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I have found it depends on how comfortable the earplugs are. If I feel they are uncomfortable in the ear, there is a good chance I'll get an infection/inflammation in the next few days.
Responding here to short-circuit all the replies to this:
You shouldn't be looking at just various kinds of earplugs as options for this. You can get custom made earplugs for your ears for differing use cases (sleep, concerts) at an ENT.
ime finding the right earplugs is the key. there are lots of options a of diameter, density and material to try out. getting the right one made a big difference for me
As someone who has been wearing earplugs for decades for motorcycles, firearms and other loud events, this information at face value is a bit off.
Foam by far has the most effective NRR. Silicone and wax are fine but will not provide as effective of NRR. That said, if it’s for sleeping silicone and wax are probably fine. I would argue that foam is not scratchy at all but I usually buy more expensive brands like Mack’s and it’s good to try out different sizes.
I have like 20 brands of foam earplugs in my drawer, 5 different pairs of custom silicone airplugs, unusual earplugs from Kickstarter like [1], and so on. What I'm saying is I know my way around the earplug block. Here's what I'd write for your categories:
Foam: The most effective, by far. I suspect many people wear them incorrectly and do not insert them far enough. You can use lube (they make special ear lube for stuff like hearing aids, although I think anything medical grade will do) if you have difficulty doing so. I have unusually small ear canals; the most comfortable and best I've found by a mile are Mack's Ultra Soft Foam Earplugs. These are much more comfortable than slim fit alternatives and also have very high attenuation.
Silicone: expensive (but they're reusable and last years), but the least fussy once you get them. They are moulded to your goddamn ear---it's a perfect, pressure-free fit every time and they go right in. Drawbacks include lesser attenuation and attenuation that isn't immediately at 100%---it takes a while for it to "seal". I abadoned these once moisture started to accumulate between my ear canal and the plug and I'd hear it as I moved and it became very annoying.
Wax: joke attenuations compared to foam, and bad compared to silicone. The most expensive long-term unless you're serious about reuse. Somewhat fussy and may fall out. Very comfortable (little insertion).
Foam + wax: this is what you really want if you care about maximum attenuation. My ear canals are slightly too short to comfortably insert an entire Mack's earplug, so I snip the ends off mine, lube them up, and insert them completely flush into my ear canal. Then, I take a wax plug and mould it on top. It's perfectly comfortable and it performs better than any other option I'm aware of. I tend to also wear a Bluetooth sleep mask and play rain sounds on 100% volume and it just comes through the double earplug situation to mask any very loud/spurious noise. To remove the flush-inserted earplugs, I use a pair of blunt tweezers.
When I used slim fit foam earplugs I'd routinely get ear infections. Switching to silicone fixed that, but suffered from the aforementioned issues. With the ultra soft earplugs + wax method I never get ear infections. I make sure to always insert a fresh pair (but I reuse the wax ones for a few days) and to always do so with clean hands. I think the infections are due to friction between the plug and the canal during insertion as well as plugs that are too large/exert too much pressure once expanded---the lube and very soft plug addresses those issues.
Oh well lube would make a huge difference, it's true. Some places require me to wear foam ones for health and safety reasons, and I always put water on them, for softness and a good seal. By calling the silicone ones fussy I just meant that they need washing, really (I am lazy). I buy big boxes of wax ones, they cost approximately nothing and come with a little storage container, and then I throw the current pair away after a week or two, mainly because they start to look gross (I suspect bacteria don't actually find paraffin wax hospitable).
How so?
I use the 3M yellow ones for many years and I find the pretty good. I buy like a box of 200 pairs and use them for a couple of times, so they are also pretty cheap.
Foam are indeed the best, but there's a lot of variation in sound blocking quality and ear comfort. Experimentation is needed to find what works for you.
White noise also helps without the need for ear plugs. Depends how loud the disturbances are.
I guess it depends on the person because I've been wearing them every night for years with no side effects. I use those laser lite ones and use a new pair every night (they're very cheap).
The only downside is you get used to the quiet and it means when I don't sleep with them I get a worse night sleep than I used to. (But I still get a better night sleep with them than when I didn't use them.)
I have custom molded ones. They help a lot, however high pitched sudden noises still get through and wake me up. I never managed to sleep without earplugs since moving to this city. Not considering moving due to the quality of life (apart from the noise)
They are pretty comfortable, though they take getting used to because the seal is perfect and you'll slightly pressurize your ear canal which is a strange feeling. They'll also fit slightly inside your ear, so lying sideways is fine.
The downside is they're very expensive, relative to other earplugs and mine no longer seal as well as they used to so I'd need to get a new pair. They're still better than nothing. I started using earbuds around the same time, from using cans, and I wonder if I've very slightly widened my ear's opening.
I also use an eye mask if I'm somewhere that doesn't have good curtains or blinds. Really works very well, but I recommend one that wraps around and doesn't have an elastic band to dig into your ears (Matador makes a good one).
Barcelona, Spain. Basically narrow streets, full of loud motorbikes, mostly single glassing in windows, trash collection happens for some reason at night, noisy culture. Still love the city though. But originally grew up in a quiet country and on the outside the city with 0 noise during day and night
Interesting. Taipei, Taiwan has a similar problem: Endless motorbikes and motorscooters. The droning background noise of two stroke engines is awful (plus air pollution!). However, it is improving quickly with the arrival of electric equivalents. Is Barcelona pushing to replace two stroke engines with electric? It will make a huge difference! Also, I wonder if electric garbage trucks could also help.
I've been using those for a few years. I also cover my eyes with a sleeping mask in the summer. In this part of the world (Berlin) it gets light around 4am in the summer. About 3-4 hours before I want to wake up. I'm sensitive to light, I sleep longer in the winter.
Once I also had automatic blackout blinds, they would slowly roll up before my my alarm rings. All controlled by home assistant, which can read the phono alarm time. Waking up slowly by light is nice :)
Heavy / blackout curtains are great for noise insulation / echoes / reverb / heat management, too. But there's often some leakage above and below, so a combination of blackout curtains, blinds, and / or outdoor blinds is likely the best option. But that's three separate investments and may not be possible if you rent.
Depending on your setup it might not be enough.
I have those in the bedroom, but I can't install them on the rest of the flat (they're not the most beautiful).
Leaving the bedroom door open for proper air quality leads inevitably to light coming in from other rooms. Yes it's that bright in Berlin at 4am in summer.
Therefore I second the mask. There are a lot of option that are super comfortable and cheap on Amazon.
I have fallen into the (questionable) habit of sleeping with Airpods. I used to wake up with my mind racing and not be able to fall back asleep. The Airpods helped distract and sedate my midnight thoughts such that I would fall back asleep much quicker than without. I've progressively shifted towards falling asleep listening to the droll of engaging non-fiction, but keep them in my ears in noise canceling mode with no media for the remainder of my night.
Again, not medical advice, just anectdotal experience..
Edit: this is entirely due to the 'Stop playing when falling asleep' function of iOS 26, which I loathe. But this feature barely make it worthwhile.
It's pretty good, but I guess it depends on your environment. Pretty decent at removing things like traffic, air conditioning, television. Even Sirens are pretty muted unless they are extremely close, which is a good thing I guess. They probably won't block the base beat if you sleep above a night club..
I've been sleeping with ear plugs for well over 10 years at this point, so I feel qualified to answer.
1. You have to find the right ear plugs for YOU. Everyone has different ear canal size, shape, sensitivity, etc.
2. They should never be painful unless you are doing it wrong. Yes, they are likely to be uncomfortable at first, but the first time you wake up feeling like a million bucks because you got 8 uninterrupted hours of sleep for the first time in your life, you will happily accept the temporary discomfort.
I take ear plugs with me when travelling but I really hate wearing them. I've tried all kinds. Silicone is best. There is a knack to making them a bit more comfortable, but they're still not great. I sleep on my side which probably doesn't help. If I wear them for more than a couple of nights my ears get really sore.
What they're good for is sleeping due to desperation while travelling. I couldn't imagine having to wear them every day at home. That sounds like hell.
This, this exactly. Uncomfortable and itchy to the point of keeping me awake until I take them out. Do not understand how anyone can sleep with them in!
Yeah, this seems like a way overengineered solution.
I moved to the US 15 years ago and it was too noisey for me to sleep well (fire trucks, cars, etc), but ear plugs solved the problem and are portable to other places you might need to sleep.
Quies foamies. After wearing military issue 3M foamies around jet engines for years, I bought some of these Quies and were very surprised to discover that they could be made so comfortable, and also long lasting.
Huge fan of my Anker Soundcore A20s w/ a mixture of noise colors over conventional ear plugs. Much more comfortable and don't create such a closed in effect. Easy to take in/out if I need to chat w/ a partner.
Agreed. These have been a game changer especially for those with partners who snore. It took a few days but my ears got used to them after that. They are very comfortable.
To the person who asked, I can sleep with these in on my side without a problem after I made sure to use the right tip size.
I’ve been using fans as white noise generators for decades. When staying in a hotel room, I run the bathroom fan if it’s loud enough. It’s a great way to drown out thoughts if you have trouble falling asleep.
You might want to consider investing in something like a Babelio sound machine. It's tiny, quite loud, kinder to the environment and will guarantee you have a solution if the bathroom is too far away or the outside noise is a bit too aggressive.
They're designed for side-sleeping, but may present a bit of pressure on your ears... they do for me, I've adjusted. It's minor as the materials are quite soft.
They have a newer model that is slightly slimmer w/ more features like active noise cancellation, but has a smaller battery that is marginal for full-night sleeping, so I didn't bother upgrading.
One thing to note is they have some bad reviews due to issues with batteries dying or depleting quickly - my right bud wouldn't charge past 50% after 9 months of daily usage, which only lasted about 6 hours or so before dying. That said, Anker's tech support promptly sent out a new pair with minimal friction, which I received just days after reaching out. I've had 4 months of usage on those new ones without a hitch. Hopefully those kinks have been worked out.
Even if these new ones die outside of warranty, they're so good that I feel I'll have gotten my money's worth and will immediately buy them again.
No no, we first need to adopt a technology that consumes more water and energy than a small town to solve a problem we've already solved!
Jokes aside: overengineering issue like this to LEARN a new coding language, hardware setup, platform etc. used to be a great opportunity for skills growth. Now honestly it's hard to justify, if you're using AI to do it.
With the added insult that the sycophantic AI will also make you feel like a genius for overthinking a stupid idea.
I don't want to paint your comment as pro-AI brigading, but in the solution to any problem, considering the collaterals is a pillar principle of engineering. You don't get praise for solving a bug infestation problem by nuking the city.
I feel some of the recent HackerNews stories start leaning a bit too much toward using AI regardless of whether it makes sense. A solution to any problem, however interesting or clever should be critiqued holistically, alternatives included.
It's especially tiring how apparently datacenters were invented last year. Datacenters were fine when you were using them to encode video for the billionth mindless TikTok short, but AI suddenly made them the scourge of the earth?
My suspicion from regular use of ear plugs is that the wax sticks to the plug every night. I use a new set every night. Pretty wasteful, but man, I need my sleep.
When my wife showed me the Loop ad, I told her it's a scam.
But now I'm the one using them. Haven't done as much work researching earplugs as some posters above, but like the Loops. For comparison, I have earplugs at work, that feel like someone was raping my ear every time I'm putting them on.
So, there's definitely earplugs and earplugs. If you need to use them, might be worth few hours and few bucks spent on testing/research.
Oh yeah, I bought a few different types of ear plugs to test them out. The silicone putty and the loops left my ears sweaty. I'd pull them out at night to dry them out. Tmi, I know, sorry, but yeah, I tried 'em.
I used to wear them every night and they definitely improved my sleep.
But then I also had instances where my ear was blocked with wax for several days.
But you also shouldn’t be surprised if someone challenges the implications or merits of your anecdata, for the benefit of others that might take it as good advice.
Just because someone has perceived that doing X leads to Y doesn’t mean there’s causation. Easy and common mistake to make though.
Anyway, I’m not trying to convince you of anything. My comment was aimed at other readers; further discussion between us won’t be necessary. Good day! :)
If there's enough earwax in there to get pushed around and compacted, then it seems like there is some other issue going on? Is having small mounds of wax per permanently living in the ear canal normal for some people?
I have been wearing ear plugs every night for over a decade and cleaning my ears with cotton swabs at least every other day for my whole life and never once had ear wax build up.
The ones I have are rated at about 20db, compared to approximately 30db for the best foam earplugs, but they are much more comfortable for every-night wear. I use foam ear plugs occasionally when I know I'm going to be in a very noisy environment or need perfect sleep.
Yeah this is my primary qualm just as a dad with four young kids, I’m addition to needing to hear them if they have a night terror or something. I still use them occasionally though.
A would be intruder did bang on my door at 3am (I guess to test if anyone was in) and I looked pretty pissed off and menacing when I opened the door (ex prop forward rugby player) and they ran off. Maybe not the smartest move on my part.
Apparently they immediately decided to break into my neighbours a few doors down while people were sleeping.
I wear ear plugs every night. The disposable foam ones are good enough to prevent me from being woken up by my partner getting ready before me, but I would most certainly hear a fire alarm. I'm laying in bed right now with them in and I can still hear the fan pointed at me. They significantly reduce low-mid range frequencies, but they're not 100% soundproof
This is really cool. We did a similar thing around 2 years ago but didn't use AI in that case. Just used a phone to record a few nights sleeping. Then a python script. I manually listened for some time in order to find the threshold amplitude (where all sounds would be ignored below and tracked above). Generated a graph that should the spikes of interest. Clicked on the spikes which went to the timestamp in the audio and listened. Not super scientific I know.
Two observations. 1. Often you wake up after a loud noise but like 5 minutes later with no memory of it. 2. even if you don't wake up from the noise your breathing changes, more likely to talk in sleep and shuffle more. So even if you not waking up your quality of sleep is disrupted.
Our case had some random construction like noise in the early morning, lasted around 10 seconds and disappeared. However, we noted even ordinary sounds we didn't think was loud was effecting our sleep.
Solution for that place was earplugs and a loud fan to generate white noise.
And thanks for sharing that comment, I can second your two observations
For multiple months, I thought I’m waking up at night because I need to go to the bathroom so often (even checked for insulin resistance but markers were perfect). Interestingly enough, most of the times (not always) there are one or multiple louder sounds just before I wake up to go to the bathroom. Zero memory or conscious perception of the noise, still woke up and feeling like I need to go to the bathroom
One time there was construction/renovation going on one floor below mine. I'm talking sledgehammers, jackhammers, the whole shebang.
For some reason, I've never slept better. Every little noise generally wakes me up (like someone walking in the same room) but the demolition noises kind of numbed me to all audio, apparently.
I also somehow sleep better when I leave a window open, and get some morning sun and noise? Though in that case, loud motorcycles revving will probably wake me up, but random people talking/shouting is fine.
That CO2 concentration looks unhealthy, I wonder to what extent it's affecting your sleep quality (as opposed to waking you up).
> Measure before you fix
In my case, I got a few IKEA CO2 sensors, and after leaving them in the bedrooms for a few days, we found that leaving an outside window slightly open + the bedroom door open, kept the CO2 levels below 600PPM at night.
We're 1000ft/300m away from a motorway, but fortunately the noise pollution isn't bad. So ventilating (even as it's getting cold) turned out to be a simple fix.
I hadn't thought of collecting sleep data from our devices, but maybe I'll get an AI to do that, so I can correlate our sleep quality with the environment.
The levels I have at night indeed are unhealthy, I’m still trying to find the best way to tackle this challenge..
Most wakeups are from noise (I can see it in the data) but high CO2 levels can also make me a lighter sleeper.
Not sure where you’re based but in Europe the priority is mostly on heat isolation, so air movement suffers. The US is better in that regard. There was a big thread on that topic on X the other week (Peter the indie hacker initiated it and there were some good recommendations in case you’re the owner of the flat)
Is your bedroom approaching 4 or 5k PPM? The chart screen shotted was at 3300+ and it looks like it kept going up after. Hopefully it's a bad sensor reading, but that is very high. I sleep in a small room with a few people and it's maybe 1500 and noticeable when that happens. Getting to 5k is potentially dangerous for extended periods of time.
Hi, Co2 levels like that are severely high and will cause you to have a lot of issues. I had some issues with poor ventilation and headaches in my apartment, and my solution was to run the bathroom fan all the time - this gave me enough ventilation to feel much better. You're basically suffocating at 3000 ppm.
It's important to measure this somehow - I do this with a $100 Co2 sensor and display I got off amazon, but you seem to already have these sensors available.
I was a bit surprised at the level of those readings.
Anecdotally, we have an air monitor gadget and the highest I've ever seen (small home office, fairly well-sealed, winter, me working there all day with no ventilation) was around 1100-1200 PPM. I get that two people in a small sealed bedroom could push it higher, but 3350 PPM?!
I also agree co2 levels are super important, but I’m wondering: in your situation isn’t air pollution from the motorway a concern? Not sure how to balance that one
“These results are not applicable to typical buildings, where outdoor-to-indoor air exchange already removes volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at a rate that could only be matched by the placement of 10–1000 plants/m2 of a building's floor space.[2]
The results also failed to replicate in future studies”
You’d need a forest in your room to see a proper change. There was a whole discussion in the Indie hacking scene on X on that topic around 1-2 weeks ago
Everyone gets unhealthy CO2 levels if the bedroom doesn't have air extraction inside or you don't leave the door opened.
Does it really matter in the grand scheme of things tho ? I have a captor at home, even when I leave the door opened and CO2 remains low, I don't notice anything different at wakeup.
It can be the difference between between feeling like you're suffocating, not getting enough oxygen to rest enough/sleep well.
I notice a difference if I move between a ventilated room vs congested one. I suppose it depends on what's causing the concentration. If it's human breath, I'll smell freshness. If it's e.g. burning a portable gas heater (common in my part of the world), I'll feel like I'm not inhaling smoke (probably small amounts of CO).
A few years ago, I would sometimes wake up at night and open a window wide, or go open the outside door and stand there for 5-10 minutes.
I find if I work out consistently I am always getting great sleep and getting really tired in the evening, but if I don't I might not ever feel tired then I look up and it's 3am. I never made the connection between heavy exercise and sleep before, but it seems obvious in hindsight. Got to do what we are built to do not what modern life insists we do.
I think being active, especially evenings, is helpful. When in Santa Cruz, my wife ensures via threat (joking) that I attend her evening pilates classes. It does help with sleep.
> The biggest factor is - has my brain settled. Background and noise don’t matter.
I'm there too on this. Something I've found helps is listening to certain types of audio. Some audio books can work, but if they're too engaging or interesting it's counter-productive.
My current solution for this is a particular YouTuber; I noticed a long time ago that watching his videos in bed (when I already given up on trying to sleep immediately because my brain was too alert) seemed to help me relax and feel drowsy. Now it's almost a switch - start a video, phone face down, and I rarely need a second one.
I started meditating recently (~10mins per day) and have found it to be surprisingly effective. It’s a combination of body scanning & mindfulness meditation.
I used to do yoga and meditation. I let that slip while life transitions. I have some meds from my doctor (seroquel) which is knock me out, but getting back to being active and disconnecting is a better approach than pills.
I recently had (and then lost/left on a plane!) a Lumenate Nova[1] and found it was very helpful at quickly getting me away from the mind going state. I work very late to overlap with distant timezones and would often find it difficult to get to sleep once I went to bed given I've been staring at screens and on calls only minutes before hitting the pillow. This was great.
I find my mind goes straight to settled if my phone and all configurable electronics are in a completely separate room. Its like I give up seeking more stimulation.
An off topic addendum - those are 2 very nice places to be. Maybe someday.
I live in a silent area at night and regularly woke up at 3:30 am a couple of years ago. Turns out it was a leading indicator for digestive issues, nothing major and fixed now but it seems 3:30am was the point my body said “I need more food and I don’t care you’re asleep” and according to the dietician I saw this is relatively common with IBS.
This is the most HN thing ever. Someone works to create an ultimately useless tool because no matter what you find the answer to be, the solution is the same:
-- Attenuate loud noises --
Which is exactly what they ended up doing
> With actual data, I could finally act with some confidence instead of guessing:
> I added proper acoustic panels (the IKEA ones for offices to create meeting areas work surprisingly well)
> I added extra insulation around the bedroom door and the window (silicone, rubber, ...)
This is amazing. I wish I had this when I was struggling with sleep. I tried a lot of things and stacked them:
Mouth taping (stopped snoring immediately), magnesium glycinate before bed, no screens an hour before sleep, keeping the room cold, not eating dinner so late and regular sauna sessions. Individually they helped.
Together they made a real difference, loud cars and city noise don't wake me up anymore.
I know it sounds like biohacker stuff, but it works. This tool makes it possible to actually find the root cause instead of just guessing. Love it!
Yeah, a cool/cold bedroom and not-eating-so-late have been pretty clear helpers for me, and I can very clearly see the differences the days that I eat a lot, late. Also the days when I have drinks after 5pm or so; alcohol is a well-known sleep disturber.
I'm also on a CPAP these days, but always looking for a better solution so I'm not so tethered to technology.
Last: when I'm trying to lose weight, I have to be careful or I'm also waking up from hunger. Only it doesn't show up as hunger at first, just a kind of mildly-anxious alertness - that's from the cortisol your body releases when your blood sugar is too low during the night. And then later, after about an hour awake, I get ravenously hungry.
So now I'm stuck trying to balance this: given that a lot of my physical activity is in the evening, how do I eat enough, early enough, that I don't sleep badly from too-low blood sugar and also don't sleep badly from eating too much too late?
Environment management is important, but internal relaxation skills and similar are as important. Consider doing body scans, various visualizations, breathing exercises when going to bed: I found a 20mn guided exercise I liked (it was yoga nidra) and in a few months it transformed me from a "horrible sleeper" into someone who actually enjoys sleep.
I'm surprised that AI didn't tell him that the most likely cause of regularly waking up around 3 am is a cortisol spike. Try some breathing exercises or some other type of stress relief throughout the day, and you might sleep better.
In my case, thinking too much about the causes of bad sleep actually contributed to making sleep worse, so if this guy is anything like me then this whole project could be hurting his sleep rather than helping.
I’m actually the author of the post and doing regular breathing exercises and some additional things. Pretty sure my cortisol levels at night are (currently) not an issue. Morning walks looking up into the sky also help me a lot. Falling asleep isn’t my issue
I grew up in the country side and unfortunately, where I live now, double glassing isn’t a thing unless you live in a recently built house.
That doesn’t nullify what you’re saying, obviously putting worries into sleep affects the sleep itself. Still thought it was an interesting project to build as I’m anyways cautious about noise and air pollution topics :)
If you're regularly waking around 3 (as opposed to random times throughout the night) you might want to reconsider cortisol as a possibility, at least as setting a baseline wakefulness that allows you to be easily woken up from a noise. There is a natural cortisol spike at that time, and that combined with elevated levels from background stress causes the same problem for many people who fall asleep without issues, myself included.
The 3am part was just a random picked time. But interesting to know, thanks for sharing! I had some stress related sleeping issues about a year ago, that’s why I started with proactively provoking morning cortisol spikes and preventing them in the evenings which definitely helped. At that time I went through some personal challenges, so it made sense
I went to work at a BBB office once. They turned all their computers off at night and every morning they were back on. It was just "normal" for them.
I can't even remember what problem I was troubleshooting. At the time I was working on IVR systems.
Anwayz, I was working late in their office. Everyone had turned off their computers and went home. At exactly Midnight, every computer in the office turned back on.
I walked around the office looking at desks wondering what had happened. On one persons desk was an alarm clock with a very quiet alarm buzzing. I checked the clock and it was set for midnight (probably a default). About two minutes later it turned off automatically.
I turned off computers and re-set the alarm to go off a few minutes later.
When that alarm clock went off it somehow caused either draw or feedback in the wiring that caused all the computers to turn back on. At the time I wondered if it had something to do with wake on lan.
In any case, I suggested that person take their alarm clock home.
You're joking, but the other night I had high fever and had nightmares of AI giving me wrong answers to questions I already knew the answer, but for some reason I kept insisting on writing the same prompts I didn't even needed over and over again.
This post reminded me of a project I started but, alas, I ran into configuration issues and didn’t have the time to properly research. I think chat could be a great tool to move it forward.
I don't need this to know what wakes me up during the night: my wife pushes the door and THEN turns the doorknob. A simple conversation was no good. My MIL said on her experience deep conversations would not help either. At least it didn't help for 15 years.
lol, my husband does the same thing… I told him I can’t see the door at night and sometimes walk into it, so we leave it open at night, solves the problem.
Motion activated (night) light - even a little battery powered one - and the same in the bathroom. Not enough light to stir you awake but enough to find your way without turning on lights or fumbling in the dark.
The thing this guy should have done with AI is asking it: "how can I record sounds at night and check them back later?" And the AI would have told him to just download any recording app (for a kind of specific one I suggest snoreclock). End of the story.
Sidenote but still, I put ear plugs for 5 years already. It doesn't hurt, you don't feel anything, but it helps tremendously to stay asleep. Better than trying to fix your environment.
I even heard of people going to sleep with airpods pro in their ear.
Now that it's fixed tho my body decided I would need to pee every night about 2 hours after I went to bed... La vieillesse est un naufrage.
At times, when my SO is snoring, I just put my overhead headphones, turn on noise cancelling, put some gentle music on and lay on my back until I fall asleep.
Not exactly great, but does the job.
Using ear plugs in the past caused infections as I have curved ear canals.
I'd never go to sleep with AirPods in intentionally.
I had a scare in the very early days of owning AirPod Pros accidentally falling asleep with them, and waking up with tinnitus that took hours to go away.
Since then with every gen I've occasionally had ANC malfunction when they come in contact with a pillow and make some deafening noises, I wouldn't be surprised if that day they had been making some horrible shrieking noise while I slept.
(in fact, as if to mock me, I left this comment unsent realizing I didn't care enough to finish it, until my AirPod Maxes decided to flashbang me for having the audacity to while lying on my back. people need to know these things are treacherous in bed)
I like the sleep ear plugs; they're silicone plugs that are moldable. So they don't tend to extend out so much, or over-fill the ear like buds do.
I was at a festival a year back and unfortunately our camp was near a minor side stage which was running a daytime talent show. I wanted to take an afternoon nap. The sleep ear plugs + noise canceling headphones dulled the moderate noise down to almost nothing.
Had a similar problem in 2013. Fitness tracker showed my partner and I woke up at exactly 4:00am every day. Barely audible TV from neighbor through a shared wall the source.
Literally 5 minutes of online search and a white noise app solved the problem.
I know this is a post on a blog designed to sell us on Martin, but it's sort of like a movie where a single text message would spoil the whole plot. AI didn't really need to help solve this problem. Martin didn't "let" AI build a tool, he just asked (Claude, probably) how to build something that is replicated by existing apps that record sound and are activated over certain decibel levels. Comments seem to confirm many of us have done the same. Just seems a a bit over-engineered for the sake of it. Sorry, Martin.
Related project I did in 2014 tried to do this. I was a web developer so used the web audio APIs to trigger a recording when the decibel level exceeded a certain value. I was living in a big tent in my friends back yard in Sydney at the time and was convinced it was airplanes coming into SYD that were waking me up at 4am but never really captured conclusive evidence because my laptop battery couldn't make it through the night :)
Or just used earplugs. They can take some getting used to, but are worth it noisy disturbances are affecting your sleep.
If the goal was to have fun, that's great. If the goal was to solve a problem, I'm reminded of when engineers build over-engineered solutions, when a simple solution is available.
Each night is laid out like tracks in a music editor: one for sleep stages, one for heart rate and HRV, a few for the sensor events, and one for the noise events with the audio loaded in.
As an avid reader of aircraft accident reports (ok, more reader of blog posts and watcher of YouTube videos based on those reports - yeah, people have strange hobbies), it reminds me more of flight data recorder graphs - the first FDRs actually inscribed the graphs with needles on metal foil (https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/59289/was-the-f...), which is of course no longer the case, but the presentation has been kept.
If your app could track things like anxiety and worries, help you find the root cause, or train you not to let them wake you up at 3 a.m., I would pay as much as I could afford for it. :-(
Hey OP, would love to know more about your thoughts on Garmin you reference at the bottom? Why would they be any better/worse than Coros?
> *= I do not like Garmin, I think they're a fraudulent company systematically breaching consumer rights and I'm looking for alternatives. Already converted multiple people to Coros.
Came to see if someone commented on that. I have generally seen Garmin as one of the good ones on several criteria:
- when hit by ransomware, disclosed publicly, bit on the data loss and told them to fsck off
- devices can very much operate without any account, app, or cloud connection (of course you don't get the more advanced "Connect" features)
- plug it in and you have rw access to .FIT files over MTP
- same mechanism to build and sideload apps made with Monkey C
- ANT+ is a fairly open ecosystem (progressively replaced by BLE, often in much less open ways)
I hear that some people are annoyed that devices stop receiving major feature updates after a year or two, and see that as predatory "you must upgrade every year", which is like, ridiculous?
Also in a sense I like that I buy the device and it's mostly "done". Like a mechanical watch it's a utility item I can rely on and it won't ever have a Liquid Ass pulled up on me.
Yeah I totally agree with this list. In contrast, Coros had a pretty nonchalant response to their security issues last year. Attackers could:
> Hijacking the vicitim’s COROS account and accessing all data
> – Eavesdropping sensitive data, e.g. notifications
> – Manipulating the device configuration
> – Factory resetting the device
> – Crashing the device
> – Interrupting a running activity and forcing the recorded data to be lost [0]
The security firm disclosed the vulnerability to Coros in Mar 2025. They planned to fix it by the end of 2025, and didn’t address it until the security firm publicly released the finding.
>>*= I do not like Garmin, I think they're a fraudulent company systematically breaching consumer rights and I'm looking for alternatives. Already converted multiple people to Coros.
Slightly off the main topic, but I can strongly second that recommendation for Coros gear!
No relation other than a very happy Coros user (Pace Pro). They make an excellent series of sport & health monitoring watches and bike gear, best GPS I've ever seen producing the most accurate run/bike tracks I've ever seen (using 5 GNSS systems: GPS, Galileo, QZSS, etc.), very reasonable pricing compared to the competition, continuous useful updates, and just a great overall approach to health and technology.
We also installed triple-layered windows for sound insulation, but I believe it degraded the quality of the air, so sometimes have to open the windows for a few minutes before sleep to get fresh air.
My mom would love this one :) .. she told me recently about a long-running chat gpt session that she's had for over a week, where she was going back and forth trying to figure out the source of some strange sound in the building.
I opened the article thinking that it's about the on-call scenario (paging). Something like, I got paged in the middle of the night and let the remediation/mitigation to the agent...
Which makes a lot of sense. Especially non-Tier-1 services.
Note: Having previously worked at Amazon, certain shifts can be really busy. Busy as in 30-40 pages/incidents over the course of the shift. I sometimes wake up to a "ghost" page, although I left my position earlier this year...
I sleep terriibly.
It got 'better', when i worked out i have a 'day', of around 32-36 hours.
So, to people kon a regular 24 hour day, I'm tired at the wrong times and wide awake over aboit two of their sleep cycles.
Damned annoying, as I've gone out when i should have stayed in - but everyone is out and awake, and viceversa.
I've learned to say 'no' to invites I know I won't make. 8 hour working days, suck.
For long creative bursts, it's great, though.
> I get the sleep data from my Garmin* watch. Every watch and ring calculates sleep slightly differently, and to be honest, I don't fully trust any of them on the exact sleep stage I was in at any given second.
I love my Garmin, but it's one of the worst smart watches to track sleep with. It consistently ranks poorly in tests that stack it up against pro sleep equipment, and from my experience it struggles to even detect sleep times properly. That 3:32 event that the watch said has pulled you out of deep sleep may not have been real.
Totally agree with you, that’s why I wanted to check. I btw turned off the morning report long time ago, so it’s more about me checking the sleep stages after realizing that I feel without energy. Also my sleep outside the city is much better. In the end it turns out that most times it is real and an external noise woke me up. Not always, there are false positives and sometimes you just wake up (nightmare, stress, sickness, ..)
OP, I would encourage you to take a sleep test. While it seems to be correlated with sound, it sounds (pun not intended) way too similar to my OSA symptoms
I like the temperate graph halfway down the page. It looks like two decaying exponentials alternating every ~40 minutes, with the downward one steeper than the upward one. It's a neat visualization of hysteresis, where the thermostat presumably has a different temperature threshold for turning off or turning on (or perhaps there's a minimum time between state switches). Without the scale it's hard to know for sure.
Yes it’s the AC keeping the temperature. I have different targets set depending on season and time of night (cooler to fall asleep, warmer in the morning). Added this data because I already have it in Home Assistant and you never know what other crazy conclusions you can get from looking at the data :D
I know what is waking me up at night...my neighbour is going out to smoke weed at 0:30am and 3:00am and the smoke wafts into my room (it is warm enough to leave one window slightly open). He's also listening to some podcast w/o earphones and also coughing a lot because of smoking the weed.
This is cool, but a simple circular buffer audio recorder connected to stdin would have been sufficient. The recorder records continuously on a circular buffer that stores the last 5 minutes, and whenever OP wakes up, he can press any key on the keyboard to dump the current 5 minutes on storage, with the timestamp as file name. False positives are much less possible, and the whole system can just be a small CLI program.
Not sure I understand how this would work. The whole point is that you often don’t realize that you even woke up. And not sure jumping to go to the computer to hit a key is the smoothest way to fall back asleep
I spend most of my days in front of CLIs but here I really think a cli wouldn’t be the right tool for the job..
what a waste of technology. you could have had a pen and graph paper hooked up to an microphone 100 years ago and looked for the spikes in the time set.
it could also be common sense.. you live in a noisy city and you are wondering what the noise is.... maybe it could be the city itself? how about sleep in a different smaller town and then ask yourself the same question, you'll probably get a different answer.
I'm not sure if things are really that simple, at least from my personal experience. I think the quality of noise and noise floor can make a difference
Don't get me wrong but this seems like a first world problem which even I have experienced after my life has got easier. When I was younger, I used to live at a very noisy location and used to sleep like a baby.
Also, would late workouts help to aid a better sleep? Tired body falls asleep?
I read so many doom and gloom stories on hn regarding ai, it's a breath of fresh air to read articles about genuine use cases that improve quality of life. And all that without complaining. Marvellous
We may be entering the age of "disposable software" (some people politely call it "on-demand software"). Until recently, coding was a highly specialised skill and was relatively expensive. So writing custom code for personal whimsy was a luxury only software developers could afford. Not anymore.
They’re called “MITTZON”, made for offices. Also great room separators. I’ve tested them for a few nights and they work surprisingly well.
Otherwise making sure the windows are properly sealed is first resort. And if you’re living with other people (partner, flatmates, family) it also helps to check the doors
The point that we can now do these seemingly small projects is well put.
My grandmother can't see very well, and she always loved doing crossword puzzles, but the small print was giving her troublem. At the same time, the available crosswords in her language were too simple and boring for her.
So, I vibed a small scraper from some crossword collection, and with smart composition of the final HTML, I managed to get the crossword and the questions to show up on one side while the other side of the page was for the answers.
I still have no idea how the scraper works, and frankly I don't really need to. My challenge now is finding my way to even more challenging and enjoyable crosswords, or maybe even try to get AI to make the crosswords from scratch.
One observation: If you're often waking up around 3am, it is a strong indicator for histamine/MCAS issues. This is fairly new research, so most people dont know about it, I haven't had a single doctor yet who was familiar with this.
The mechanism: mast cells (the immune cells that release histamine among other things) have their own circadian clock. The CLOCK gene controls their IgE receptor expression in a time-of-day manner, and both plasma histamine and tryptase peak during the night. In healthy people this is fine. In MCAS or histamine intolerance, this nightly mediator release is excessive, and it happens right in the window where cortisol (which normally suppresses histamine release) bottoms out around 2-4am. Histamine is itself a wake-promoting neurotransmitter, so you get woken up, often by something minor like a noise, reflux, or a temperature shift that wouldn't otherwise register.
Signs it might be worth looking into: 3am waking with a racing heart, sweating, flushing, itching, or reflux/throat tightness.
A good in-depth resource: https://health.programmerlife.org/en/
This seems quite over engineered. They could’ve just left their phone recording overnight and done much simpler analysis on the big file. Maybe leverage LLM to write a 20-line python script, at most
This is another dumb AI project idea which i would have done at some point too if I didn't know better. It's one of those things where doctors will just go ahead with the fix even if they haven't evaluated the exact diagnosis, since the fix will probably be the same regardless. The human mind wants certainty though so I get it, but the fix doesn't need to be preceded by a pinpointing of the exact cause.
This is cool don't get me wrong, but surely overcomplicated? Why not just record audio to disk the whole night then eyeball the waveform for loudness spikes? If you just don't connect it to any network at all, there's no data breach risk (or am I misunderstanding the justification for the noise-detection toggle thing?).
Thx for the feedback about the hero image. I just removed it. (you weren’t the only one pointing it out)
The intention was to have something less detailed than the screenshot in the post.
About the other thing: yes this would have worked for a night or so. I wanted to be able to go back and forth between nights and compare. I also had concerns about the SD-card durability and storage capacity. Still, after an hour into letting the coding agent do its thing, I was impressed by the result, so more and more ideas popped into my head
This person wasted an entire weekend, spent a shit ton time with LLM and contributed to CO2 emissions, water table depletion just to come to the conclusion that he needs to wear fucking ear plugs or use a white noise maker?
Anybody living in a mid to large city or urban area could have told you that. What a waste of resources.
Good article! Not agreeing with the statement before the link
Also, not sure if you’ve taken the time to read the post but it clearly states that I’m not using AI to analyze the data. The point of posting this was a different one
I’m happy because I can clearly hear what wakes me up at night. I knew I wake up from noise and now I can clearly see it in the data that I wake up right after door slams, noisy motorbikes, car horning, and dishes from the kitchen (own and neighbors)
After taking action I now sleep better and don’t have those random wake-up moments.
Intrigued by your comment and being someone that have a broken sleeping pattern due to both me being a nervous person and having went through raising 2 kids, I went to the linked article hoping to learn something new about my pattern. And it turns out it's just about talking the habit of "siesta" - so having a short sleep period during daytime - and NOT about wake up in the middle of the night naturally.
So, I find totally inappropriate the snarky comment about OP and AI melting anything.
Prior to that, many people across different continents and cultures followed a biphasic sleep schedule. They went to bed in the evening and slept for a few hours, waking up around midnight. Then, they would stay up for a few hours to eat, tend to their children, or add wood to the fire, before finally falling back asleep for their second sleep phase.
And it goes on to mention this pre-industrial biphasic ‘schedule’ many times throughout the article.
Which is absolutely not what many of us experience when awaken by sounds or something else in the middle of the night. Because you fall asleep again shortly after, not after few hours.
I often wake up at 2-4 AM long enough to look at a clock - then fall back asleep. I’ve never even considered that it could be something in my environment waking me up!
3am is a common time to wake up or be half awake. This is the old "witching hour" (not midnight) when most people claim to sight "ghosts" or "aliens" in their room, and/or suffer sleep paralysis.
Then there is the two sleep theory that suggests we are not supposed to sleep in single block. In more traditional environments, people got up to stoke the fire at this point. I know some folk that get up to urinate or have a drink. I used to turn the radio on for a bit.
Yet, another day, yet another article hyping up AI tooling. 99.999% chance the author works for a company selling AI products. Let's see ..
Click through to their blog's main page. Click their LinkedIn link, google their current employer ...... "{Company} is a company that provides a platform for real-time search, observability, security, and generative AI"
Aaaaaand there it is. A person whose livelihood is tied to selling AI products writing blog posts hyping up how amazing AI products are. Who could have ever guessed?
Hey, OP, consider sleeping with ear plugs. They're scientifically proven to reduce night time awakenings due to audio disturbances. [1]
[1] https://academic.oup.com/sleep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/s...
Don't listen to him– he is a cat burglar, and you being deaf at night helps him steal your cats.
> Don't listen to him
That's the idea
Hopefully the ear plugs are good enough to not hear the "badum tiss" too :)
Unless the joke lands on deaf ears
Sounds like it did
You don’t say
:)
Is there such a flourishing black market for subtracted cats that would prompt burglars to steal these pets?
You can't subtract cats, you have to concatenate then truncate.
concatenating cats is useless use of cat, you can just provide more arguments instead
You can create a meme by concatenating cats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longcat
Yeah they just finished their series A funding yesterday. Sorry to hear you missed out
I don't think it will work out. Dwarf fortress got it right. Cats own you, not vice versa.
Which is the infinite money glitch.
You're worth X.
You have 1 cat who owns you, total value X.
Get 10 black market cats for free, now 11 cats own you for a total net worth of 11X.
That's even before considering the compound effect of each cat owning a human worth 11X, which means you can divest from 1 cat for 11X, and still be worth 110*X.
The system basically works like xAI shares. Don't look too close into it.
That's seems like a shady business, I'll have a thousand shares
There you go, here are your 1,000 shares for $0.0001.
Everybody! Pay attention now! Only 22,999,000 share tokens are left, and due to gchamonlive's massive transaction, the liquidity pool is moving fast, and a share/token is now worth $150,000. Don't miss out, act now!
It's alright, I'll just hide my cats along with my kids and wife.
You can tell by the sneakers.
AFAIK there is some inflammation potential if earplugs are used all night everyday.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/advice-wearing-ea...
Trash night (early morning) is once a week in my area. You can use the ear plugs strategically.
I've been using them for decades without issue, FWIW.
You are either a scientific anomaly or a single data point. Or both.
Well, then I am another anomaly and data point. I'm using ear plugs for 30 years at least 95% of nights. Never ever had an ear infection.
And by induction, earplugs don't give anyone an ear infection. QED!
I am also a scientific anomaly. Seems there are a lot of us!
You're a cohort now!
Me too, 20 years without a single ear infection and without a single day without ear plugs
I have found it depends on how comfortable the earplugs are. If I feel they are uncomfortable in the ear, there is a good chance I'll get an infection/inflammation in the next few days.
yeah my wife has some custom made silicon ones. She frequently gets external otitis from wearing them too many nights in a row.
Responding here to short-circuit all the replies to this:
You shouldn't be looking at just various kinds of earplugs as options for this. You can get custom made earplugs for your ears for differing use cases (sleep, concerts) at an ENT.
Or if you don't have time, Radians brand molded earplugs are at-home custom molded options.
ime finding the right earplugs is the key. there are lots of options a of diameter, density and material to try out. getting the right one made a big difference for me
Foam: cheap, scratchy, ineffective. This one will give you abrasions sometimes.
Silicone: expensive, effective, fussy.
Wax: cheap, effective, disposable. (Needs warming up, slight drawback.)
As someone who has been wearing earplugs for decades for motorcycles, firearms and other loud events, this information at face value is a bit off.
Foam by far has the most effective NRR. Silicone and wax are fine but will not provide as effective of NRR. That said, if it’s for sleeping silicone and wax are probably fine. I would argue that foam is not scratchy at all but I usually buy more expensive brands like Mack’s and it’s good to try out different sizes.
I have like 20 brands of foam earplugs in my drawer, 5 different pairs of custom silicone airplugs, unusual earplugs from Kickstarter like [1], and so on. What I'm saying is I know my way around the earplug block. Here's what I'd write for your categories:
Foam: The most effective, by far. I suspect many people wear them incorrectly and do not insert them far enough. You can use lube (they make special ear lube for stuff like hearing aids, although I think anything medical grade will do) if you have difficulty doing so. I have unusually small ear canals; the most comfortable and best I've found by a mile are Mack's Ultra Soft Foam Earplugs. These are much more comfortable than slim fit alternatives and also have very high attenuation.
Silicone: expensive (but they're reusable and last years), but the least fussy once you get them. They are moulded to your goddamn ear---it's a perfect, pressure-free fit every time and they go right in. Drawbacks include lesser attenuation and attenuation that isn't immediately at 100%---it takes a while for it to "seal". I abadoned these once moisture started to accumulate between my ear canal and the plug and I'd hear it as I moved and it became very annoying.
Wax: joke attenuations compared to foam, and bad compared to silicone. The most expensive long-term unless you're serious about reuse. Somewhat fussy and may fall out. Very comfortable (little insertion).
Foam + wax: this is what you really want if you care about maximum attenuation. My ear canals are slightly too short to comfortably insert an entire Mack's earplug, so I snip the ends off mine, lube them up, and insert them completely flush into my ear canal. Then, I take a wax plug and mould it on top. It's perfectly comfortable and it performs better than any other option I'm aware of. I tend to also wear a Bluetooth sleep mask and play rain sounds on 100% volume and it just comes through the double earplug situation to mask any very loud/spurious noise. To remove the flush-inserted earplugs, I use a pair of blunt tweezers.
When I used slim fit foam earplugs I'd routinely get ear infections. Switching to silicone fixed that, but suffered from the aforementioned issues. With the ultra soft earplugs + wax method I never get ear infections. I make sure to always insert a fresh pair (but I reuse the wax ones for a few days) and to always do so with clean hands. I think the infections are due to friction between the plug and the canal during insertion as well as plugs that are too large/exert too much pressure once expanded---the lube and very soft plug addresses those issues.
[1] https://paxauris.com/
Oh well lube would make a huge difference, it's true. Some places require me to wear foam ones for health and safety reasons, and I always put water on them, for softness and a good seal. By calling the silicone ones fussy I just meant that they need washing, really (I am lazy). I buy big boxes of wax ones, they cost approximately nothing and come with a little storage container, and then I throw the current pair away after a week or two, mainly because they start to look gross (I suspect bacteria don't actually find paraffin wax hospitable).
I have the same experience with foam being best at noise blocking. The brand makes a big difference. 3M ear plugs are terrible. Best brand is Oropax.
How so? I use the 3M yellow ones for many years and I find the pretty good. I buy like a box of 200 pairs and use them for a couple of times, so they are also pretty cheap.
Foam are indeed the best, but there's a lot of variation in sound blocking quality and ear comfort. Experimentation is needed to find what works for you.
White noise also helps without the need for ear plugs. Depends how loud the disturbances are.
> they make special ear lube
huh, potentially a game-changer. Thank you!
I guess it depends on the person because I've been wearing them every night for years with no side effects. I use those laser lite ones and use a new pair every night (they're very cheap).
The only downside is you get used to the quiet and it means when I don't sleep with them I get a worse night sleep than I used to. (But I still get a better night sleep with them than when I didn't use them.)
That's bad, because I suffer from pulse-synchronous tinnitus and they help. Can't find a cause though, on some days it's gone completely.
Also they are very bad for sex
Or very good
I have custom molded ones. They help a lot, however high pitched sudden noises still get through and wake me up. I never managed to sleep without earplugs since moving to this city. Not considering moving due to the quality of life (apart from the noise)
Are custom molded ones better?
I’ve been using swimmers plugs for a few years now and they’ve been fine. Do you use an eye mask too?
There are special molded ones optimized for sleep. Cost me around 100€, never going back.
But I think you need to get lucky with the ear canal print. Mine had 30 days return policy of they don’t fit well. I did it in a local store
They are pretty comfortable, though they take getting used to because the seal is perfect and you'll slightly pressurize your ear canal which is a strange feeling. They'll also fit slightly inside your ear, so lying sideways is fine.
The downside is they're very expensive, relative to other earplugs and mine no longer seal as well as they used to so I'd need to get a new pair. They're still better than nothing. I started using earbuds around the same time, from using cans, and I wonder if I've very slightly widened my ear's opening.
I also use an eye mask if I'm somewhere that doesn't have good curtains or blinds. Really works very well, but I recommend one that wraps around and doesn't have an elastic band to dig into your ears (Matador makes a good one).
They don’t block much more noise but they’re much more comfortable
I use these custom-molded ones for sleep. They're awesome. So comfortable. https://www.sensaphonics.com/products/solidsleep
Yes. Wearing regular earplugs will change the shape of your ear, and many people can't tolerate it every night.
I am curious: What city?
Barcelona, Spain. Basically narrow streets, full of loud motorbikes, mostly single glassing in windows, trash collection happens for some reason at night, noisy culture. Still love the city though. But originally grew up in a quiet country and on the outside the city with 0 noise during day and night
Interesting. Taipei, Taiwan has a similar problem: Endless motorbikes and motorscooters. The droning background noise of two stroke engines is awful (plus air pollution!). However, it is improving quickly with the arrival of electric equivalents. Is Barcelona pushing to replace two stroke engines with electric? It will make a huge difference! Also, I wonder if electric garbage trucks could also help.
I've been using those for a few years. I also cover my eyes with a sleeping mask in the summer. In this part of the world (Berlin) it gets light around 4am in the summer. About 3-4 hours before I want to wake up. I'm sensitive to light, I sleep longer in the winter.
Or as an alternative I use blackout curtains.
Once I also had automatic blackout blinds, they would slowly roll up before my my alarm rings. All controlled by home assistant, which can read the phono alarm time. Waking up slowly by light is nice :)
Heavy / blackout curtains are great for noise insulation / echoes / reverb / heat management, too. But there's often some leakage above and below, so a combination of blackout curtains, blinds, and / or outdoor blinds is likely the best option. But that's three separate investments and may not be possible if you rent.
Depending on your setup it might not be enough. I have those in the bedroom, but I can't install them on the rest of the flat (they're not the most beautiful). Leaving the bedroom door open for proper air quality leads inevitably to light coming in from other rooms. Yes it's that bright in Berlin at 4am in summer. Therefore I second the mask. There are a lot of option that are super comfortable and cheap on Amazon.
What about your rouladen? Articulated steel blinds block quite a lot of light, don't they?
You mean "Rollläden", Rouladen are the rolled meat things.
Are you sure they're not the same thing? I'm quite certain I've heard people talk about "beef curtains."
Same for Seattle! And I got one for the exact same reasons. Once you got used to them, a sleeping mask and earplugs is pure bliss.
I have fallen into the (questionable) habit of sleeping with Airpods. I used to wake up with my mind racing and not be able to fall back asleep. The Airpods helped distract and sedate my midnight thoughts such that I would fall back asleep much quicker than without. I've progressively shifted towards falling asleep listening to the droll of engaging non-fiction, but keep them in my ears in noise canceling mode with no media for the remainder of my night.
Again, not medical advice, just anectdotal experience..
Edit: this is entirely due to the 'Stop playing when falling asleep' function of iOS 26, which I loathe. But this feature barely make it worthwhile.
I was wondering how good their noise cancelation would be for night-time sleeping, how effective would you say it is?
It's pretty good, but I guess it depends on your environment. Pretty decent at removing things like traffic, air conditioning, television. Even Sirens are pretty muted unless they are extremely close, which is a good thing I guess. They probably won't block the base beat if you sleep above a night club..
How can anyone sleep with these things? My ears get extremely sweaty and sore after half an hour.
I've been sleeping with ear plugs for well over 10 years at this point, so I feel qualified to answer.
1. You have to find the right ear plugs for YOU. Everyone has different ear canal size, shape, sensitivity, etc.
2. They should never be painful unless you are doing it wrong. Yes, they are likely to be uncomfortable at first, but the first time you wake up feeling like a million bucks because you got 8 uninterrupted hours of sleep for the first time in your life, you will happily accept the temporary discomfort.
I take ear plugs with me when travelling but I really hate wearing them. I've tried all kinds. Silicone is best. There is a knack to making them a bit more comfortable, but they're still not great. I sleep on my side which probably doesn't help. If I wear them for more than a couple of nights my ears get really sore.
What they're good for is sleeping due to desperation while travelling. I couldn't imagine having to wear them every day at home. That sounds like hell.
This, this exactly. Uncomfortable and itchy to the point of keeping me awake until I take them out. Do not understand how anyone can sleep with them in!
Yeah, this seems like a way overengineered solution.
I moved to the US 15 years ago and it was too noisey for me to sleep well (fire trucks, cars, etc), but ear plugs solved the problem and are portable to other places you might need to sleep.
I recommend these: Mack's Pillow Soft Silicone Earplugs. Can be found on Amazon. Block out A LOT of noise.
They’re little putty molds that you shape to fit your ear.
I also rip them in half before molding so I get 2 ear plugs from 1 putty.
Quies foamies. After wearing military issue 3M foamies around jet engines for years, I bought some of these Quies and were very surprised to discover that they could be made so comfortable, and also long lasting.
Wax-style earplugs like you describe are the only kind that a friend of mine uses. The foam ones never fit them.
Huge fan of my Anker Soundcore A20s w/ a mixture of noise colors over conventional ear plugs. Much more comfortable and don't create such a closed in effect. Easy to take in/out if I need to chat w/ a partner.
Also a simple noise machine can work wonders.
Agreed. These have been a game changer especially for those with partners who snore. It took a few days but my ears got used to them after that. They are very comfortable.
To the person who asked, I can sleep with these in on my side without a problem after I made sure to use the right tip size.
I’ve been using fans as white noise generators for decades. When staying in a hotel room, I run the bathroom fan if it’s loud enough. It’s a great way to drown out thoughts if you have trouble falling asleep.
You might want to consider investing in something like a Babelio sound machine. It's tiny, quite loud, kinder to the environment and will guarantee you have a solution if the bathroom is too far away or the outside noise is a bit too aggressive.
Is side sleeping possible with these?
They're designed for side-sleeping, but may present a bit of pressure on your ears... they do for me, I've adjusted. It's minor as the materials are quite soft.
They have a newer model that is slightly slimmer w/ more features like active noise cancellation, but has a smaller battery that is marginal for full-night sleeping, so I didn't bother upgrading.
One thing to note is they have some bad reviews due to issues with batteries dying or depleting quickly - my right bud wouldn't charge past 50% after 9 months of daily usage, which only lasted about 6 hours or so before dying. That said, Anker's tech support promptly sent out a new pair with minimal friction, which I received just days after reaching out. I've had 4 months of usage on those new ones without a hitch. Hopefully those kinks have been worked out.
Even if these new ones die outside of warranty, they're so good that I feel I'll have gotten my money's worth and will immediately buy them again.
The tinnitus is deafeningly loud with earplugs for me. Better to have a white noise generator or a fan running.
I sympathize with you, but there are people who don't have a tinnitus, and for those, they might be a solution...
No no, we first need to adopt a technology that consumes more water and energy than a small town to solve a problem we've already solved!
Jokes aside: overengineering issue like this to LEARN a new coding language, hardware setup, platform etc. used to be a great opportunity for skills growth. Now honestly it's hard to justify, if you're using AI to do it. With the added insult that the sycophantic AI will also make you feel like a genius for overthinking a stupid idea.
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I don't want to paint your comment as pro-AI brigading, but in the solution to any problem, considering the collaterals is a pillar principle of engineering. You don't get praise for solving a bug infestation problem by nuking the city.
I feel some of the recent HackerNews stories start leaning a bit too much toward using AI regardless of whether it makes sense. A solution to any problem, however interesting or clever should be critiqued holistically, alternatives included.
It's especially tiring how apparently datacenters were invented last year. Datacenters were fine when you were using them to encode video for the billionth mindless TikTok short, but AI suddenly made them the scourge of the earth?
Most disingenuous or misinformed or both take of the week
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I would think earwax build up would increase with that
My suspicion from regular use of ear plugs is that the wax sticks to the plug every night. I use a new set every night. Pretty wasteful, but man, I need my sleep.
I use Loop silicone earplugs, they’re reusable and washable. Used to use the disposables but got tired of the waste.
When my wife showed me the Loop ad, I told her it's a scam.
But now I'm the one using them. Haven't done as much work researching earplugs as some posters above, but like the Loops. For comparison, I have earplugs at work, that feel like someone was raping my ear every time I'm putting them on.
So, there's definitely earplugs and earplugs. If you need to use them, might be worth few hours and few bucks spent on testing/research.
Oh yeah, I bought a few different types of ear plugs to test them out. The silicone putty and the loops left my ears sweaty. I'd pull them out at night to dry them out. Tmi, I know, sorry, but yeah, I tried 'em.
Definitely does.
I used to wear them every night and they definitely improved my sleep. But then I also had instances where my ear was blocked with wax for several days.
YMMV
I can confirm. I also use in-ear headphones daily which I think exacerbates it further. It can be fixed by an occasional ear wash though.
Yeah, they can block drainage
I used to have lots of earwax buildup that kept me from using earplugs.
Then I fixed my health.
What did you do to fix your earwax buildup?
Leave the environments that stimulated it.
Stop eating the foods that stimulate it.
I now have visible production on a tissue or cotton swab once a week or fewer.
There’s no real evidence linking specific foods with ear wax production.
Also, for anyone getting reading this, cotton swabs in your ears is a bad idea and usually makes the problem worse (pushes wax in and compacts it).
> There’s no real evidence linking specific foods with ear wax production.
That’s not what’s being discussed.
They asked what I did.
This is anecdata.
and anecdotally:
I no longer make enough wax to see in a month.
You’re free to share your anecdata.
But you also shouldn’t be surprised if someone challenges the implications or merits of your anecdata, for the benefit of others that might take it as good advice.
Yes, it’s no longer good advice to
checks notes
consider switching up environment
or diet/things you’re ingesting,
if you’re generating excess goo known for waste-carrying,
and protection from environmental debris...
Are you serious?
Feel free to struggle until a peer-reviewed study gives you permission not to,
but don’t be surprised if others continue making basic observations and improvements for themselves.
I didn’t refute a link between environmental factors and ear wax production. Nor did I say improving diet isn’t a good thing in general.
But changing your diet won’t help with ear wax. And cotton swabs are a bad idea.
You seem upset; this is just a discussion on an internet forum. It’s ok for people to have different opinions and share them in a thread :)
You changing YOUR diet may not help your earwax.
Changing mine does - and I can reliably show it - and I’m what was asked about.
Also, cotton-swabs or a tissue aren’t a bad idea (again, anecdotally for me - what was asked about)
unless one has build-up,
and/or the ear opening has become smaller as a protective measure,
ensuring one rifles the gunk in from the walls,
instead of going past it in the center,
and then pulling out and around the walls.
Most have ear-openings too-tight to even know what I’m referring to.
Anyway, not upset, just steadfast that words matter.
and that individuals don’t need the permission of peer-reviewed studies (or you!) to make basic improvements in their lives.
Just because someone has perceived that doing X leads to Y doesn’t mean there’s causation. Easy and common mistake to make though.
Anyway, I’m not trying to convince you of anything. My comment was aimed at other readers; further discussion between us won’t be necessary. Good day! :)
Like I said, wait your whole life for permission of peer-reviewed mass studies to make basic adjustments.
Some people can do better.
Cotton swabs were/are the problem. Using them can cause impacted earwax.
If there's enough earwax in there to get pushed around and compacted, then it seems like there is some other issue going on? Is having small mounds of wax per permanently living in the ear canal normal for some people?
I have been wearing ear plugs every night for over a decade and cleaning my ears with cotton swabs at least every other day for my whole life and never once had ear wax build up.
One group simply cannot understand the other.
Network effects at play, here.
What we consider normal is informed by the people we spend the most time around.
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i find earplugs so uncomfortable that it ruins my night
Get custom fitted ones at an audiologist.
They are very comfortable, at least in the upward facing ear, for me. Foamies are only tolerable a couple of nights for me.
Do they suppress as much noise?
The ones I have are rated at about 20db, compared to approximately 30db for the best foam earplugs, but they are much more comfortable for every-night wear. I use foam ear plugs occasionally when I know I'm going to be in a very noisy environment or need perfect sleep.
I was dealing with longterm chronic infections, when my ears were that sensitive.
Whenever I sleep with ear plugs, I wake up with brain fog.
Maybe I've seen too many horror movies, but aren't you concerned about not hearing an intruder and being able to respond? Maybe I'm paranoid. :)
Yeah this is my primary qualm just as a dad with four young kids, I’m addition to needing to hear them if they have a night terror or something. I still use them occasionally though.
Is the risk of intruders a real or a perceived problem? How does it weigh with sleep quality?
Frankly, my sleep is so poor that if they mind the noise level they can take what they can carry.
A would be intruder did bang on my door at 3am (I guess to test if anyone was in) and I looked pretty pissed off and menacing when I opened the door (ex prop forward rugby player) and they ran off. Maybe not the smartest move on my part.
Apparently they immediately decided to break into my neighbours a few doors down while people were sleeping.
As I sit in bed at midnight, winding down from my day, this comment gave me a great belly laugh. Thanks!
Smoke detectors are another reason
You will never not hear a smoke alarm while wearing ear plugs.
They are effective at attenuating noise, ineffective at eliminating it.
Except for me… I sleep through smoke alarms without any earplugs or medications. :/
Luckily smoke detectors and true (loud) emergencies seem to punch right through without any issues.
I wear ear plugs every night. The disposable foam ones are good enough to prevent me from being woken up by my partner getting ready before me, but I would most certainly hear a fire alarm. I'm laying in bed right now with them in and I can still hear the fan pointed at me. They significantly reduce low-mid range frequencies, but they're not 100% soundproof
Wear earplugs and adopt a dog. Best of both worlds.
Question: Doesn't this just allow ear wax to get impacted for 8 hours?
Do you use an alarm? Does this affect your wake up?
This is very important question that demands answer
This is really cool. We did a similar thing around 2 years ago but didn't use AI in that case. Just used a phone to record a few nights sleeping. Then a python script. I manually listened for some time in order to find the threshold amplitude (where all sounds would be ignored below and tracked above). Generated a graph that should the spikes of interest. Clicked on the spikes which went to the timestamp in the audio and listened. Not super scientific I know.
Two observations. 1. Often you wake up after a loud noise but like 5 minutes later with no memory of it. 2. even if you don't wake up from the noise your breathing changes, more likely to talk in sleep and shuffle more. So even if you not waking up your quality of sleep is disrupted.
Our case had some random construction like noise in the early morning, lasted around 10 seconds and disappeared. However, we noted even ordinary sounds we didn't think was loud was effecting our sleep.
Solution for that place was earplugs and a loud fan to generate white noise.
You definitely went for a simpler solution!
And thanks for sharing that comment, I can second your two observations
For multiple months, I thought I’m waking up at night because I need to go to the bathroom so often (even checked for insulin resistance but markers were perfect). Interestingly enough, most of the times (not always) there are one or multiple louder sounds just before I wake up to go to the bathroom. Zero memory or conscious perception of the noise, still woke up and feeling like I need to go to the bathroom
One time there was construction/renovation going on one floor below mine. I'm talking sledgehammers, jackhammers, the whole shebang.
For some reason, I've never slept better. Every little noise generally wakes me up (like someone walking in the same room) but the demolition noises kind of numbed me to all audio, apparently.
I also somehow sleep better when I leave a window open, and get some morning sun and noise? Though in that case, loud motorcycles revving will probably wake me up, but random people talking/shouting is fine.
That CO2 concentration looks unhealthy, I wonder to what extent it's affecting your sleep quality (as opposed to waking you up).
> Measure before you fix
In my case, I got a few IKEA CO2 sensors, and after leaving them in the bedrooms for a few days, we found that leaving an outside window slightly open + the bedroom door open, kept the CO2 levels below 600PPM at night.
We're 1000ft/300m away from a motorway, but fortunately the noise pollution isn't bad. So ventilating (even as it's getting cold) turned out to be a simple fix. I hadn't thought of collecting sleep data from our devices, but maybe I'll get an AI to do that, so I can correlate our sleep quality with the environment.
The levels I have at night indeed are unhealthy, I’m still trying to find the best way to tackle this challenge..
Most wakeups are from noise (I can see it in the data) but high CO2 levels can also make me a lighter sleeper.
Not sure where you’re based but in Europe the priority is mostly on heat isolation, so air movement suffers. The US is better in that regard. There was a big thread on that topic on X the other week (Peter the indie hacker initiated it and there were some good recommendations in case you’re the owner of the flat)
Is your bedroom approaching 4 or 5k PPM? The chart screen shotted was at 3300+ and it looks like it kept going up after. Hopefully it's a bad sensor reading, but that is very high. I sleep in a small room with a few people and it's maybe 1500 and noticeable when that happens. Getting to 5k is potentially dangerous for extended periods of time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Below_1%
Hi, Co2 levels like that are severely high and will cause you to have a lot of issues. I had some issues with poor ventilation and headaches in my apartment, and my solution was to run the bathroom fan all the time - this gave me enough ventilation to feel much better. You're basically suffocating at 3000 ppm.
It's important to measure this somehow - I do this with a $100 Co2 sensor and display I got off amazon, but you seem to already have these sensors available.
https://archive.ph/dd5Kl
“Almost 2%. The reduction in carbon-dioxide concentration when 60 square centimetres of plants were placed in an office, according to one study.”
Plants can help somewhat.
They can't, it's a myth. It's not enough plants, but also, they actually release CO2 at night.
Oh duh, thanks for the reminder.
I was a bit surprised at the level of those readings.
Anecdotally, we have an air monitor gadget and the highest I've ever seen (small home office, fairly well-sealed, winter, me working there all day with no ventilation) was around 1100-1200 PPM. I get that two people in a small sealed bedroom could push it higher, but 3350 PPM?!
I also agree co2 levels are super important, but I’m wondering: in your situation isn’t air pollution from the motorway a concern? Not sure how to balance that one
3k+ is well into the headache / feel really bad range
we rarely get over 1k here
yeah... the problem is that his vibecoded dashboard or sensor readings are buggy
plants plants plants. Most of these are dummy easy to care for, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study#List_of_p...
Plants are nice…but, from your link:
“These results are not applicable to typical buildings, where outdoor-to-indoor air exchange already removes volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at a rate that could only be matched by the placement of 10–1000 plants/m2 of a building's floor space.[2]
The results also failed to replicate in future studies”
You could use air scrubbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime
You’d need a forest in your room to see a proper change. There was a whole discussion in the Indie hacking scene on X on that topic around 1-2 weeks ago
Big fan of plants though, help me feel calm
Plants release CO2 at night, though. Not much, but they certainly won't help to remove it unless they are photosynthesising.
Everyone gets unhealthy CO2 levels if the bedroom doesn't have air extraction inside or you don't leave the door opened.
Does it really matter in the grand scheme of things tho ? I have a captor at home, even when I leave the door opened and CO2 remains low, I don't notice anything different at wakeup.
It can be the difference between between feeling like you're suffocating, not getting enough oxygen to rest enough/sleep well.
I notice a difference if I move between a ventilated room vs congested one. I suppose it depends on what's causing the concentration. If it's human breath, I'll smell freshness. If it's e.g. burning a portable gas heater (common in my part of the world), I'll feel like I'm not inhaling smoke (probably small amounts of CO).
A few years ago, I would sometimes wake up at night and open a window wide, or go open the outside door and stand there for 5-10 minutes.
Interesting. I may need to add some sensors.
I spend time in two places. San Juan Islands WA and Santa Cruz, CA.
On island, nights are too quiet. During the day, a float plane a mile away sounds like it is next door.
In Santa Cruz, the house is on a major street. Busses, ambulances all sorts of yahoos.
I sleep better quiet. But I sleep even better when settled - mind not going, etc.
I generally don’t sleep well at all. The biggest factor is - has my brain settled. Background and noise don’t matter.
I find if I work out consistently I am always getting great sleep and getting really tired in the evening, but if I don't I might not ever feel tired then I look up and it's 3am. I never made the connection between heavy exercise and sleep before, but it seems obvious in hindsight. Got to do what we are built to do not what modern life insists we do.
I think being active, especially evenings, is helpful. When in Santa Cruz, my wife ensures via threat (joking) that I attend her evening pilates classes. It does help with sleep.
> The biggest factor is - has my brain settled. Background and noise don’t matter.
I'm there too on this. Something I've found helps is listening to certain types of audio. Some audio books can work, but if they're too engaging or interesting it's counter-productive.
My current solution for this is a particular YouTuber; I noticed a long time ago that watching his videos in bed (when I already given up on trying to sleep immediately because my brain was too alert) seemed to help me relax and feel drowsy. Now it's almost a switch - start a video, phone face down, and I rarely need a second one.
“Has my brain settled” I feel this.
I started meditating recently (~10mins per day) and have found it to be surprisingly effective. It’s a combination of body scanning & mindfulness meditation.
It doesn’t always help, but tends to.
I used to do yoga and meditation. I let that slip while life transitions. I have some meds from my doctor (seroquel) which is knock me out, but getting back to being active and disconnecting is a better approach than pills.
I recently had (and then lost/left on a plane!) a Lumenate Nova[1] and found it was very helpful at quickly getting me away from the mind going state. I work very late to overlap with distant timezones and would often find it difficult to get to sleep once I went to bed given I've been staring at screens and on calls only minutes before hitting the pillow. This was great.
[1] https://lumenate.co/lumenate-nova/
I find my mind goes straight to settled if my phone and all configurable electronics are in a completely separate room. Its like I give up seeking more stimulation.
An off topic addendum - those are 2 very nice places to be. Maybe someday.
I live in a silent area at night and regularly woke up at 3:30 am a couple of years ago. Turns out it was a leading indicator for digestive issues, nothing major and fixed now but it seems 3:30am was the point my body said “I need more food and I don’t care you’re asleep” and according to the dietician I saw this is relatively common with IBS.
wow i've been dealing with this exact problem for years. is the fix just eating a snack right before bed?
Some kind of slow digesting healthy snack with a reasonable amount of calories does the trick for me.
This is the most HN thing ever. Someone works to create an ultimately useless tool because no matter what you find the answer to be, the solution is the same:
-- Attenuate loud noises --
Which is exactly what they ended up doing
> With actual data, I could finally act with some confidence instead of guessing:
> I added proper acoustic panels (the IKEA ones for offices to create meeting areas work surprisingly well)
> I added extra insulation around the bedroom door and the window (silicone, rubber, ...)
This is amazing. I wish I had this when I was struggling with sleep. I tried a lot of things and stacked them:
Mouth taping (stopped snoring immediately), magnesium glycinate before bed, no screens an hour before sleep, keeping the room cold, not eating dinner so late and regular sauna sessions. Individually they helped.
Together they made a real difference, loud cars and city noise don't wake me up anymore.
I know it sounds like biohacker stuff, but it works. This tool makes it possible to actually find the root cause instead of just guessing. Love it!
Yeah, a cool/cold bedroom and not-eating-so-late have been pretty clear helpers for me, and I can very clearly see the differences the days that I eat a lot, late. Also the days when I have drinks after 5pm or so; alcohol is a well-known sleep disturber.
I'm also on a CPAP these days, but always looking for a better solution so I'm not so tethered to technology.
Last: when I'm trying to lose weight, I have to be careful or I'm also waking up from hunger. Only it doesn't show up as hunger at first, just a kind of mildly-anxious alertness - that's from the cortisol your body releases when your blood sugar is too low during the night. And then later, after about an hour awake, I get ravenously hungry.
So now I'm stuck trying to balance this: given that a lot of my physical activity is in the evening, how do I eat enough, early enough, that I don't sleep badly from too-low blood sugar and also don't sleep badly from eating too much too late?
Bodies are weird
Environment management is important, but internal relaxation skills and similar are as important. Consider doing body scans, various visualizations, breathing exercises when going to bed: I found a 20mn guided exercise I liked (it was yoga nidra) and in a few months it transformed me from a "horrible sleeper" into someone who actually enjoys sleep.
I find that forced yawning helps me relax and fall asleep when I couldnt otherwise.
I'm surprised that AI didn't tell him that the most likely cause of regularly waking up around 3 am is a cortisol spike. Try some breathing exercises or some other type of stress relief throughout the day, and you might sleep better.
In my case, thinking too much about the causes of bad sleep actually contributed to making sleep worse, so if this guy is anything like me then this whole project could be hurting his sleep rather than helping.
I’m actually the author of the post and doing regular breathing exercises and some additional things. Pretty sure my cortisol levels at night are (currently) not an issue. Morning walks looking up into the sky also help me a lot. Falling asleep isn’t my issue
I grew up in the country side and unfortunately, where I live now, double glassing isn’t a thing unless you live in a recently built house.
That doesn’t nullify what you’re saying, obviously putting worries into sleep affects the sleep itself. Still thought it was an interesting project to build as I’m anyways cautious about noise and air pollution topics :)
If you're regularly waking around 3 (as opposed to random times throughout the night) you might want to reconsider cortisol as a possibility, at least as setting a baseline wakefulness that allows you to be easily woken up from a noise. There is a natural cortisol spike at that time, and that combined with elevated levels from background stress causes the same problem for many people who fall asleep without issues, myself included.
The 3am part was just a random picked time. But interesting to know, thanks for sharing! I had some stress related sleeping issues about a year ago, that’s why I started with proactively provoking morning cortisol spikes and preventing them in the evenings which definitely helped. At that time I went through some personal challenges, so it made sense
Second this
Have the same pattern, issue is cortisol/stress, not sounds / etc that happen precisely at night
Built simular things tonwhat Op did (thoug using Oura for sleep tracking, not Garmin)
Result: no statistically significant variations in sounds, CO2 normal etc. Cortisol is what doctors/AI told me first
Yeah, if you continuously wake up around 3am you are anxious/stressed/depressed. Whole article is overthought/engineering mindset nonsense.
You ever try just masking the noises with some white noise?
Embracing biphasic sleep is also an option if your life permits it
This reminds me of a weird story...
I went to work at a BBB office once. They turned all their computers off at night and every morning they were back on. It was just "normal" for them.
I can't even remember what problem I was troubleshooting. At the time I was working on IVR systems.
Anwayz, I was working late in their office. Everyone had turned off their computers and went home. At exactly Midnight, every computer in the office turned back on.
I walked around the office looking at desks wondering what had happened. On one persons desk was an alarm clock with a very quiet alarm buzzing. I checked the clock and it was set for midnight (probably a default). About two minutes later it turned off automatically.
I turned off computers and re-set the alarm to go off a few minutes later.
When that alarm clock went off it somehow caused either draw or feedback in the wiring that caused all the computers to turn back on. At the time I wondered if it had something to do with wake on lan.
In any case, I suggested that person take their alarm clock home.
you could’ve been a great start of a horror movie.
Motherboards turn on PCs based on observed voltage drop when pressing the PWR switch.
Could also have been “AC power restored” functionality being triggered.
clearly the alarm clock was set to wake the computers up from sleep
You let it? It really wanted to, but you kept denying it until you finally gave in and let it?
I got a lot of shit the other day for pointing out our language around LLM’s is absurd. May as well ask your hammer for permission to hit a nail.
“Respect your tools” and all that but remember it’s an “it.”
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can't we all agree they're BOTH terrible?
Both are fuel for the other. The romance is amusing.
Can't we all agree LLM users are only "AI" curious, and not to kink shame those that lose $200k to their hubris. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ4pSVS_mN0
Plot twist: the existential dread of an AI-ified world where "AI" is the answer to everything was what was waking him.
You're joking, but the other night I had high fever and had nightmares of AI giving me wrong answers to questions I already knew the answer, but for some reason I kept insisting on writing the same prompts I didn't even needed over and over again.
> a flash of lightning following the boom
That’s not how lightning and thunder work.
^f lightning ;)
Honestly, feels more like a bit. I sometimes say I need to cross my i's and dot my t's to suss out who's still paying attention in a meeting...
This post reminded me of a project I started but, alas, I ran into configuration issues and didn’t have the time to properly research. I think chat could be a great tool to move it forward.
https://medium.com/homeday/building-a-noise-level-dashboard-...
https://thepihut.com/products/respeaker-4-mic-array-for-rasp...
I don't need this to know what wakes me up during the night: my wife pushes the door and THEN turns the doorknob. A simple conversation was no good. My MIL said on her experience deep conversations would not help either. At least it didn't help for 15 years.
lol, my husband does the same thing… I told him I can’t see the door at night and sometimes walk into it, so we leave it open at night, solves the problem.
Motion activated (night) light - even a little battery powered one - and the same in the bathroom. Not enough light to stir you awake but enough to find your way without turning on lights or fumbling in the dark.
naa, that would re-introduce the problem of sound from door being pushed before turning the doorknob.
The thing this guy should have done with AI is asking it: "how can I record sounds at night and check them back later?" And the AI would have told him to just download any recording app (for a kind of specific one I suggest snoreclock). End of the story.
Sidenote but still, I put ear plugs for 5 years already. It doesn't hurt, you don't feel anything, but it helps tremendously to stay asleep. Better than trying to fix your environment.
I even heard of people going to sleep with airpods pro in their ear.
Now that it's fixed tho my body decided I would need to pee every night about 2 hours after I went to bed... La vieillesse est un naufrage.
At times, when my SO is snoring, I just put my overhead headphones, turn on noise cancelling, put some gentle music on and lay on my back until I fall asleep.
Not exactly great, but does the job.
Using ear plugs in the past caused infections as I have curved ear canals.
I'd never go to sleep with AirPods in intentionally.
I had a scare in the very early days of owning AirPod Pros accidentally falling asleep with them, and waking up with tinnitus that took hours to go away.
Since then with every gen I've occasionally had ANC malfunction when they come in contact with a pillow and make some deafening noises, I wouldn't be surprised if that day they had been making some horrible shrieking noise while I slept.
(in fact, as if to mock me, I left this comment unsent realizing I didn't care enough to finish it, until my AirPod Maxes decided to flashbang me for having the audacity to while lying on my back. people need to know these things are treacherous in bed)
I like the sleep ear plugs; they're silicone plugs that are moldable. So they don't tend to extend out so much, or over-fill the ear like buds do.
I was at a festival a year back and unfortunately our camp was near a minor side stage which was running a daytime talent show. I wanted to take an afternoon nap. The sleep ear plugs + noise canceling headphones dulled the moderate noise down to almost nothing.
You want to just start by addressing the >3000 CO2 ppm
Wouldn’t it be easier to just train a camera with continuous recording at your bed?
Then correlate the time you woke up in your sleep log with the camera footage.
Had a similar problem in 2013. Fitness tracker showed my partner and I woke up at exactly 4:00am every day. Barely audible TV from neighbor through a shared wall the source.
Literally 5 minutes of online search and a white noise app solved the problem.
I know this is a post on a blog designed to sell us on Martin, but it's sort of like a movie where a single text message would spoil the whole plot. AI didn't really need to help solve this problem. Martin didn't "let" AI build a tool, he just asked (Claude, probably) how to build something that is replicated by existing apps that record sound and are activated over certain decibel levels. Comments seem to confirm many of us have done the same. Just seems a a bit over-engineered for the sake of it. Sorry, Martin.
Related project I did in 2014 tried to do this. I was a web developer so used the web audio APIs to trigger a recording when the decibel level exceeded a certain value. I was living in a big tent in my friends back yard in Sydney at the time and was convinced it was airplanes coming into SYD that were waking me up at 4am but never really captured conclusive evidence because my laptop battery couldn't make it through the night :)
All that work and you could have just bought a white noise machine on amazon for 25 bucks and been done, why?!
Or just used earplugs. They can take some getting used to, but are worth it noisy disturbances are affecting your sleep.
If the goal was to have fun, that's great. If the goal was to solve a problem, I'm reminded of when engineers build over-engineered solutions, when a simple solution is available.
Workaround vs fix
Also, why not?
Kind of sucks to have to sleep with a white noise machine?
Each night is laid out like tracks in a music editor: one for sleep stages, one for heart rate and HRV, a few for the sensor events, and one for the noise events with the audio loaded in.
As an avid reader of aircraft accident reports (ok, more reader of blog posts and watcher of YouTube videos based on those reports - yeah, people have strange hobbies), it reminds me more of flight data recorder graphs - the first FDRs actually inscribed the graphs with needles on metal foil (https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/59289/was-the-f...), which is of course no longer the case, but the presentation has been kept.
If your app could track things like anxiety and worries, help you find the root cause, or train you not to let them wake you up at 3 a.m., I would pay as much as I could afford for it. :-(
Sleep is my biggest concern right now.
Hey OP, would love to know more about your thoughts on Garmin you reference at the bottom? Why would they be any better/worse than Coros?
> *= I do not like Garmin, I think they're a fraudulent company systematically breaching consumer rights and I'm looking for alternatives. Already converted multiple people to Coros.
Came to see if someone commented on that. I have generally seen Garmin as one of the good ones on several criteria:
- when hit by ransomware, disclosed publicly, bit on the data loss and told them to fsck off
- devices can very much operate without any account, app, or cloud connection (of course you don't get the more advanced "Connect" features)
- plug it in and you have rw access to .FIT files over MTP
- same mechanism to build and sideload apps made with Monkey C
- ANT+ is a fairly open ecosystem (progressively replaced by BLE, often in much less open ways)
I hear that some people are annoyed that devices stop receiving major feature updates after a year or two, and see that as predatory "you must upgrade every year", which is like, ridiculous?
Also in a sense I like that I buy the device and it's mostly "done". Like a mechanical watch it's a utility item I can rely on and it won't ever have a Liquid Ass pulled up on me.
Yeah I totally agree with this list. In contrast, Coros had a pretty nonchalant response to their security issues last year. Attackers could:
> Hijacking the vicitim’s COROS account and accessing all data
> – Eavesdropping sensitive data, e.g. notifications
> – Manipulating the device configuration
> – Factory resetting the device
> – Crashing the device
> – Interrupting a running activity and forcing the recorded data to be lost [0]
The security firm disclosed the vulnerability to Coros in Mar 2025. They planned to fix it by the end of 2025, and didn’t address it until the security firm publicly released the finding.
[0]:https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/06/coros-confirms-substanti...
I'm curious about this too. This is the first time I've heard of Garmin being a bad company.
I was under the impression that the pattern "I have a problem -> let's ask AI" is frowned upon here.
I’m also a little surprised about it. The reason I wrote this post was to send the message: I wouldn’t have done this if it wasn’t for the AI tooling
It seems fine if you express what you did without focusing on the code.
It resonates well with what some people have been saying about building software for 1 person.
>>*= I do not like Garmin, I think they're a fraudulent company systematically breaching consumer rights and I'm looking for alternatives. Already converted multiple people to Coros.
Slightly off the main topic, but I can strongly second that recommendation for Coros gear!
No relation other than a very happy Coros user (Pace Pro). They make an excellent series of sport & health monitoring watches and bike gear, best GPS I've ever seen producing the most accurate run/bike tracks I've ever seen (using 5 GNSS systems: GPS, Galileo, QZSS, etc.), very reasonable pricing compared to the competition, continuous useful updates, and just a great overall approach to health and technology.
I sometimes use SimplyNoise to have brown noise for sleeping or filter out distracting sounds in the office.
Also, iOS has background (white noise etc) sounds built-in: https://support.apple.com/en-us/109346 Android has something similar too?
We also installed triple-layered windows for sound insulation, but I believe it degraded the quality of the air, so sometimes have to open the windows for a few minutes before sleep to get fresh air.
My mom would love this one :) .. she told me recently about a long-running chat gpt session that she's had for over a week, where she was going back and forth trying to figure out the source of some strange sound in the building.
Maybe take your mother to brunch or something. I am pretty sure it will be better than any chatgpt session she has running for a week
I think that's the actual risk, that you're /not/ as comforting and less enjoyable to talk to. I know this is true for many people already.
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I opened the article thinking that it's about the on-call scenario (paging). Something like, I got paged in the middle of the night and let the remediation/mitigation to the agent...
Which makes a lot of sense. Especially non-Tier-1 services.
I sleep terriibly. It got 'better', when i worked out i have a 'day', of around 32-36 hours. So, to people kon a regular 24 hour day, I'm tired at the wrong times and wide awake over aboit two of their sleep cycles. Damned annoying, as I've gone out when i should have stayed in - but everyone is out and awake, and viceversa. I've learned to say 'no' to invites I know I won't make. 8 hour working days, suck. For long creative bursts, it's great, though.
> I get the sleep data from my Garmin* watch. Every watch and ring calculates sleep slightly differently, and to be honest, I don't fully trust any of them on the exact sleep stage I was in at any given second.
I love my Garmin, but it's one of the worst smart watches to track sleep with. It consistently ranks poorly in tests that stack it up against pro sleep equipment, and from my experience it struggles to even detect sleep times properly. That 3:32 event that the watch said has pulled you out of deep sleep may not have been real.
Totally agree with you, that’s why I wanted to check. I btw turned off the morning report long time ago, so it’s more about me checking the sleep stages after realizing that I feel without energy. Also my sleep outside the city is much better. In the end it turns out that most times it is real and an external noise woke me up. Not always, there are false positives and sometimes you just wake up (nightmare, stress, sickness, ..)
OP, I would encourage you to take a sleep test. While it seems to be correlated with sound, it sounds (pun not intended) way too similar to my OSA symptoms
I like the temperate graph halfway down the page. It looks like two decaying exponentials alternating every ~40 minutes, with the downward one steeper than the upward one. It's a neat visualization of hysteresis, where the thermostat presumably has a different temperature threshold for turning off or turning on (or perhaps there's a minimum time between state switches). Without the scale it's hard to know for sure.
Yes it’s the AC keeping the temperature. I have different targets set depending on season and time of night (cooler to fall asleep, warmer in the morning). Added this data because I already have it in Home Assistant and you never know what other crazy conclusions you can get from looking at the data :D
I know what is waking me up at night...my neighbour is going out to smoke weed at 0:30am and 3:00am and the smoke wafts into my room (it is warm enough to leave one window slightly open). He's also listening to some podcast w/o earphones and also coughing a lot because of smoking the weed.
This is cool, but a simple circular buffer audio recorder connected to stdin would have been sufficient. The recorder records continuously on a circular buffer that stores the last 5 minutes, and whenever OP wakes up, he can press any key on the keyboard to dump the current 5 minutes on storage, with the timestamp as file name. False positives are much less possible, and the whole system can just be a small CLI program.
Not sure I understand how this would work. The whole point is that you often don’t realize that you even woke up. And not sure jumping to go to the computer to hit a key is the smoothest way to fall back asleep
I spend most of my days in front of CLIs but here I really think a cli wouldn’t be the right tool for the job..
what a waste of technology. you could have had a pen and graph paper hooked up to an microphone 100 years ago and looked for the spikes in the time set.
Yeah idk why home assistant needed to get involved. I guess to turn the system on and off according to his heuristic.?
it could also be common sense.. you live in a noisy city and you are wondering what the noise is.... maybe it could be the city itself? how about sleep in a different smaller town and then ask yourself the same question, you'll probably get a different answer.
I'm not sure if things are really that simple, at least from my personal experience. I think the quality of noise and noise floor can make a difference
Don't get me wrong but this seems like a first world problem which even I have experienced after my life has got easier. When I was younger, I used to live at a very noisy location and used to sleep like a baby. Also, would late workouts help to aid a better sleep? Tired body falls asleep?
Results may vary, but for most people the body takes multiple hours to calm down completely after a activating workout.
I read so many doom and gloom stories on hn regarding ai, it's a breath of fresh air to read articles about genuine use cases that improve quality of life. And all that without complaining. Marvellous
We may be entering the age of "disposable software" (some people politely call it "on-demand software"). Until recently, coding was a highly specialised skill and was relatively expensive. So writing custom code for personal whimsy was a luxury only software developers could afford. Not anymore.
My sleep was not good so I installed panelling and now I sleep better. There you go. Saved you 8 hours and using AI
Can you tell me more about this panelling?
They’re called “MITTZON”, made for offices. Also great room separators. I’ve tested them for a few nights and they work surprisingly well.
Otherwise making sure the windows are properly sealed is first resort. And if you’re living with other people (partner, flatmates, family) it also helps to check the doors
The point that we can now do these seemingly small projects is well put.
My grandmother can't see very well, and she always loved doing crossword puzzles, but the small print was giving her troublem. At the same time, the available crosswords in her language were too simple and boring for her.
So, I vibed a small scraper from some crossword collection, and with smart composition of the final HTML, I managed to get the crossword and the questions to show up on one side while the other side of the page was for the answers.
I still have no idea how the scraper works, and frankly I don't really need to. My challenge now is finding my way to even more challenging and enjoyable crosswords, or maybe even try to get AI to make the crosswords from scratch.
Cool, but there are already sleep analysis apps for that, like Sleep as android and probably many other similar apps too.
There are apps that capture noises over a certain threshold, write them to disk and make it easy to review them?
What about using a white noise machine? I blast mine next to my head when I sleep, and I never wake up in the middle of the night anymore.
Sounds like "observability, for sleep".
It’s funny how many things can boil down to "rich distributed traces" and events / logs.
Why didn't you just record the whole night and listen to the part where you woke up?
Also ear plugs.
I'm much more interested in the app and what they learned than anything to do with AI. Leave that part out, imo.
I was going to do something like this but turns out it was my baby the whole time.
What did you do with the bathwater?
A flash of lightning following a boom, that would wake me up all right.
One observation: If you're often waking up around 3am, it is a strong indicator for histamine/MCAS issues. This is fairly new research, so most people dont know about it, I haven't had a single doctor yet who was familiar with this.
The mechanism: mast cells (the immune cells that release histamine among other things) have their own circadian clock. The CLOCK gene controls their IgE receptor expression in a time-of-day manner, and both plasma histamine and tryptase peak during the night. In healthy people this is fine. In MCAS or histamine intolerance, this nightly mediator release is excessive, and it happens right in the window where cortisol (which normally suppresses histamine release) bottoms out around 2-4am. Histamine is itself a wake-promoting neurotransmitter, so you get woken up, often by something minor like a noise, reflux, or a temperature shift that wouldn't otherwise register. Signs it might be worth looking into: 3am waking with a racing heart, sweating, flushing, itching, or reflux/throat tightness. A good in-depth resource: https://health.programmerlife.org/en/
Why use a generated image in that weird dirty yellow style when you have a real screenshot to show?
This could easily be sleep apnea
How did they filter out the snoring and talking in their sleep?
> a flash of lightning following the boom……?
Say what?
This seems quite over engineered. They could’ve just left their phone recording overnight and done much simpler analysis on the big file. Maybe leverage LLM to write a 20-line python script, at most
What is the front end built with? It looks nice.
Not OP - but it's Ghost:
I meant the tool he built, not his blog
long time back i had this sense orb that did something similar and it was night sounds made me wake up !
https://sense.io/
All he had to do is buy a sound machine for $60and problem would be solved. So simple but he made overly complicated.
This is another dumb AI project idea which i would have done at some point too if I didn't know better. It's one of those things where doctors will just go ahead with the fix even if they haven't evaluated the exact diagnosis, since the fix will probably be the same regardless. The human mind wants certainty though so I get it, but the fix doesn't need to be preceded by a pinpointing of the exact cause.
god forbid a person wants to understand and have fun doing that
This is cool don't get me wrong, but surely overcomplicated? Why not just record audio to disk the whole night then eyeball the waveform for loudness spikes? If you just don't connect it to any network at all, there's no data breach risk (or am I misunderstanding the justification for the noise-detection toggle thing?).
Also the AI-generated hero image looks vile.
Thx for the feedback about the hero image. I just removed it. (you weren’t the only one pointing it out)
The intention was to have something less detailed than the screenshot in the post.
About the other thing: yes this would have worked for a night or so. I wanted to be able to go back and forth between nights and compare. I also had concerns about the SD-card durability and storage capacity. Still, after an hour into letting the coding agent do its thing, I was impressed by the result, so more and more ideas popped into my head
Makes sense. Hope you get better sleep!
This person wasted an entire weekend, spent a shit ton time with LLM and contributed to CO2 emissions, water table depletion just to come to the conclusion that he needs to wear fucking ear plugs or use a white noise maker?
Anybody living in a mid to large city or urban area could have told you that. What a waste of resources.
hint: your watch is probably lying to you and you're following a normal bifurcated sleep pattern.
AI is melting your real world understanding: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/biphasic-sle...
Good article! Not agreeing with the statement before the link
Also, not sure if you’ve taken the time to read the post but it clearly states that I’m not using AI to analyze the data. The point of posting this was a different one
I’m happy because I can clearly hear what wakes me up at night. I knew I wake up from noise and now I can clearly see it in the data that I wake up right after door slams, noisy motorbikes, car horning, and dishes from the kitchen (own and neighbors)
After taking action I now sleep better and don’t have those random wake-up moments.
Intrigued by your comment and being someone that have a broken sleeping pattern due to both me being a nervous person and having went through raising 2 kids, I went to the linked article hoping to learn something new about my pattern. And it turns out it's just about talking the habit of "siesta" - so having a short sleep period during daytime - and NOT about wake up in the middle of the night naturally.
So, I find totally inappropriate the snarky comment about OP and AI melting anything.
In the third paragraph:
Prior to that, many people across different continents and cultures followed a biphasic sleep schedule. They went to bed in the evening and slept for a few hours, waking up around midnight. Then, they would stay up for a few hours to eat, tend to their children, or add wood to the fire, before finally falling back asleep for their second sleep phase.
And it goes on to mention this pre-industrial biphasic ‘schedule’ many times throughout the article.
Which is absolutely not what many of us experience when awaken by sounds or something else in the middle of the night. Because you fall asleep again shortly after, not after few hours.
I often wake up at 2-4 AM long enough to look at a clock - then fall back asleep. I’ve never even considered that it could be something in my environment waking me up!
> and the trash collection truck passing by.. (guess the country I live in)
Many countries have trash collection in the early morning, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Earplugs also solve this problem with many fewer tokens.
There is software for sound localization:
https://www.acoular.org/
https://github.com/introlab/odas
Claude of course has a nasty habit of reinventing every wheel.
3am is a common time to wake up or be half awake. This is the old "witching hour" (not midnight) when most people claim to sight "ghosts" or "aliens" in their room, and/or suffer sleep paralysis.
Then there is the two sleep theory that suggests we are not supposed to sleep in single block. In more traditional environments, people got up to stoke the fire at this point. I know some folk that get up to urinate or have a drink. I used to turn the radio on for a bit.
Have you tried sleeping without a watch?
Yet, another day, yet another article hyping up AI tooling. 99.999% chance the author works for a company selling AI products. Let's see ..
Click through to their blog's main page. Click their LinkedIn link, google their current employer ...... "{Company} is a company that provides a platform for real-time search, observability, security, and generative AI"
Aaaaaand there it is. A person whose livelihood is tied to selling AI products writing blog posts hyping up how amazing AI products are. Who could have ever guessed?
Many peoples' interests align with their jobs. Mechanics talk about cars.
interesting lol
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