from Hacker News

I've been tracking everything about myself

by ericnakagawa on 7/12/14, 8:56 AM with 157 comments

• by PStamatiou on 7/12/14, 5:46 PM

  Anand is my roommate. He's been doing this non-stop for the last 2-3 months (but thinking about it for the last 9), including while traveling internationally for the first month after he quit his job. The last month has been nightly design critiques after I got home from work :D

• by chdir on 7/12/14, 6:04 PM

  Slightly off topic, your site design is awesome. Would you share what libraries/frameworks/skills/time-resources are needed for something like this. Just curious. For me, the graphics & layout are far more interesting.

• by fasteo on 7/13/14, 9:12 AM

  I miss some important stats:

  - Your height. To calculate your BMI and contrast it with your Body Fat %. To be a runner, your BF% is high, but I cannot see whether it is because lack of muscle ("skinny fat") or excess of body fat. As you are not logging any weight training session, my guess is the former, but I am sure you are not logging all these data to end up guessing :)

  - Triglycerides: I find this much more important than LDL/HDL. It as a proxy for excess carb (either you are eating too many of them, or you are exercising too little). Remember, triglycerides are produced in the liver from any excess carbohydrates that have not been used for energy. They have nothing to do with dietary fats.

  - Total cholesterol. To be able to calculate the TC to HDL ratio.

  - LDL/HDL ratio. With you current stats it is at 1,5 (average risk), but it should be handy to see it in the dashboard.

  My suggestions:

  - Do some weight training. If you goal is to be healthy, this is key. A couple of 30 mins heavy sessions per week will do it. No need to become a gym rat.

  - Eat better.

  - I see that you are running outdoors, but your D3 levels are mid-low. I guess you are running either too early in the morning or too late in the evening. Try to get some running with the sun right above your head (just bring more water with you)

  Congrats for this herculean effort.

• by hunvreus on 7/12/14, 3:21 PM

  Beautiful website indeed; there are a lot of carefully crafted details, especially for navigation.

  I genuinely wonder though what to do of it. I can't seem to see what people do with all this data; what does one get from knowing how many steps, run, calories, subway stops and hours of sleep were accounted for in a day, every day.

  I can see how one could be rigorous enough with his training to see value in some of it, similarly I would see myself trying to improve my sleep patterns. But really, so far, people I've met use this as yet another distraction.

  I have yet to meet anybody who has been leveraging the data they collect; most (all?) people I know eat healthy, exercise and sleep well do so without relying on devices. Now, once we're able to track real health related data continuously, we may be able to detect illness or problems as soon as they arise and effectively create a feedback lookp. But from where I stand, as of today, these things are just gimmicks.

• by Jemaclus on 7/12/14, 3:40 PM

  I like it. My big beef with it so far is that it looks like most of this stuff is input manually by Anand. (The 1200+ commits suggests that it's manual and not automatic.) I'm not anal enough to spend that kinda time tracking things. I have a Fitbit, a scale that i step on every day, Strava to track my runs, etc, but those are all things you just put on (or push a button) and forget about.

  Things like climbing (which I also do) don't have automatic trackers, and tracking food intake is just too cumbersome these days for me to even try and keep up with that.

  If there were better ways to automate these things and better APIs available to pull these things in automatically, I'd totally build something like this. I just don't have the time, inclination, or the energy to manually add the climbs, the calories, every food item, and myriad other things into the system.

  So I'll say this: it's beautiful and full of very, very cool info. I just wouldn't do it myself unless I could generate all of that data. A handful of commits to build the site, and then let it update itself automatically via APIs. Granted, this means my site would be a bit less interesting, since the most interesting things on here are things you can't automatically track... but I'm working on plenty of other interesting things, and this just doesn't rate high enough on my list to do.

  I'm jealous, though. Very well done.

• by ChuckMcM on 7/12/14, 6:38 PM

  If the cops ever ask you "Where were you last week on Tuesday at 8AM?" you'll have a solid answer for them :-). My question is 104 days and no journal entries? Is the author reflecting on this information or just logging it?

  I ask because I have a lot of unformed questions and thoughts about what is known as the 'quantified self' movement. Given the technological memory of all these things, what insights or changes do you draw/make?

• by arondeparon on 7/12/14, 1:55 PM

  I think the site is absolutely beautiful.

  What I am wondering, though is: how are the vitamin/mineral stats on http://aprilzero.com/sport/ generated? Is there a way to self-measure these stats without blood tests?

• by cmdrfred on 7/12/14, 11:12 AM

  Wow. This site discourages me, as I feel that I may never make something so pretty.

• by gress on 7/12/14, 4:38 PM

  This is an astonishingly beautiful website, and clearly shows the technical and design skill of Anand.

  However, I'm genuinely not sure what the purpose of this dashboard is other than as a résumé piece. What questions does it answer? How is it better than doing specific investigations using R?

• by ArikBe on 7/12/14, 1:19 PM

  Nicholas Felton has been doing something similar for a couple of years, but he creates a printed journal: http://feltron.com/ar12_02.html

  I would be interested in a turnkey solution with modular components that would allow people to quickly "snap" together a site like this.

• by nathan_f77 on 7/13/14, 4:11 AM

  The design is absolutely incredible. I started using TicTrac [1] a little while ago, but it's not great. I hate that I have to set up and arrange everything myself. I really want to just wire up my accounts, and let a professional designer show me the information in a beautiful way. Other dashboards like Geckoboard [2] and TicTrac only let you dump a bunch of boxes on a page. The sports page on AprilZero is an amazing example of a cohesive design, where everything is laid out in a far more useful way.

  For the last month, I've been tracking what I eat with MyFitnessPal, and have been tracking my weight every morning with a Withings wifi scale. It's extremely powerful when the data is collected effortlessly, and for the first time in my life, I'm on track to really change some unhealthy habits. Entering food in MFP is still a PITA, but I've managed to keep it up so far.

  It's been one of my dream projects to design a personal dashboard like this, especially in the style of the Iron Man movies. This website has exceeded everything I imagined. I hope it becomes open source one day, and that I can contribute a ton of new integrations and sections. Or if not, please let me pay to use this service!

  [1]: https://tictrac.com

  [2]: https://www.geckoboard.com

• by ipince on 7/12/14, 5:47 PM

  Kind of random, but why is there so much time (entire days) spent in hotels when traveling? Is that due to Foursquare (or whatever) not allowing you to check-in to other places or did you really stay in the hotel the entire time? If so, doing what?

  It's a genuine question--I basically NEVER stay in hotels beyond the required sleep time, so I'm curious as to how other people do things.

• by tlrobinson on 7/12/14, 11:08 AM

  Honestly, the only reason I use Foursquare and various other personal tracking things is I hope someday to be able to export the data into a nice visualization like this.

• by hawkharris on 7/12/14, 4:00 PM

  Personal health recording systems like this one are most useful for reporting symptoms to health care providers. In the event of a flu or a running injury, I like being able to tell my doctor exactly when, where and how the problem started.

  It's also smart to record the data yourself instead of sharing it with a health tracking app. With due respect to those projects, I draw a line at sharing specific and private health information. I've arrived at this personal stance after weighing the benefits of information sharing against the risks of my data being leaked, mishandled or mined.

• by rkayg on 7/12/14, 4:00 PM

  This site is gorgeous. There is so much attention to detail. I don't quite understand the barely visible half curves right above the transport row for a particular explorer day.

• by danoprey on 7/12/14, 12:03 PM

  Looks like HN took it down. Will have to come back later as the screenshot looked awesome.

• by thallukrish on 7/13/14, 4:39 PM

  If Anand had not done this whole thing artistically, there is no way it would have elicited interest. What if every one on the planet did this?. Then this whole thing becomes terribly boring and meaningless no matter how it looks. I am pretty sure many got attracted by the design rather than the content itself!

• by fuzzythinker on 7/12/14, 4:27 PM

  Very beautiful animations and visualizations. What tools did you use to build them?

• by dominotw on 7/12/14, 3:29 PM

  Can someone tell me what is the point of this self obsession with tracking?

  Why do I care to document where I went or which rock I climbed. Has narcissism finally become socially acceptable?

• by josyulakrishna on 7/12/14, 2:07 PM

  This has to be the most beautiful website i've seen.

• by sgarbi on 7/12/14, 1:28 PM

  I'm on a tablet now, what libraries is he using?

• by XorNot on 7/13/14, 12:13 AM

  So a criticism of the stats: the health page bars for electrolyte levels are poorly conceived - they give the impression that "higher is better" (there's no numbers on them) - not whether or not the value is within the relevant "normal" range (which itself, should be adjusted for age/demographics as well).

• by ejain on 7/14/14, 9:05 PM

  There are several existing services that aggregate and visualize fitness and health data, for people who are too lazy to build their own site :-) I'll plug mine here: https://zenobase.com/

• by afaqurk on 7/12/14, 4:12 PM

  Anand, you beautiful, brilliant bastard. That site looks awesome beyond compare. Awesome job.

• by tabrischen on 7/12/14, 9:22 PM

  I love the design and feel of the site. What would you say are the most important insights from tracking your activities that lead to any significant changes in your lifestyle?

• by brenfrow on 7/13/14, 7:19 AM

  I would be really interested to see your stats change by being effected by different diets. I'm interested in something like Paleo vs Veganism.

• by platz on 7/12/14, 9:02 PM

  I love the site and design. Maybe displaying some values at nine decimals out is perhaps a bit more for eye candy than for information.

• by sgy on 7/13/14, 3:35 PM

  Quantified-self raises huge privacy concerns, and will make it easier to "rule the world".

• by johnpc on 7/15/14, 5:02 PM

  What tech are you using to track all this? A fitbit? What apps/wearables are you using?

• by vova_feldman on 7/12/14, 4:14 PM

  This is insane! Amazing work dude. Btw. love the UI/UX.

• by ing33k on 7/12/14, 5:15 PM

  for some reason this page reminds me of dcurtis's home page some time ago.

• by kevinwang on 7/13/14, 8:01 AM

  This is beautiful.

• by kayoone on 7/13/14, 8:22 AM

  its beautiful, however even the rather static looking "sports" page produces some decent CPU load and makes the fans in my rMBP spin up. Maybe that could be optimized :)

• by liotier on 7/12/14, 5:19 PM

  "Everything" ? Unless you publish a daily graph of your sperm count, it is not 'everything' !

• by jowag on 7/12/14, 2:40 PM

  So much personal details but no mention of the age? Grand example of SF's ageism.

• by pdknsk on 7/12/14, 2:50 PM

  Reminds me of a guy who was on Bloomberg West last year. He does it to become more productive, and find out what makes him less.

  http://www.bloomberg.com/video/using-sensors-to-track-your-e...

  PS. The website is well done, but in all fairness, similar websites were made in Flash more than 10 years ago.

• by tarere on 7/12/14, 5:36 PM

  " great website" "fantastic" "fabulous"...

  ??!!!

  So nobody feel that tracking everything you do every second and log it in real time and forever on a server is terribly frightening ?!!!!

  In 2005 i predicted every one who ever logged on facebook would regret it one day and pay a huge price for it. This is more than real now. Still you don't stop, and now you're sending to "them" in realtime your heartbeats, your weight, what you yeat, etc.

  Did you just forgot about LIFE ? Is this the next American Way of life ? So yout think totalitarism is Iran or Syria ? Pouarrrk !!!

  You guys are totally out of your minds. Seriously.

• by taway98765 on 7/12/14, 1:48 PM

  Nice PR campaign to prepare the floor for a new generation of wearables / tracking & monitoring devices .. don't get me wrong, I like(LOVE) the technology, I just don't like the idea of becoming a self-sponsored spy pawn on me and everyone around .. focus on privacy, local/self hosted services first, hardened leak-free hw, cloud data encryption(with keys not leaving your devices) by default + 1000 of other privacy-related challenges that are being largely ignored .. and since this is not in the fin. interest of hw manuf./main sw houses .. the world is becoming a modern, more efficient, better organised version of orwel's 1984 and it looks like regardless of the amount of information confirming this disturbing development, people naively trade 15min of fame for privacy again and again(and it - will - turn against you even if you are protesting in front of the "right" embassy - well, activism of any kind is considered a threat these days so better stick to those kitty pictures and comments about the newest season of <insert your favorite tv-series> )