Whenever I post ANYTHING online, even a private contribution on a private forum, I assume everyone in the world can or will eventually be able to read it.
I don't know if all the blame goes to postgres or not, but a unit test in Rails is typically what others would call an integration test and Rails' architecture is more to blame than SQL. If someone chooses to use postgres in their application, don't be surprised when you see code that uses postgres. Wanting to force others to make applications that work with the lowest-common denominator of SQL could make one appear naive, and that you might not have ever faced the same problems others developers have faced.
I stopped drinking alcohol due to the possible cancer link seeming much greater than aspartame's link to cancer. It seems strange that the studies are much more conclusive on alcohol's role with cancer than aspartame, but the concerns are much higher for aspartame than alcohol. Part of me wonders why this is. One possible reason I see is that people's trust in the studies about aspartame are much lower than their trust in the studies about alcohol.
I think this whole thread has an interesting contrast to a prior HN thread about Alcohol being unsafe at any level of consumptions and which is rated as a Group 1 carcinogen by the WHO, a much stronger designation than has been given to Aspartame:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752193
Choice quotes from the top three comments in that thread:
1) “To the extent that we expect agencies like the WHO to help us make informed, practical decisions regarding this sort of absolutist statement seems like an abdication of that responsibility.”
2) “The WHO is fear mongering.
Maybe it is good health politics, people are scared of alcohol and people will have a better live.
Maybe it would be better to communicate the risks more quantitavily. Not everyone is stupid.”
3) “The thinking is backwards on this. They state there is no scientific safe drinking level. They even compare it to radiation. The goal is to establish an unsafe level. it's like saying there is no safe speed to drive a car - sure that's technically true, but worthless to say.”
I think it’s just emotional reasoning and HN having a classic case of being critical when presented with evidence that contradicts your pre-existing beliefs while being uncritical of evidence that confirms them.
> but the concerns are much higher for aspartame than alcohol
This is not true, at least with the WHO. Alcohol is a Group 1 carcinogen according to the WHO. It definitely causes cancer. The WHO classifies aspartame in Group 2b "possibly a carcinogen." There's some confusion over how to render uncertainty here, but the WHO does not actually classify aspartame as a carcinogen.
I think the op meant concerns amongst the general public. Yes food safety experts have more concerns about alcohol but I would guess there are a lot more people who avoid aspartame and still drink alcoholic beverages.
I also experienced Siri talking at what seems like 1% volume recently, out of no change that I can recall making. Just learned how to fix that through these comments, thanks.
This has been driving me mad. It seems certain actions have had all audible feedback disabled, but there's no real sense to which ones.
When I say across a room to set a reminder or add something to my shopping list my Homepods will just silently do so, with no indication but a flash of the screen. I have no idea if it's registered what I was saying or not.
When I ask to turn on the lights in a room, it'll do a bing-bong noise at me to indicate that it's registered despite the fact I can see the lights turning on. It's utter nonsense.
My guess is that the combination of a power button long-press continued by pressing the volume down button is something that might happen accidentally while you have the iPhone in your pocket.
Once Siri is active, using the hardware volume buttons control the feedback volume.
There are also probably very personal and biological variables involved too that the post doesn't mention. I stare into monitors and phones all day long. Every light in the house is full-blown LED. I can't help but fall asleep at 20:00 in an led lit room watching led TVs, while my led phone drops onto the floor after I've fallen asleep. I've been in an extreme LED environment for over a decade and never have problems waking up at 6:30 and falling asleep in bed at 22:00. I totally agree with concern raised by the article, but I also think it lacks the whole picture of someone's lifestyle. People have struggled with sleep issues well before LEDs.
I've battled the opposite in the form of clinical, anxiety-driven insomnia my whole life. I've found it utterly debilitating at times and have quite literally struggled since birth, long before electronics and LEDs were common.
I can confidently say you're so right about the number (and type) of variables. Sleep hygiene as we say in the biz is a very complex and personal issue.
I've tried everything under the sun from strict routine, screen avoidance, both abstinence from and ample sex, more reading, less reading, zero caffeine, limited caffeine, ALL THE CAFFEINE, changes to diet, fasting, supplements, and even medication.
There are usually relatively minor, short lived improvements but it's only a matter of time before I'm spending my nights once again staring at the ceiling, mind at full-tilt.
Whenever sleep comes up in conversation, and I mention my struggles, I feel like invariably I'm met with a response along the lines of "you _just_ have to...", and "have you ever tried ...?" followed by some arbitrary rule or herbal remedy.
Since about the the introduction of the first iPad, consensus seems to have formed the root of all sleep evil is screentime.
Sleep (for some) is an incredibly sensitive and personal struggle. Alarmist "mankind is doomed!" make it even harder to understand the greater picture.
It's closely related to diet. There's always some fad trending, and a number of people who find success in choosing a "better" diet almost always have a system they'll fervently claim is The Way.
The science is relatively clear on light though. I just appear to be some form of mutant.
I sympathize, having suffered from bouts of insomnia for decades. I'm with you, in that none of the oft-cited 'cures' ever worked for me.
My most recent 'solution', which has been working better than most attempts, is reading. On my phone, because my eyes are old. Doesn't matter that it's a screen, lit by LEDs. All that matters is that it's not real life (no news, or anything along those lines). Fantasy fiction mostly for me. Gets my mind to quit spinning about real life issues, and after a little bit I can feel myself getting sleepy so I drop the phone.
I wish you nothing but the best of luck finding something that works for you. Few things are more irritating than routinely spending hours in the middle of the night staring up at a dark ceiling.
I can relate deeply to this. Spent the last 2 years trying to get treatment for what turned out to be a neurological sleep movement disorder with an insomnia component. Basically I have sometimes ~150 involuntary limb movements/hr during sleep, they sometimes wake me up but even if they don't I wake up exhausted.
Things are getting better with medication finally, but yeah I've learned not to bring my sleep issues up with people generally. I diet, exercise, avoid caffeine and alcohol yes I've tried magnesium, as well as a slew of atypical antipsychotics, very old tricyclic antidepressants, and a parkinson's medication. Most people have a very hard time imagining what it's like to fight for each hour of sleep, so have a difficult time empathizing I think
No matter what problem you have, you will always be met with the "just do this, it works for me". Eating disorder? Just eat. Can't sleep? Just do some running one hour before bedtime. The invisible disorders are much harder to get any sort of understanding for than the visible ones. If you use a wheelchair because you are missing limbs, noone will tell you to just get up and walk.
had a polysomnograph (aka sleep study) done which allowed them to recognize that I was having these movements during my sleep. My wife had always assumed I was just tossing and turning constantly while awake and I obviously had no clue what was going on without that PSG
The first issue with that is periodic limb movements (or PLMs) by definition can actually range from subtle movements almost like muscle spasms to large limb movements, so constraints would be limited in efficacy for that purpose specifically. This would also surely negatively affect any insomnia, sucks enough waking up at 2am involuntary when I'm not in restraints
That said, my father has a sleep movement disorder as well- but his is more extreme and called REM Behavior Disorder. Basically means he physically acts out his nightmares on a regular basis. His neurologist has been trying to convince him to put barriers on the side of his bed so he doesn't fall out and injure himself but he's been hesitant. sucks getting older.
These don't actually prevent moving. Restraints simply mean the movement won't be large. Great solution to prevent damage if you hit things in your sleep or, say, you have had a stroke and can't control one arm. It just doesn't actually prevent the movement or the signals that make them (muscles will still get the signal to move).
> The science is relatively clear on light though.
AFIK since is clear on:
- a increase in blue intensity reducing melatonin production
- higher melatonin levels before sleep helping with falling asleep
- melatonin is an important factor when it comes to the regulation of the inner clock
but the exact degree to which led light will make it harder to sleep, especially if in combination with other sleep issues, is much less clear cut
For example melatonin doesn't make you sleep, it (simplified) puts your body in a state in which it's easier to fall asleep. While that might sound like it's the same on the first look it's quite a huge difference.
In a certain way you could say melatonin is a major way our body signals itself "now is a good time to sleep", making it somewhat easier to fall asleep.
But people do not need melatonin to fall asleep. Some people can (oversimplified) fall asleep whenever they want, some are conditioned to fall asleep under some specific trigger. In both cases this often works pretty much unrelated to melatonin.
In the other direction if you have some issues which bare you from sleeping, e.g. bouts of anxiety or somniphobia, then having more or less melatonin is unlikely to make it difference, you won't sleep either way (EDIT: until you are strongly sleep deprived, overcome the anxiety or take some sleeping pills).
Anyway reducing the intensity of light in the evening, especially blue light, and making sure you get a lot of light in the morning (i.e. sun light, because your indoor light bulbs are most likely much much less intense) is always a good idea, even if it (hypothetically) would not affect melatonin it still would help with creating healthy habits, and habits are powerful.
I've been a terrible sleeper for about a decade. Weeks on end where I am only sleeping a few hours a night. Can't fall asleep, can't stay asleep, just tired all the time. Tried all the sleep hygiene recommendations but made no difference.
Started supplementing with creatine and about a month later had the best sleep of my adult life.
Shortly after switching creatine brands, I noticed my restless legs were back and I couldn't get to sleep. Switched back to the first creatine brand and a couple weeks later and I am sleeping again.
I don't know if the creatine helps me sleep. I started taking it because I heard on a podcast that it can help prevent cognitive decline as I age. I also started breathing through my nose when I try to sleep so maybe that was what made the difference.
> A major negative is that marijuana is usually grown with heavy pesticide use (even the certified organic stuff) so unless you grow it yourself it isn't really healthy.
Or perhaps there is something lacking in the brand that does not help them sleep? By that I mean maybe there is less creatine than claimed, or it is supplied in a form that is harder to digest.
Really hard to know, but the creatine that didn't seem to help was a cheaper, bulk buy. My guess is that it wasn't as much creatine as it said. Unfortunately, I feel like there is a lot of misrepresentation around supplements.
> Whenever sleep comes up in conversation, and I mention my struggles, I feel like invariably I'm met with a response along the lines of "you _just_ have to...", and "have you ever tried ...?" followed by some arbitrary rule or herbal remedy.
So I hate to be that guy, but did you look into an ADHD diagnoses?
ADHD medications help people with ADHD gain control over racing thoughts, and that allows them to sleep.
How is your breathing while sleeping? If you have sleep apnea you could have subconsciously associated sleeping with axfixiation.
This is the particular problem I have. A CPAP machine remedied the breathing, but it was very uncomfortable to wear, waking me up. Now I use nose strips (Breathe right) and a slightly inclined bed. I still snore but it seems to have improved my breathing. Next on the list: losing weight.
I'm interested in exploring a completely different type of bed design that would allow apnea sufferers to sleep securely with their head face down. Not just a mattress with a head cavity in it, but a design that would be both comfortable yet passively discourage subconsciously turning over in the middle of the night.
OK not to be that guy.. and please don't misunderstand, I assume that like you say you are just different and that individual variability plays a part and people can have sleep conditions.
But since you did not literally mention either thing, how much sun exposure do you get per day? And how much Vitamin D3 do you take during the day, and melatonin at night?
I have had the same experience, and am only listing what helped me because I have never seen it mentioned anywhere, and stumbled upon it myself after decades of trying everything:
For me, it seems to be the combination of 10,000 IU vitamin D before 10 am, and >120gr protein taken at evening. I am approx 85kg.
The protein is the more important component - it improves things considerably but not fully. For more than 20 years into adulthood, I was eating approx 50gr of protein per day (being vegetarian, you have to be deliberate to got more, and I wasn’t). Since this discovery, life has several times taken a path that for a while made deliberate meal planning a luxury, and every time my protein intake dropped, so did my ability to fall asleep at regular hours.
In defense of the layman people, they are not doctors, and they can't recommend prescription drugs.
And sometimes non-doctor solutions do help and complement official treatments.
I started mindfulness neditation a while ago and it did me wonders to help me sleep. At first by the act of meditating, and then by some byproducts on attention span and fleeting thoughts.
I relate very much to this. In particular the well intended but ignorant suggestions.. I think it's often hard for most people to truly appreciate a problem they don't have.
Not a solution that works or is available to everyone, but for me, small doses of marijuana taken just before bed has changed my world.
I’m currently traveling and in a state where that isn’t an option and I haven’t had more then 4 hours in each of the past few nights. Will be glad to get some rest tomorrow.
I (unfortunately) am sometimes exposed to second hand marijuana smoke (from other people in the building smoking) and it does seem like there might be some positive effect in my case (there are a bunch of different types and I have no idea which ones I've been exposed to). A major negative is that marijuana is usually grown with heavy pesticide use (even the certified organic stuff) so unless you grow it yourself it isn't really healthy. Of course, smoking anything is also not healthy but you don't need to smoke it (and shouldn't). Also, many things help with sleep short term but with long term use you go back to normal (except that often quitting makes things worse for a while).
I've also had bad insomnia most of my life (and a non-24 hour circadian rhythm starting somewhat over a decade later). Early on it seemed to be anxiety/racing thoughts related and what finally mostly prevented that part for me was meditation. I still occasionally stay awake due to racing thoughts but not often. Unfortunately, that didn't ultimately help with the insomnia, which got somewhat worse (or at least different) over time :(.
The meditation method I used goes like this:
1) In general, althernate between focusing your attention on your breath as it touches your skin above your mouth (since it does that all the time you can kind of feel it and not feel it at the same time) and either active or passive muscle relaxation (mostly active unless you are getting tired enough not to feel like it).
2) For active relaxation, tense muscles in one group a time (I doubt the exact organization matters, I think I used three or four groups: arms and hands, core muscles, legs, and possibly feet) for several seconds and then feel the contrasting relaxation for a while after you release them. For passive, just tell yourself you are relaxing those particular muscles and try to feel them relax.
3) The time split between focusing on your breath and relaxing muscles doesn't matter, if you are having trouble focusing on your breath then just switch to a relaxation cycle.
4) For getting to sleep, wandering thoughts are fine. What you want to avoid is strong emotional reactions to your thoughts, including a feedback loops such as where something feels like an excitingly good idea (when you are half asleep and not so good at evaluating what is a good idea) and that leads to other thoughts that feel like good ideas or building on the same idea. If you really thing something is a good idea get out of bed and write it down along with enough follow up throughts to find the same stream of thought the next day (should it prove interesting to do so, which is not usually the case in my experience). Otherwise go back to the relaxation/breath cycle when you notice you have a stronger emotional reaction to your thoughts. Other feedback loops include remembering past mistakes or bad events (which can either then go to moment by moment recall of one event or remind you of other similarish situations) and focusing on a difficult current situation (again either going into detail about the current situation or often recalling any memory connected to anyone or anything involved in the situation). It may (or may not) be helpful to think of it as a type of internal drug addiction and you are trying to recognize when drugs that keep you awake are released internally rather than noticing particular thoughts.
5) Visualization can make it easier get to sleep if you are able to do it, so you can try imagining yourself on a warm beach as you do the breath focus and relaxation. I can usually only do that when I am about to get to sleep, if I happen to think of it (and noticing I'm about to get to sleep can make it harder to actually get to sleep :( ). Also, make sure you are actually sufficiently warm (and not too warm if you can avoid it) since that can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to notice even if it is keeping you awake.
6) I didn't become a world class meditator over the decades I've had insomnia, I mostly just try to use it when I notice racing thoughts, which is not that often these days (infrequent enough to not always think of it when it does happen :( ). I think it was 5-10 years that I meditated frequently before racing thoughts were rarely an issue, although it was very quickly obvious that it was helping. I've lately been thinking that I should try it again more regularly to see if it could help some even without racing thoughts (however, I don't think the circadian issue is affected much if at all by the meditation).
Some people find a formal Cognative Behavioral Therapy course to be helpful (or reading books that cover the same techniques), however some of the techniques won't work at all if you have circadian issues (and could make the circadian issues worse).
I've had similar problems since I was a little kid.
I do try and combat the blue light problem with nightmode on all my screens, turning off LED light bulbs, and, as weird as it might be, donning my red LED headlamp to get through the evening without much blue light in my life.
>I just appear to be some form of mutant.
This may be literally true for me given that I grew up in ground zero for the DuPont C8 poisoning.
I mean the problem with many of the studies quoted and referred to in the article is that they are about correlation but fail to show causation outside of "that seems right if you approach it with a mind which has already been biased to believe it".
For example night work independent of light has _a lot_ of ways it can negatively affect people, cause stress and in turn increase the risk of cancer.
And while the relationship between melatonin and blue light does exist the magnitude of it's effect (compared to other factors) is much less clear and might vary hugely between people.
Especially when it comes to reasons why you sleep is bad there are docents non melatonin related problems of which the negative effect can by far outweigh any melatonin difference caused by blue light.
I'm also like this, very rarely do I have trouble falling asleep and usually it's because I can't stop thinking about something.
But I feel like it's really that I'm just that tired in the evenings, and feel like I always needed more sleep than the average person.
We'd need stats about the number of people reporting problems with falling asleep and quality of sleep over the decades I guess. This might very well just be something that manages to push people over the edge and thus makes a difference, just not for those of us who are at the more extreme ends of the spectrum.
Also even if it doesn't affect my sleep quality noticeably, I wonder about the cancer risk part; is that a direct result of worse sleep, or might that still affect me?
I can sleep in a sunny day outside at noon (lots of blue light around) like a baby! : )
(which was very handy living 5 years at the polar circle. the only off thing was discovering a ca 26 hours daily cycle of mine in a long stretch of solitary work and lots of food at home, when I did not have to sync my activities with any single human being for more than a week during a summer)
This is why I never fork a repo from github. I checkout my own branch (like git is supposed to be) and create a repo on github and most importantly, another server.
It's not good that you are uncomfortable when it asks you to talk about it with its preferred pronouns. It's 2023, it's about time you try to do what it ask you to do. When it tells you its preferred pronouns, try as hard as you can to follow it.
"It" has a pretty clear meaning in English, and it is not as a pronoun for people.
You seem eager to reduce this to "just" a pronoun issue, but it's not the same as calling someone "he" or "she", whatever they might prefer.
No one gets to single-handedly (re)define the English language for everyone else. "It" in this usage does not fall in to normal English usage, other than to mock people. That they want to use it nonetheless or whatever reason, that's fine with me. I will always listen to that and do my best to oblige with that within reason. However, radically different meanings for words in common grammatical structures, for me, falls outside of "within reason". Other people may choose different, and that is fine too.
In the absolutely fantastic novel Too Like Lightning there was a character that is famous for the life-like dolls made of it. Eventually it comes to term with the fact that its preferred identifier is "it" because it feels more comfortable being referred to as a doll, or inhuman, i.e. literally objectified, than it does with being considered traditionally human.
I also feel uncomfortable using "it" as a pronoun, luckily this person seems comfortable with "she/her" as well so we can just use those instead.
Maybe it’s something well know in the us/ gay sphere, but what does it refer to? I get to call the person he/she backwards so she/he feels acknowledged, I get calling one’s/they instead of he because it may be a woman and they will feel discriminated. But it referring to a person?
As an older trans person who's been subjected to targeted hate speech in public, I used to be pretty uncomfortable with younger trans people using it/its pronouns. It's understandable, let's give people some grace.
No one is obliged to endure morally sane discomfort for the sake of someone else’s comfort.
This isn’t “I don’t want to call her him because he’s a she.” The person you’re replying to has a very valid discomfort with reducing a person to an object’s pronoun. Completely understandable and defensible and beyond the apparent needs of the author.
I tried self hosting it, but could never log in. I would even follow the password reset emails that tell me the password was changed, but then login never worked. I wish I could have gotten it to work, but ended up giving up on it.
