[johnnybgoode]

Some aspects of the bubble lifestyle irritate me, but this was an interesting read.

In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors -- a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I'll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC.

What does this actually mean? A Mac with a virtualized Windows instance on one of the monitors?

I do my best stuff midmorning and superlate at night, from 1 to 5 in the morning. Some people don't need sleep. I actually do need sleep. I just sleep all the time. I'll catch naps in the afternoon, or I'll take a 20-minute snooze in the office -- just all the time. Our business is 24 hours. Our guys in Europe come online at midnight. Sometimes, I will go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 a.m., and then go to work.

This has to take a toll, right?

[lionhearted]

> This has to take a toll, right?

For a while, a friend and I went on a "steal sleep" schedule. We both underslept, got like 4-6 hours per night, and then stole sleep whenever we had nothing important to do. Sleep 10 minutes in a taxi, 20 minutes on a subway ride, 1 hour between meetings when you're in the middle of the city... surprisingly, it actually works, and you can go into deep sleep pretty quickly whenever you want when you're constantly underslept.

Now, I don't do it these days, and don't really recommend it, but if your schedule is crazy enough, it might be the answer. I was full-time running one company, building another, and studying full time. Also was dating two girls and had a couple hobbies. So basically, I did stuff every hour I could, and slept every time I couldn't do something. It's crazy but it kind of works.

Edit: I didn't mention my biggest takeaway from the experiment. We waste a hell of a lot of time, all of us. Like a ridiculous amount. 3-7 hours per day at least, between tasks, waiting in lines, in transit without reading or working on anything or sleeping, etc. A hell of a lot. I kept the habit of cutting down "dead time" as much as possible now that I'm more aware of it.

[ekanes]

It sounds like a fun experiment, but hard to control for the fact that your decisions, your "effective IQ", etc. are all greatly affected by being tired. This would let you do more stuff, but you were doing it all sub-optimally.

[photomatt]

I agree, if I'm low on sleep I'm lucky if I can get through email, much less write anything coherent. If I'm not traveling I can usually get a full night and be fine during the day, but sometimes I still overdo lunch (I love food) and shut down in the afternoon.

[mrbgty]

That dead time isn't necessarily waste. Time to ponder is a good thing.

[simonw]

It probably means he's using http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ - I've used it for similar things (typing on a Mac laptop, with a second monitor hooked up to a Linux desktop) and it's a brilliant solution.

[timcederman]

He definitely means Synergy -- that's the setup I have at work too. (except 24")

[dhoe]

Me too, except with Linux on one and Windows on the other. synergy works fine, although the fact that the last release seems to be from 2006 worries me a bit.

[pmjordan]

I keep meaning to pick up the synergy source code and improve it a bit. Things I'd like to see:

* Make it peer to peer instead of client/server, keyboard & mouse events from all peers are shared, not just the server's

* Use mDNS (e.g. Bonjour) to auto-detect nearby peers and auto-connect to known ones. Also, use some kind of authentication - you don't want random people on a public wifi to be able to get access to your clipboard because you forgot to quit your synergy client.

Alas, I haven't had the time. Maybe this summer...

[photomatt]

I'd be willing to sponsor this.

[pmjordan]

I'd love to shuffle around my project priorities in return for sponsorship. :) I've emailed you at m@..., my email address is in my HN profile in case it gets filtered or whatever.

[jcromartie]

> the fact that the last release seems to be from 2006 worries me a bit

Me too, but Synergy finally convinced me that it's possible to build amazingly good software that lasts.

[ErrantX]

that worried me too - but Im hooked :D the fact I can hook my mac, PC, dev machine and laptop (OSX,Vista,Fedora10,XP) to one KB/Mouse is so great!

[joshu]

Tangent: Is two 30" screens really useable? I imagine you end up with neither being front and center, and it gets uncomfortable.

I'm trying to decide between 2x30" and 30" + 2x20"(in landscape) on either side.

[photomatt]

Yep. :)

[johnnybgoode]

Ah, thank you.

[TrevorJ]

Yeah, it's my number one favorite application of the last 2 years. Works amazingly well most of the time. I have even gotten it to work for gaming reasonably well.

[wizard_2]

I find it chokes up on some types of clipboard objects between the pc and mac and then I have to restart the service to get it to behave again. Plain text it usually does alright, but text from the web (unicode maybe?) causes the copy/paste to break

[dugmartin]

I've found it chokes on unicode - converting it down to Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1). I still love it though - been using it for several years.

[listic]

This has to take a toll, right?

Maybe not, if he's getting some benefits of ad-hoc polyphasic sleep?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652650

The theory is that one should be able to train one's body to enter deep sleep immediately (that's the kind of sleep that matters) and get along with just several 20-minute naps throughout the day.

[vladimir]

What does "bubble lifestyle" mean?

[johnnybgoode]

Our financialized economy causes bubbles. During many bubbles, the results of a massive, artificial credit infusion reach some sector(s) of the economy. This results in a lot of short-term economic waste, as well as some people getting rich far out of proportion to the wealth they have created. (More specifically, richer than they would've become under similar circumstances in a free market economy without government-backed financialization.)

You can see this when Wall Street traders blow $100,000 on a night of entertainment, and you can also see it on a smaller scale when excessive financing through a VC reaches a company which then sometimes wastes the excess money.

Coming back to this article, Matt seems like a nice, productive guy, so this wasn't really a good example of what I'm talking about. There are some people in the Bay Area, though, who are in the "startup scene" largely to party, socialize, spend lots of money in extravagant ways, and attempt to get rich quick -- this is the "bubble lifestyle" I referred to. I know there are at least a few others here on HN who have seen firsthand what I'm talking about, because it's been mentioned before.

So, when I saw the mention of dual 30" monitors, 2 laptops a year, prime SF real estate, eating out all the time, etc. I was reminded of the bubble lifestyle. Sometimes, for people who are used to being frugal, this kind of thing just jumps out at you. Many hackers are frugal people -- PG seems to be one of them, because I remember him saying something about being impressed that a Yahoo co-founder went poking around Viaweb servers to see if there was any unnecessary use of resources, even though Yahoo was already big and he was already rich.

Before someone downvotes this comment, I want to reiterate that I don't mean to denigrate Matt at all. In Matt's case, it could very well be that the expenditures are worthwhile and even necessary. But I was just reminded of others who are just in it for the lifestyle.

[timcederman]

You'd think so -- but I was the same when I was a PhD student. I'd get my best work done from 10pm-5am, and a bit during the middle of the day. I'd take naps in the afternoon and evening whenever I felt like it. I actually felt great and wish I could work like that all the time (having a wife makes it difficult to sustain).

[johnnybgoode]

Yeah, but I wonder if it affects your health in the long term?

[sonofjanoh]

One should sleep whenever he/she's tired.

Anyone who has the luxury to choose what to do with his/her time is extremely successful or at least happy.

And also the quality of sleeping is more important than the quantity. No point sleeping 2 more hours if you feel rested and rejuvenated after only 4-5 hours. And again, lucky is the one who can get to the "office" at 4 AM or 1PM whenever he/she is awake and feel like working...

[swombat]

I think what matters most in that respect is probably whether you get enough sleep, rather than when you get that sleep.

I slept at very normal times, but nowhere near enough, while launching my first start-up on the side of a full time job, and that definitely took its toll.

[johnnybgoode]

True, how much matters a lot more than when. But is sleeping for 8 hours a day at unusual times worse than sleeping 8 hours a day at normal times?

[MaysonL]

After you've done it long enough, there are no unusual times to sleep. Most months I will sleep at least once for each of the 24 hours.

[robryan]

Would take a toll but it sounds like the way he works he could just randomly sleep an extra couple of hours to make up for it.