9 ms·

I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night

276 points by showmypost 5mo ago

rexthonyy 5mo ago
[flagged]
ziml77 5mo ago
Why use a generated image in that weird dirty yellow style when you have a real screenshot to show?
dev360 5mo ago
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.
- odshoifsdhfs 5mo ago
  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
  - toxik 5mo ago
    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.
- fatata123 5mo ago
  [dead]
usernametaken29 5mo ago
My sleep was not good so I installed panelling and now I sleep better. There you go. Saved you 8 hours and using AI
- bovinegambler 5mo ago
  Can you tell me more about this panelling?
  - showmypost 5mo ago
    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
_dain_ 5mo ago
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.
- showmypost 5mo ago
  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
  - _dain_ 5mo ago
    Makes sense. Hope you get better sleep!
cyanydeez 5mo ago
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-sleep https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/biphasic-sle...
- showmypost 5mo ago
  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.
- jrmg 5mo ago
  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!
- darkwater 5mo ago
  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.
  - jrmg 5mo ago
    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.
phainopepla2 5mo ago
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.
- showmypost 5mo ago
  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 :)
  - phainopepla2 5mo ago
    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.
    - showmypost 5mo ago
      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
nekooooo 5mo ago
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.
- jijji 5mo ago
  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.
  - kube-system 5mo ago
    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
- NewJazz 5mo ago
  Yeah idk why home assistant needed to get involved. I guess to turn the system on and off according to his heuristic.?
lbrito 5mo ago
Plot twist: the existential dread of an AI-ified world where "AI" is the answer to everything was what was waking him.
- locao 5mo ago
  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.
codazoda 5mo ago
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.
- manuisin 5mo ago
  you could’ve been a great start of a horror movie.
- DANmode 5mo ago
  Motherboards turn on PCs based on observed voltage drop when pressing the PWR switch. Could also have been “AC power restored” functionality being triggered.
- blitzar 5mo ago
  clearly the alarm clock was set to wake the computers up from sleep
tppiotrowski 5mo ago
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 :)
sciencesama 5mo ago
long time back i had this sense orb that did something similar and it was night sounds made me wake up !
- sciencesama 5mo ago
  https://sense.io/ https://sense.io/
amelius 5mo ago
I was under the impression that the pattern "I have a problem -> let's ask AI" is frowned upon here.
- showmypost 5mo ago
  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
- nevi-me 5mo ago
  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.
nevi-me 5mo ago
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.
- Eric_WVGG 5mo ago
  plants plants plants. Most of these are dummy easy to care for, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study#List_of_plants_studied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study#List_of_p...
  - jdsnape 5mo ago
    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”
    - bustermellotron 5mo ago
      You could use air scrubbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime
  - showmypost 5mo ago
    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
  - 5mo ago
bad_username 5mo ago
> 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.
- showmypost 5mo ago
  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, ..)
pizzly 5mo ago
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.
- showmypost 5mo ago
  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
- stavros 5mo ago
  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.
kmm 5mo ago
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.
- showmypost 5mo ago
  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
WhoffAgents 5mo ago
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Jimmy0252 5mo ago
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curtisblaine 5mo ago
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.
- showmypost 5mo ago
  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..
sneak 5mo ago
Earplugs also solve this problem with many fewer tokens.
kube-system 5mo ago
What is the front end built with? It looks nice.
- baconhigh 5mo ago
  Not OP - but it's Ghost: <meta name="generator" content="Ghost 6.19">
  - kube-system 5mo ago
    I meant the tool he built, not his blog
vzaliva 5mo ago
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.
babblingfish 5mo ago
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/sleep/zsag001/8452884?login=false https://academic.oup.com/sleep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/s...
- b3ing 5mo ago
  I would think earwax build up would increase with that
  - knicholes 5mo ago
    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.
    - donkers 5mo ago
      I use Loop silicone earplugs, they’re reusable and washable. Used to use the disposables but got tired of the waste.
      - wafflemaker 5mo ago
        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.
        knicholes 5mo ago
        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.
foo-bar-baz529 5mo ago
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
lo_fye 5mo ago
You let it? It really wanted to, but you kept denying it until you finally gave in and let it?
- ulfw 5mo ago
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  - Daz912 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - skeeter2020 5mo ago
      can't we all agree they're BOTH terrible?
      - ccimmergreen 5mo ago
        Both are fuel for the other. The romance is amusing.
        Joel_Mckay 5mo ago
        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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ4pSVS_mN0
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  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.”
jmspring 5mo ago
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.
- j_bum 5mo ago
  “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.
  - jmspring 5mo ago
    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.
- glenngillen 5mo ago
  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/ https://lumenate.co/lumenate-nova/
- asdff 5mo ago
  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.
ssgodderidge 5mo ago
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.
- deckplecksetter 5mo ago
  I'm curious about this too. This is the first time I've heard of Garmin being a bad company.
- lloeki 5mo ago
  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.
  - ssgodderidge 5mo ago
    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-substantial-watch-security-vulnerablity-says-fixes-are-coming.html https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/06/coros-confirms-substanti...
accidentpr0ne 5mo ago
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accidentpr0ne 5mo ago
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Ylpertnodi 5mo ago
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.
Sxubas 5mo ago
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
ajkjk 5mo ago
I'm much more interested in the app and what they learned than anything to do with AI. Leave that part out, imo.
throw310822 5mo ago
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.
jonhohle 5mo ago
> a flash of lightning following the boom That’s not how lightning and thunder work.
- rithdmc 5mo ago
  ^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...
gverrilla 5mo ago
Have you tried sleeping without a watch?
toss1 5mo ago
>>*= 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.
fud101 5mo ago
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.
- baq 5mo ago
  god forbid a person wants to understand and have fun doing that
jryb 5mo ago
This could easily be sleep apnea
xyst 5mo ago
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.
radar1310 5mo ago
All he had to do is buy a sound machine for $60and problem would be solved. So simple but he made overly complicated.
timzaman 5mo ago
You want to just start by addressing the >3000 CO2 ppm
locao 5mo ago
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.
- chillfox 5mo ago
  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.
  - blitzar 5mo ago
    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.
    - chillfox 5mo ago
      naa, that would re-introduce the problem of sound from door being pushed before turning the doorknob.
ElFitz 5mo ago
Sounds like "observability, for sleep". It’s funny how many things can boil down to "rich distributed traces" and events / logs.
odysseus 5mo ago
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.
vaulstein 5mo ago
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?
- thunfischtoast 5mo ago
  Results may vary, but for most people the body takes multiple hours to calm down completely after a activating workout.
hona_mind 5mo ago
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haltonlabs 5mo ago
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dmos62 5mo ago
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.
- onemoresoop 5mo ago
  I find that forced yawning helps me relax and fall asleep when I couldnt otherwise.
pvtmert 5mo ago
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...
- ruperthair 5mo ago
  That's appalling! At that stage, it's not on-call, it's just another badly paid shift, which you're probably forced to do in addition to your 9-5. Good on you for leaving.
nikhilpareek13 5mo ago
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blitzar 5mo ago
How did they filter out the snoring and talking in their sleep?
bigfry 5mo ago
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.
gebste 5mo ago
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ludwigvan 5mo ago
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 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.
rob74 5mo ago
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-foil-in-older-fdrs-reused-when-it-ran-out-or-replaced https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/59289/was-the-f...), which is of course no longer the case, but the presentation has been kept.
aucisson_masque 5mo ago
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.
- Tade0 5mo ago
  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.
- BoorishBears 5mo ago
  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)
  - Windchaser 5mo ago
    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.
jamisteven 5mo ago
All that work and you could have just bought a white noise machine on amazon for 25 bucks and been done, why?!
- yaseer 5mo ago
  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.
- jaapz 5mo ago
  Workaround vs fix Also, why not?
- farfatched 5mo ago
  Kind of sucks to have to sleep with a white noise machine?
nephihaha 5mo ago
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.
Ozzie-D 5mo ago
[flagged]
lucalouren 5mo ago
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!
- Windchaser 5mo ago
  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
simondanisch 5mo ago
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/ https://health.programmerlife.org/en/
aquir 5mo ago
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.
shiandow 5mo ago
A flash of lightning following a boom, that would wake me up all right.
heocoi 5mo ago
[dead]
OutOfHere 5mo ago
There is software for sound localization: https://www.acoular.org/ https://www.acoular.org/ https://github.com/introlab/odas https://github.com/introlab/odas Claude of course has a nasty habit of reinventing every wheel.
prokopton 5mo ago
I was going to do something like this but turns out it was my baby the whole time.
- tclancy 5mo ago
  What did you do with the bathwater?
stratosgear 5mo ago
> a flash of lightning following the boom……? Say what?
spyder 5mo ago
Cool, but there are already sleep analysis apps for that, like Sleep as android and probably many other similar apps too.
- tclancy 5mo ago
  There are apps that capture noises over a certain threshold, write them to disk and make it easy to review them?
PUSH_AX 5mo ago
Why didn't you just record the whole night and listen to the part where you woke up? Also ear plugs.
tim-projects 5mo ago
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
3RTB297 5mo ago
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.
simonbarker87 5mo ago
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.
- curiouser2 5mo ago
  wow i've been dealing with this exact problem for years. is the fix just eating a snack right before bed?
  - simonbarker87 5mo ago
    Some kind of slow digesting healthy snack with a reasonable amount of calories does the trick for me.
yajan1010 5mo ago
interesting lol
paol_taja 5mo ago
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.
thegrim33 5mo ago
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?
- papageek 5mo ago
  Many peoples' interests align with their jobs. Mechanics talk about cars.
spiralcoaster 5mo ago
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, ...)
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
Aardwolf 5mo ago
> and the trash collection truck passing by.. (guess the country I live in) Many countries have trash collection in the early morning, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ArlejTech 5mo ago
[flagged]
dromologist 5mo ago
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.
xtiansimon 5mo ago
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-for-your-office-with-a-raspberry-pi-71360ee1ff46 https://medium.com/homeday/building-a-noise-level-dashboard-... https://thepihut.com/products/respeaker-4-mic-array-for-raspberry-pi https://thepihut.com/products/respeaker-4-mic-array-for-rasp...

276 points by showmypost 5mo ago

rexthonyy 5mo ago

[flagged]

ziml77 5mo ago

Why use a generated image in that weird dirty yellow style when you have a real screenshot to show?

dev360 5mo ago

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.

odshoifsdhfs 5mo ago
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
- toxik 5mo ago
  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.
fatata123 5mo ago
[dead]

usernametaken29 5mo ago

My sleep was not good so I installed panelling and now I sleep better. There you go. Saved you 8 hours and using AI

bovinegambler 5mo ago
Can you tell me more about this panelling?
- showmypost 5mo ago
  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

_dain_ 5mo ago

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.

showmypost 5mo ago
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
- _dain_ 5mo ago
  Makes sense. Hope you get better sleep!

cyanydeez 5mo ago

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-sleep https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/biphasic-sle...

showmypost 5mo ago
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.
jrmg 5mo ago
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!
darkwater 5mo ago
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.
- jrmg 5mo ago
  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.

phainopepla2 5mo ago

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.

showmypost 5mo ago
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 :)
- phainopepla2 5mo ago
  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.
  - showmypost 5mo ago
    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

nekooooo 5mo ago

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.

jijji 5mo ago
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.
- kube-system 5mo ago
  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
NewJazz 5mo ago
Yeah idk why home assistant needed to get involved. I guess to turn the system on and off according to his heuristic.?

lbrito 5mo ago

Plot twist: the existential dread of an AI-ified world where "AI" is the answer to everything was what was waking him.

locao 5mo ago
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.

codazoda 5mo ago

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.

manuisin 5mo ago
you could’ve been a great start of a horror movie.
DANmode 5mo ago
Motherboards turn on PCs based on observed voltage drop when pressing the PWR switch. Could also have been “AC power restored” functionality being triggered.
blitzar 5mo ago
clearly the alarm clock was set to wake the computers up from sleep

tppiotrowski 5mo ago

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 :)

sciencesama 5mo ago

long time back i had this sense orb that did something similar and it was night sounds made me wake up !

sciencesama 5mo ago
https://sense.io/ https://sense.io/

amelius 5mo ago

I was under the impression that the pattern "I have a problem -> let's ask AI" is frowned upon here.

showmypost 5mo ago
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
nevi-me 5mo ago
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.

nevi-me 5mo ago

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.

Eric_WVGG 5mo ago
plants plants plants. Most of these are dummy easy to care for, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study#List_of_plants_studied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study#List_of_p...
- jdsnape 5mo ago
  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”
  - bustermellotron 5mo ago
    You could use air scrubbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime
- showmypost 5mo ago
  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
- 5mo ago

bad_username 5mo ago

> 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.

showmypost 5mo ago
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, ..)

pizzly 5mo ago

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.

showmypost 5mo ago
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
stavros 5mo ago
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.

kmm 5mo ago

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.

showmypost 5mo ago
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

WhoffAgents 5mo ago

[dead]

Jimmy0252 5mo ago

[dead]

curtisblaine 5mo ago

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.

showmypost 5mo ago
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..

sneak 5mo ago

Earplugs also solve this problem with many fewer tokens.

kube-system 5mo ago

What is the front end built with? It looks nice.

baconhigh 5mo ago
Not OP - but it's Ghost: <meta name="generator" content="Ghost 6.19">
- kube-system 5mo ago
  I meant the tool he built, not his blog

vzaliva 5mo ago

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.

babblingfish 5mo ago

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/sleep/zsag001/8452884?login=false https://academic.oup.com/sleep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/s...

b3ing 5mo ago
I would think earwax build up would increase with that
- knicholes 5mo ago
  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.
  - donkers 5mo ago
    I use Loop silicone earplugs, they’re reusable and washable. Used to use the disposables but got tired of the waste.
    - wafflemaker 5mo ago
      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.
      - knicholes 5mo ago
        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.

foo-bar-baz529 5mo ago

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

lo_fye 5mo ago

You let it? It really wanted to, but you kept denying it until you finally gave in and let it?

ulfw 5mo ago
[flagged]
- Daz912 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - skeeter2020 5mo ago
    can't we all agree they're BOTH terrible?
    - ccimmergreen 5mo ago
      Both are fuel for the other. The romance is amusing.
      - Joel_Mckay 5mo ago
        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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ4pSVS_mN0
Forgeties79 5mo ago
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.”

jmspring 5mo ago

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.

j_bum 5mo ago
“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.
- jmspring 5mo ago
  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.
glenngillen 5mo ago
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/ https://lumenate.co/lumenate-nova/
asdff 5mo ago
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.

ssgodderidge 5mo ago

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.

deckplecksetter 5mo ago
I'm curious about this too. This is the first time I've heard of Garmin being a bad company.
lloeki 5mo ago
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.
- ssgodderidge 5mo ago
  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-substantial-watch-security-vulnerablity-says-fixes-are-coming.html https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/06/coros-confirms-substanti...

accidentpr0ne 5mo ago

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accidentpr0ne 5mo ago

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Ylpertnodi 5mo ago

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.

Sxubas 5mo ago

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

ajkjk 5mo ago

I'm much more interested in the app and what they learned than anything to do with AI. Leave that part out, imo.

throw310822 5mo ago

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.

jonhohle 5mo ago

> a flash of lightning following the boom That’s not how lightning and thunder work.

rithdmc 5mo ago
^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...

gverrilla 5mo ago

Have you tried sleeping without a watch?

toss1 5mo ago

>>*= 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.

fud101 5mo ago

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.

baq 5mo ago
god forbid a person wants to understand and have fun doing that

jryb 5mo ago

This could easily be sleep apnea

xyst 5mo ago

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.

radar1310 5mo ago

All he had to do is buy a sound machine for $60and problem would be solved. So simple but he made overly complicated.

timzaman 5mo ago

You want to just start by addressing the >3000 CO2 ppm

locao 5mo ago

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.

chillfox 5mo ago
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.
- blitzar 5mo ago
  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.
  - chillfox 5mo ago
    naa, that would re-introduce the problem of sound from door being pushed before turning the doorknob.

ElFitz 5mo ago

Sounds like "observability, for sleep". It’s funny how many things can boil down to "rich distributed traces" and events / logs.

odysseus 5mo ago

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.

vaulstein 5mo ago

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?

thunfischtoast 5mo ago
Results may vary, but for most people the body takes multiple hours to calm down completely after a activating workout.

hona_mind 5mo ago

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haltonlabs 5mo ago

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dmos62 5mo ago

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.

onemoresoop 5mo ago
I find that forced yawning helps me relax and fall asleep when I couldnt otherwise.

pvtmert 5mo ago

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...

ruperthair 5mo ago
That's appalling! At that stage, it's not on-call, it's just another badly paid shift, which you're probably forced to do in addition to your 9-5. Good on you for leaving.

nikhilpareek13 5mo ago

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blitzar 5mo ago

How did they filter out the snoring and talking in their sleep?

bigfry 5mo ago

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.

gebste 5mo ago

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ludwigvan 5mo ago

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 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.

rob74 5mo ago

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-foil-in-older-fdrs-reused-when-it-ran-out-or-replaced https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/59289/was-the-f...), which is of course no longer the case, but the presentation has been kept.

aucisson_masque 5mo ago

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.

Tade0 5mo ago
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.
BoorishBears 5mo ago
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)
- Windchaser 5mo ago
  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.

jamisteven 5mo ago

All that work and you could have just bought a white noise machine on amazon for 25 bucks and been done, why?!

yaseer 5mo ago
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.
jaapz 5mo ago
Workaround vs fix Also, why not?
farfatched 5mo ago
Kind of sucks to have to sleep with a white noise machine?

nephihaha 5mo ago

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.

Ozzie-D 5mo ago

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lucalouren 5mo ago

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!

Windchaser 5mo ago
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

simondanisch 5mo ago

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/ https://health.programmerlife.org/en/

aquir 5mo ago

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.

shiandow 5mo ago

A flash of lightning following a boom, that would wake me up all right.

heocoi 5mo ago

[dead]

OutOfHere 5mo ago

There is software for sound localization: https://www.acoular.org/ https://www.acoular.org/ https://github.com/introlab/odas https://github.com/introlab/odas Claude of course has a nasty habit of reinventing every wheel.

prokopton 5mo ago

I was going to do something like this but turns out it was my baby the whole time.

tclancy 5mo ago
What did you do with the bathwater?

stratosgear 5mo ago

> a flash of lightning following the boom……? Say what?

spyder 5mo ago

Cool, but there are already sleep analysis apps for that, like Sleep as android and probably many other similar apps too.

tclancy 5mo ago
There are apps that capture noises over a certain threshold, write them to disk and make it easy to review them?

PUSH_AX 5mo ago

Why didn't you just record the whole night and listen to the part where you woke up? Also ear plugs.

tim-projects 5mo ago

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

3RTB297 5mo ago

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.

simonbarker87 5mo ago

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.

curiouser2 5mo ago
wow i've been dealing with this exact problem for years. is the fix just eating a snack right before bed?
- simonbarker87 5mo ago
  Some kind of slow digesting healthy snack with a reasonable amount of calories does the trick for me.

yajan1010 5mo ago

interesting lol

paol_taja 5mo ago

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.

thegrim33 5mo ago

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?

papageek 5mo ago
Many peoples' interests align with their jobs. Mechanics talk about cars.

spiralcoaster 5mo ago

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, ...)

deleted 5mo ago
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Aardwolf 5mo ago

> and the trash collection truck passing by.. (guess the country I live in) Many countries have trash collection in the early morning, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ArlejTech 5mo ago

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dromologist 5mo ago

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.

xtiansimon 5mo ago

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-for-your-office-with-a-raspberry-pi-71360ee1ff46 https://medium.com/homeday/building-a-noise-level-dashboard-... https://thepihut.com/products/respeaker-4-mic-array-for-raspberry-pi https://thepihut.com/products/respeaker-4-mic-array-for-rasp...