10 ms·
I've been tracking everything about myself
- tlrobinson 12y agoHonestly, 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.
- LunaSea 12y agoBut in the meantime you give up any sense of privacy.
- tlrobinson 12y agoMeh, at least I know exactly what I'm sharing, versus most people who have no idea a variety of corporations and three-letter agencies could get basically the same information from their cell phone, toll road transponders, license plate readers, credit card transactions, etc, etc, etc.
- drinchev 12y agoSo true!!
- dhruvasagar 12y agojust so you know, all the information that's stolen from people without their knowledge, also happens to you, so the sense of knowing exactly what you share is honestly just an illusion.
- tlrobinson 12y agoI'm under no illusion. Just saying sharing on Foursquare doesn't make much difference.
- miguelrochefort 12y agoYou're just making a caricature of yourself.
- aprilzero 12y agoI would do almost anything to have this data for the past few years. What I really like about Moves is how comprehensive it is — it has every single place you went to rather than just ones that you thought were worth checking into, etc. What turns out to be relevant or helpful data to have is hard to know except in hindsight.
- snicker 12y agoI am a data junkie as you are, and I have several years of Foursquare data now, but just recently started using Moves. One gripe I've had is that if I stop somewhere for less than a two to three minutes, Moves doesn't register that I was actually at a location, and there's no way to force it to do so. Have you experienced something similar? Beautiful site, by the way.
- cmdrfred 12y agoWow. This site discourages me, as I feel that I may never make something so pretty.
- philfreo 12y agoDon't let it... Anand is a rare breed :)
- danoprey 12y agoLooks like HN took it down. Will have to come back later as the screenshot looked awesome.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- lnanek2 12y agoClicked around a little and didn't see how old he is. Personally, I could run a mile under 5 minutes in high school, ran track for high school and college, wore out my knee so it hurts constantly at any more running for years after, and currently I'd be happy to get any time at all nowadays. So 10 minutes could be quite good considering his life situation.
- arondeparon 12y agoFor what it's worth: he's 24 (see http://aprilzero.com/sport/ http://aprilzero.com/sport/).
- disputin 12y agoWith rovers shooting lasers on Mars I'm disappointed that ligament and joint repair isn't as routine as dental work. Actually, I'm also disappointed that I still have to brush my teeth. The technology trickle down doesn't really jump out at you, does it? Imagine a country redirecting a year of military spending to advance the smaller everyday things.
- kenver 12y agoI can't believe you bothered to take the time to write that. Who cares what his running pace is, and more to the point why do you? I think the point of the submission was to highlight the quality of the site. Not some strangers fitness level.
- aragot 12y agoIn all his clumsiness, chatmasta is exposing the core topic of the website: What happens when one publishes his private data to the world? Criticism, mockery, or respect if you're lucky to have the right crowd. I'm looking forward to seeing someone stalked using data he published voluntarily, just for the social experiment. Will it be good? bad?
- ArikBe 12y agoNicholas Felton has been doing something similar for a couple of years, but he creates a printed journal: http://feltron.com/ar12_02.html 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.
- djtriptych 12y agoCheck out Felton's other site - daytum.com. It's an app and website that helps people get started, though the fancy visualizations aren't modularized just yet.
- hboon 12y agoAnd http://www.reporter-app.com http://www.reporter-app.com, an iOS app, also by Felton. BTW, anyone knows why it is Nicholas Felton and feltron.com? (with and without "r")?
- sgarbi 12y agoI'm on a tablet now, what libraries is he using?
- tangue 12y agoJquery + d3. Surprisingly it works quite well on my old Ipad 1 (graceful degradation for the animations). Javascript heavy websites usually crash safari
- taway98765 12y agoNice 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> )
- jackweirdy 12y agoParagraphs!
- arondeparon 12y agoI think the site is absolutely beautiful. What I am wondering, though is: how are the vitamin/mineral stats on http://aprilzero.com/sport/ http://aprilzero.com/sport/ generated? Is there a way to self-measure these stats without blood tests?
- cl42 12y agoPossibly tools like My Fitness Pal. They track this sort of thing. Here's an example: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/fresh-satsuma-orange-132270361 http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/fresh-satsuma-oran...
- aprilzero 12y agoThere's no way that I know of besides blood tests. It's a bit painful but not too expensive and in my opinion well worth it. The blood levels are coming from a standard blood test, available at any doctor's office. I've been getting them about once a month. You need to fast for at least 8 hours prior to get accurate results, and it takes about 2 vials of blood. I'm waiting for some sort of device to give you realtime values with just a prick of blood or constant monitoring.
- josyulakrishna 12y agoThis has to be the most beautiful website i've seen.
- jackweirdy 12y agoAgreed; such a satisfying font and colour scheme. Really well done.
- jowag 12y agoSo much personal details but no mention of the age? Grand example of SF's ageism.
- abritishguy 12y agoIt says he is 24.
- bennettfeely 12y agoActually, it says he is 24.2827266, in counting
- dpweb 12y agoAmazing site, I think I like the age counter most of all!
- pdknsk 12y agoReminds 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-entire-life-67q3ZGiERROz9vnEjniD_A.html 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.
- hunvreus 12y agoBeautiful 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.
- k-mcgrady 12y agoI'll give you one small example. I started using a sleep tracking app on my iPhone because I have bad onset insomnia and don't sleep well. After one weeks use I noticed that the nights I went for a short 20 min walk before bed I had a much better sleep score. I also fell asleep faster. Another thing I noticed was that I feel asleep faster if I didn't listen to music or podcasts. I've listened to them for years thinking it helped me fall asleep more quickly but using the app for a week I was able to prove that false. Obviously my data set it very small but the changes seem to be working. If you collect data on lots of different things all of these small changes/improvements you make could add up to a noticeable difference in quality of life. The holy grail of course is software that can analyse all of these data points and recommend changes.
- alanthonyc 12y agoWhich app do you use, may I ask?
- k-mcgrady 12y ago'Sleep Cycle'. Orange icon with a clock on it. I was always quite skeptical of it and didn't download it until recently. It's been one of the top apps for a few years and has good reviews. I've found it to be quite accurate. It recommends that you keep your iPhone connected to a charger and under your sheet as you sleep but I've found just placing the device next to my pillow works fine and only uses about 25-30% battery life per night.
- dominotw 12y agoCan 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?
- criswell 12y agoI think it's nice to look back at. I don't think it's too much different from looking back at a photo album.
- sejeneoske 12y agoIt's nice to have metrics to measure your progress with an exercise routine (walking, running, strength training), weight loss effort (lbs lost, fat %), etc. Although there are always narcissists, I think many people just like quantifying their progress. Just like receiving grades to measure your understanding when you were in school, these metrics allow you to assess whether you are moving in the right direction, and if so, to feel a sense of accomplishment. Wanting to be fit and healthy does not equal narcissism.
- BrandonM 12y agoHave thinly veiled insults finally become socially acceptable?
- Jemaclus 12y agoI 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.
- mirashii 12y agoFor what it's worth, having worked with Anand, I don't think 1200+ commits suggests it's input manually (you can see on the about page a list of some of the APIs it's pulling data from), I think it more suggests that Anand likes to commit a lot when he's building something. And for good reason, it's been really cool to check out historical revisions and see how a design changed at every step.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- vilgax 12y agoIn about page it states that "Most of the data comes from various apps on my phone". In powered by section it shows that he uses an iPhone.
- rkayg 12y agoThis 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.
- Evan-Purkhiser 12y agoI think the half curves just represent some form of travel. If you look at March 29th [1] there's a large curve for his 8 hour flight, and some small gray ones for walking to his gate [1] http://aprilzero.com/explorer/march-2014/29/ http://aprilzero.com/explorer/march-2014/29/
- hawkharris 12y agoPersonal 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.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago>> "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." I agree but recently I read that doctors tend to completely discount this type of data provided by a patient as they can't verify it's accuracy (did the patient collect the data correctly) and it would be risky to base their diagnosis on it. Even if that is the case I think it can be very useful for people with chronic conditions. They can find out ways to minimise their pain through this kind of tracking/trial and error which a doctor would never have the time to do.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoIf 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?
- PStamatiou 12y agoYeah he's (my roommate) been working on building the site and hasn't gotten around to any journal entries yet. He just launched this yesterday. I've been egging him on to put more time into the blog component though, so expect some posts about how he built it and why he wants to log everything..
- afaqurk 12y agoAnand, you beautiful, brilliant bastard. That site looks awesome beyond compare. Awesome job.
- vova_feldman 12y agoThis is insane! Amazing work dude. Btw. love the UI/UX.
- fuzzythinker 12y agoVery beautiful animations and visualizations. What tools did you use to build them?
- Nemcue 12y agoThere is an "about this site" link at the bottom, where he lists some of the third party services used. In general he has a few global objects which seem to contain everything for each section; ajax requests, animations (which are webkit only as far as I can tell) etc. Most of it is done via jQuery.
- Excavator 12y ago> animations (which are webkit only as far as I can tell) So that's why people were calling it pretty. It does actually look good with all that prefix nonsense fixed. Seems odd to use prefixes for things that were unprefixed 2years ago in Firefox. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/aurora-16-is-out/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/aurora-16-is-out/
- LocalPCGuy 12y agoOne of my pet peeves is when people are so "in" the webkit world they don't bother to even list the unprefixed version. I too looked at it in Firefox, and things actually look a bit broken. My guess is adding the unprefixed version would probably fix the majority of the errors I see. I won't go so far as to say stop using prefixes, but ALWAYS include the unprefixed version last in the CSS stack. It's so easy with Sass also.
- Excavator 12y agoInsofar as I could tell, doing a simple s/-webkit-//g got things working, except for the gradients due to them still being in the old format.
- gress 12y agoThis 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?
- gress 12y agoSeriously, how is this downvoted? It's a sincere question. I enjoyed looking at the site, and I loved the interface, but I didn't get any insight into the data. Can someone enlighten me?
- ing33k 12y agofor some reason this page reminds me of dcurtis's home page some time ago.
- liotier 12y ago"Everything" ? Unless you publish a daily graph of your sperm count, it is not 'everything' !
- tarere 12y ago" 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.
- ipince 12y agoWhy is it so frightening?
- afro88 12y agoIt's only frightening if it's not deliberate / you don't know it's happening. This is beautiful, voluntary and insightful.
- rflrob 12y agoIt's also frightening if it becomes so mainstream that you become a pariah by not doing it. Dave Eggers novel _The Circle_ looks at this, and while I felt it was hyperbolic and more than a little preachy, it's certainly worth thinking about.
- tarere 12y ago"It's only frightening if it's not deliberate / you don't know it's happening." Oh my god, how old are you all ? Are you the next generation of this world ? Don't you just understand you behave like products and not human !? This is possibly the end of the world.
- icebraining 12y agoQuite possibly, yes. You should go hide and wait for the rapture.
- 12y ago
- PStamatiou 12y agoAnand 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
- kevinoconnor7 12y agoHis handle sounds familiar. Did he used to run a design company called Dragon--or something along those lines? If so I've been impressed by his design work for a long time. Really interesting to see how his work has evolved.
- markgarity 12y agoDragon Interactive - yep.
- ipince 12y agoKind 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.
- PStamatiou 12y agoHe spent a lot of time traveling while building this site. :) The first ~1.5 months were spent abroad.
- delinka 12y agoI think he's more literal: did Anand really just stay inside at the hotel that much?
- PStamatiou 12y agoYeah that's what I meant - he was spending a lot of time building it
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- aprilzero 12y agoThe data is accurate. Probably mostly sleeping, working or eating. There is a bit of a bias towards those being the most noticeable places since you spend a lot of time there, while other stuff you do may only be for 10-15 minutes and relatively is very little. You may be surprised by how much actual time you spend at home or a hotel even though it feels like you've gone out and done a lot of stuff during the day — by percentage of total time in a day it may not be that much. Also many places have a lot of nice facilities that might still count as being at the location like restaurants, bars, rooftops, pools, beaches, gym, etc.
- 12y ago
- chdir 12y agoSlightly 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.
- donniezazen 12y agohttp://aprilzero.com/about/ http://aprilzero.com/about/
- chdir 12y agoThat link points to a bunch of data sources, not how the site was designed, unless I missed something. A little sleuthing says the site is more about the launch of a CSS animations framework rather than a health tracker. Somewhere maybe there's d3.
- evanrelf 12y agohttp://builtwith.com/aprilzero.com http://builtwith.com/aprilzero.com
- crishoj 12y agoWhile certainly a neat tool, it doesn't shed a lot of light on the client side stack, and apart from revealing the hosting service and web server, doesn't say much about the server side stack either.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- PhrosTT 12y agoThe icons are from FourSquare - http://1x57.com/b/art-and-icons-of-foursquare-can-you-decipher-the-meaning/ http://1x57.com/b/art-and-icons-of-foursquare-can-you-deciph... He's using d3, jQuery, mapbox, jquery-pjax Lot's of analytics (NewRelic, gaug.es, segment.io) Skillwise you'd need great js, great d3, eye for design, patience to layout a million state transitions and animate them all with css + js, wiring up a million data sources & api's, jquery, ajax, pushstate, and pretty legit backend skills to keep this thing running ATM.
- platz 12y agoI love the site and design. Maybe displaying some values at nine decimals out is perhaps a bit more for eye candy than for information.
- tabrischen 12y agoI 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?
- XorNot 12y agoSo 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).
- nathan_f77 12y agoThe 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 https://tictrac.com [2]: https://www.geckoboard.com https://www.geckoboard.com
- ezl 12y agoseconded. Anand, I would pay for this as a service. Please let me.
- brenfrow 12y agoI would be really interested to see your stats change by being effected by different diets. I'm interested in something like Paleo vs Veganism.
- kevinwang 12y agoThis is beautiful.
- kayoone 12y agoits 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 :)
- fasteo 12y agoI 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.
- karlb 12y ago>Do some weight training. If you goal is to be healthy, this is key. Ignorant and sincere question: Why?
- fasteo 12y agoMuscle mass is a metabolic master regulator: - It allows fast glucose clearance from blood via both insulin and non-insulin glucose transport. - It drives bone density by pure mechanical tension. More muscle = stronger bones/tendons to support them. The usual hip fracture/high mortality we see in elderly people follows the loss of muscle mass->loss of bone strength->bone breaks->fall pathway, not the more intuitive fall->bone break. - It serves as "organ reserve". In case of injury or disease, your muscle mass will literally keep you alive. There are some interesting studies about muscle mass on admission to the ICU and mortality/morbidity. This is the extreme case, but you get the picture. - Not per-se, but the neurological effort you put in your weight training sessions drive the secretion of Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF improves existing neurons signaling and promotes the creation of new ones. As a side note, I have seen a huge improvement in my - properly diagnosed - ADHD child after putting him in a functional "lift heavy shit" exercise program.
- sgy 12y agoQuantified-self raises huge privacy concerns, and will make it easier to "rule the world".
- thallukrish 12y agoIf 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!
- ejain 12y agoThere 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/ https://zenobase.com/
- johnpc 12y agoWhat other aggregators are out there? No offense but I'm struggling to figure out how to import my fitbit and moves app to zenobase.
- ejain 12y agoSee https://zenobase.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/360890-how-does-zenobase-compare-to-other-services https://zenobase.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/360890... for a list of services that aggregate health and fitness data. The screencasts at https://www.youtube.com/user/zenobase https://www.youtube.com/user/zenobase should give you an idea of what you can do with Zenobase; if all you need is a nice dashboard showing recent data, there are simpler solutions like TicTrac.
- johnpc 12y agoWhat tech are you using to track all this? A fitbit? What apps/wearables are you using?