[jannyfer]

About a year ago, I saw a Hacker News comment by someone claiming to sleep on average 0-2 hours a day. There were 20 replies to that comment but (he) never responded to any questions, and continued posting replies to other threads in the coming days.

I pulled all of (his) comments and their post times via the Hacker News API and plotted it, which revealed an interesting lack of posts from midnight-6AM EST across ~150 comments. I'm calling BS on the 0-2 hours of sleep :)

[S_A_P]

Im not even sure why someone would want to be "bragging" about something that is proven to be awful for health and well being.

[pedalpete]

I only sleep about 4 hours a night on average (though I wish I slept more), but if you looked at my posts and comments they would fall within a 4-5 hour window (most posts happen when I check HN between 7-9am).

[jannyfer]

I plotted your comments/posts by GMT hour: https://imgur.com/a/9CNi2Ln

[pedalpete]

Ah, is that over the life-time of my being on HN? I've lived in 3 different timezones, US East, US West, East Australia, as well as spending a few months in Europe.

So, though it looks like I'm spending time on HN all through the day, this is not actually reflective of my behavior without taking that into consideration :)

Hope you didn't spend too much time on that, it's cool to see. Thanks.

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

Nice job! I am very skeptical of people who claim to not need much sleep.

We know there have been some who really needed much less sleep but they are widely known to be geniuses or hyper-productive (Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk etc.)

Most people who claim to sleep only 2 hours a day or whatever are probably being a little dishonest or are miscounting.

[Aperocky]

> they are widely known to be geniuses or hyper-productive (Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk etc.)

I don't buy this. I don't know life of Nikola Tesla, but the recent activity of Elon Musk might be explained by a serious and chronic lack of sleep.

[Wowfunhappy]

Short Sleepers certainly exist, but they're rare. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2019/08/415261/after-10-year-searc...

But I've usually heard of them needing ~4 hours of sleep, not 2.

[freedomben]

I had a teacher in high school that was like this. He got a job as a night checker at the grocery store to help pass the time and make a little extra money. He felt great when getting about 4 hours of sleep. He had researched it quite a bit and after talking to a doctor decided to embrace the extra time. I was always jealous.

But yeah I don't buy the 2 hour sleep thing, because according to this teacher it's almost always around 4 hours for people in this boat.

[gbear605]

Nikola Tesla was certainly not for not being entirely sane, so that might be evidence there as well.