The research is voluminous and has been around for a long time. Articles like this make the results easy for us normals to digest.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+deprivation&hl...

I think this is what surprises me - this is hacker news, not normals news. How interesting is a safe interpretation of the research that conforms to what I was taught in 2nd grade? Its like someone posted an article extolling the virtues of the food pyramid or something. Even my doctor has a more liberal interpretation of the research than this particular author (and he is probably more qualified to make this interpretation).

In the past I've experimented with quantities of sleep, polyphasic sleep, measuring sleep quality, light / sound in the room, sleep supplements, etc, etc. Why? because sleep takes up 25-30% of my life. Its a no brainer activity for me to try to hack and optimize. Further, given sleep is such a big part of all of our lives, I'm surprised more people on this site do not have a similar mindset about experimenting and tweaking their sleep patterns.

Show me some articles with new research, personal experiments, or useful tips that can allow me to hack my sleep - these kind of interpretations are much more useful to digest.

And the moment you say something like this; they down-rate you. Great going, HN.

It did nothing to advance the discussion in any meaningful way. If you don't like this article, don't read it. If you really think it's awful and doesn't belong on HN, then flag it.

In experiments, rats have actually been killed by lack of sleep. Mind you, it took about a month as I recall, but it's still a bit scary.

It may not be new or unique, but I didn't know sleep was that important.

And no, I'm not tired.

I'm one of those who normally sleep only 6.5 hours per day. As stupid as it sounds, I need someone telling me that I should sleep more. After reading an article like this I'll start sleeping 8 hours a day, and if the article is right, I'll feel better and more productive.

So the article is useful for me, hence the upvote. I do agree about 3) though.

It looks like a PR piece for a company called The Energy Project. The HBR blogger forgot to remove their link at the end: "For more tips on sleep and other forms of renewal visit our web site." (links to http://theenergyproject.com/tips).

Not to be too snarky, but your profile shows you've been a member for less than a year -- complaining about the "new kids" is rather ironic.

That's actually called out specifically in the guidelines, even.

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

I don't think being defensive of quality is a bad thing though. It's often unnecessary, but I'd say that's better than being under-cautious.