fake columns made out of, strangely, foam(!)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAT2-H8NESQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAT2-H8NESQ)

Since they are fake and have no purpose other than being ornamental they are prone to being the wrong size and just look really, really off. If you're going to make them ornamental they should look like they could be functional.

Fake shutters that are the wrong size/location really grind my gears as well.

<comment><USER7> I feel obligated to to point out the blog McMansion Hell ([http://www.mcmansionhell.com](http://www.mcmansionhell.com)) which ridicules and explains why these details are ugly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Never noticed that art nouveau apparently didn't make it to the US. Or is that because the chart only focuses on the single-family home? It's probably the most characteristic style of most cities from Brussels to Russia.

Examples: [http://www.rhein-ruhr-region.de/info/wp- content/uploads/wett...](http://www.rhein-ruhr-region.de/info/wp- content/uploads/wetter-villa-boennhoff.jpg) or [https://birgitrehse.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/planufer-1.j...](https://birgitrehse.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/planufer-1.jpg)

<comment><USER9> For whatever reason, I think Art Deco ended up supplanting Art Nouveau in US cities. Art Deco didn't have much of an influence on single-family homes either, but it certainly left its mark on everything from small apartments to skyscrapers.

It's a shame: while I certainly enjoy Art Deco, I miss the incredible design and ambiance of the Art Nouvea neighborhoods in St. Petersburg and Barcelona. I've never found anything with quite that feel in other cities, especially in the US...

<comment><USER8> It's beautiful and unlike the periods before it they are quite spacious on the inside. If you go further back in time, it sometimes gets a bit cramped (i. e. stairs half a meter wide, half the depth of your foot and at an 120 degree angle – basically a ladder).

It's interesting to see that everyone wants to life in them here, but nobody would attempt to build like it again. Even the most luxurious new apartments may have floor-to-ceiling windows on all sides, but the ceilings are at 3m instead of 4.5m+.

May be the costs of the solid walls and increased heat loss, or it'd just feel tacky to have ornaments of ivy and topless women on the front of a new building.

<comment><USER10> > _Even the most luxurious new apartments may have floor-to-ceiling windows on > all sides, but the ceilings are at 3m instead of 4.5m+._

Having friends living in apartments in such high ceilings (in my city, Kraków, there's _lots_ of those old buildings, so even poorest students often get to live in them), the number one complaint is heating - warm air rises and accumulates under the ceiling, so you have to heat _a lot_ to even feel it at floor level.

<comment><USER11> When that buildings are properly renovated (e.g. new insulation on external facade) the thermal problem is solved and you remain with the sensation of living in a "palace". Living in an old _kamienica_ with a ceiling on 3,50m+ is an "order of magnitude" better than living in a Soviet style building with ceilings on 2,40m or less. It's liberating.

<comment><USER12> Man I grew up with seven foot cielings (under 2.2m) and saw no problems with it. The house is super cozy. Now I've got roughly ten foot cielings and just changing a light bulb or replacing smoke detector batteries is a real pain.

<comment><USER13> Chandeliers, sconces, pendants, and wall-mounted smoke detectors take care of that problem.

<comment><USER10> Or, I don't know, _ladders_?

<comment><USER14> Create plenum space with drop ceiling 3-ft below actual ceiling?

<comment><USER13> I wished every Texas contractor who builds great rooms with 20 foot ceilings but still puts HVAC ducts in hot unconditioned attics did this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Their graphical representation of a McMansion is perhaps overly generous:

\- some of the windows actually match (and are even symmetrically aligned)

\- the garage takes up less that half of the house's front face

\- the columns next to the door are neither too tall nor too skinny

McMansion on the lower left: [http://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2016/08/american-v...](http://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2016/08/american- vernacular-houses-guide.png)

<comment><USER16> An excellent time to link to McMansion Hell's various guides on McMansions. Two good starting points are "What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture" [0] and "The 10 Circles of McMansion Hell" [1].

[0] [http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/148605513816/mcmansions-10...](http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/148605513816/mcmansions-101-what- makes-a-mcmansion-bad)

[1] [http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151896249151/the-10-circle...](http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151896249151/the-10-circles- of-mcmansionhell-the-mcmansion)

<comment><USER17> I guess I'm not getting it. They say "The secondary masses should never compete with the primary mass" but never says why. Why is having six masses combined by a primary mass to fill in the gaps a bad thing? At least with "too many voids" they say "looks like swiss cheese". Same thing with symmetry, why is a poorly balanced house bad? Why does a house have to follow the "rule of thirds"? That's never explained in the article.

Something makes me think that the author has never seen a Tuscan villa, because that "six secondary masses" house is clearly a villa-inspired home. And villas are often non-symmetrical, out of proportion, full of secondary masses, and certainly do not follow the rule of thirds. Part of their entire appeal is that they appear to be several small buildings connected together after they were built.

I don't have anything either for or against McMansions, but after reading that first link I'm not convinced that the author knows what makes McMansions "bad" either. In the second link some of the houses in "the 10s" look exactly like German manors. Compare the second "10" picture with this one: [http://www.castlesandmanorhouses.com/photos/bodelschwingh..j...](http://www.castlesandmanorhouses.com/photos/bodelschwingh..jpg)

Is that 13th century German manor a "McMansion" too?

<comment><USER18> It doesn't _have_ to. These are just general rules that usually make things look good. You can make good-looking things that don't follow the rules if it's done thoughtfully and with a design purpose in mind.

McMansion builders are not doing thoughtful design with some sort of aesthetic vision, though. They're slapping together the cheapest materials they can find, as quickly as possible to make the highest profit. That's why it ends up looking bad. They didn't use 5 different kind of windows because they had some design vision that requires it. They used 5 different kinds of windows because the contractor said "Hey, I've got a bunch of different windows left over from other jobs, let's use them here so we don't have to buy new ones."

<comment><USER17> Thank you, that's what I kept expecting the article to say. I was waiting for them to say "this looks bad because they cheaped out", "this looks bad because it was designed around spare parts", "this feature is a sign that they were cutting costs", etc. But they didn't. They just said "this is bad, moving on, this one's bad too, next one..."

As it stands, it's a McMansion of an article. A lot of things thrown together without any rhyme or reason, sold to people who don't know any better, and marketed as the epitome of high culture. It did nothing to further my understanding of what is a good house and what is a bad house except "if you cut it in half, you have two identical halves... most of the time... but not always".

I understand why McMansions suck, and I can use the same reasons to say the same thing about the McMansion Hell articles. They're full of "this is bad" without any "this is why" attached. And a lot of the "this is bad" stuff appears on houses that are definitively _not_ McMansions (like villas and 13th century manors).

<comment> nommm-nommm The post is part of a blog. If you read other posts in this blog all those things are expanded on and explained more.

I guess each individual post is disjointed. they aren't meant to stand alone but be part of a collective.

<comment> Jean-Philipe I totally agree with you. It's generally a good idea to actually read something before commenting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Somewhat unrelated, but I'm always surprised by the fact that most american homes have the front door open directly to the living room. In most European houses there's usually a hallway behind the front door. It acts as a thermal buffer and you have space for a coat rack and shoe cabinet.

<comment><USER20> A lot of American single-family houses have three doors (or more): the "front door", which may never be used; the side door, which leads to a "mud room" for taking off boots and hanging up coats, which is used all the time, and the rear door, used for access to the back yard.

In the South the front door is used much more often, because it gets hot, not so much cold.

<comment><USER21> Personal anecdote: growing up, the only time I used the front door was to speak to visitors and guests who rang the doorbell. My family and I never came home and used it to enter the house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A very interesting read. In what way does a "Craftsman Home" differ from what we internationally regard as a California Bungalow (or cal bung)?

<comment><USER23> I'm not positive in this but I believe a California Bungalow features a number of shared design elements that you will also find in Craftsman homes such as low sloping roofs, asymmetrical exterior proportions, open floor plans, roof overhangs, small porches along with a front stoop, but don't necessarily have to be in the traditional Craftsman/Arts & Crafts style.

What we call California Bungalows can share all of those general elements while being in different aesthetic styles such as Tudor or Spanish Mission. Basically, Craftsman would be a subset of the larger California Bungalow style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Time to create a house style classifier! Anybody trained a neural net yet?

</comment><comment><USER25> Any builders/newly constructed home owners out here?

I am thinking of building a new house instead of buying a used one. This is most likely going to be my biggest investment ever. I am looking at lands in upstate New York/New Jersey region, basically a region with 3 months of frost weather. I am not really a big fan of wooden houses. I have read all sorts of material online how wood is cheap, suitable of expansion/contraction weather, and contractors are cheap who build wood frames. But part of me just wants a durable concrete house.

I was thinking of getting a slab or raised slab concrete foundation with concrete pillars (non cylindrical) protruding upwards that would make up entire foundations of the house. Instead of wooden frames I can go for steel frames (new kid on the block). Then for the rest of the stuff, I can use wood and combination of other materials.

It would be nice hear someone else' similar experience and/or suggestions.

<comment><USER18> If you have the money it's entirely possible. Steel / Concrete is dramatically more expensive than wood framing though, like, an order of magnitude or close to it. You'll also have a harder time finding a contractor. Most residential contractors are not going to be able to build a steel / concrete structure and the job is going to be too small to interest one of the larger commercial contractors unless you're paying a hefty premium.

<comment><USER13> Depending on the region, insulated concrete form houses are 5-20% premium over an equivalent wood-framed house. Foundations and basements are almost always made of concrete anyways, so it's not that difficult to find a contractor that is comfortable with an expanded role for concrete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love side-by-side visualizations like this. I think it would be very neat to have this presented via a Chrome extension that provides design context for Trulia and Zillow listings. When I see a listing description like "this is a lovely Tudor-style home," I often wonder which elements showcase the named style.

</comment><comment><USER27> When applying for insurance for our house built in the 1780's, my wife and I couldn't find a style/year combo that the online form would accept. We thought it was a Colonial, but maybe it is Georgian? The farmstead stabled the original Morgan horse sire, and is pictured on page 12 here: [https://www.morganhorse.com/upload/photos/905TMH_Jan2015_Jus...](https://www.morganhorse.com/upload/photos/905TMH_Jan2015_JustinMorgan.pdf)

<comment><USER28> I have the _Field Guide to American Houses_. I'll take a look through it tonight and let you know, but given the era it's probably Georgian. It's not Federal, or Dutch/French/Spanish colonial. It might be what is considered a "folk" house, but those are generally what might be considered a shack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> My first house is the only one like it in the area, (one of the reasons I selected it, as I hate cookie cutter homes) but I always wondered about its origins. The neighbors said it was built by an architect in the 70's, so it was really cool to realize he had blended postmodern with deconstructionist to form it. Awesome read!

</comment><comment><USER30> The Craftsman is listed as originating in Southern California? This was news to me and is unsupported by anything that I have read. I always thought "The Craftsman" was a subset of "Arts and Crafts" with the "bungalow" variety being associated with california.

</comment><comment><USER31> Let's discuss the UX of the article: how is the user supposed to zoom the image it to actually see the house designs on the chart? I have a 4k monitor, and it's not enough at all. The site's built-in UI doesn't allow zooming. Certainly, I can open the image in a new tab and zoom it using the browser's UI, but come on: this is too advanced for the layperson.

<comment> nommm-nommm Click on the image to get the image in a modal. Right click on the image. View Image. Then it will be in a new tab and your cursor will turn into zoom.

At least in Firefox that's what I did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can finally understand my wife every time she points out a different house style :)

</comment><comment> nommm-nommm Where would a Cape Cod style fit into this? I didn't see it.

<comment><USER33> Cape Cod is the 2nd home in the infographic following the photo of the poster. It is a Minimal Traditional (along with the "Gable & Wing Roof").

<comment> nommm-nommm Thanks. I thought the poster was the entire article, I didn't notice that there was more content below it. Whoops.

It doesn't seem to be on the poster though, which is odd.

<comment><USER33> It was on the poster, again, grouped with the "Gable & Wing Roof"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Probably "McMansion"

</comment><comment><USER35> Very nice article</comment>