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Exist

exist.io

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Re: Exist

#31

Post by roryokane »

normloman wrote: post #22

How many tweets you make? How many tracks you listen to? How is this data going to help you improve your life? Tracking your sleep is one thing. But most of this is just noise. The name Exist is creepy. As if, you don't truly exist until you can pigeonhole yourself into a couple of statistics. I swear, everyone here is mind blind.

“Everyone here is mind blind”? https://xkcd.com/610/

I agree that tweets and tracks probably won’t help you notice any useful patterns. But I don’t see the name Exist as creepy. I interpret it rather as a way of saying that this is very passive software, and all you have to do to use it is to exist normally, as if it’s not there. Like existence is the context of this software, not the product they are selling.

Re: Exist

#32

Post by balls187 »

kapkapkap wrote: post #30
balls187 wrote: post #26

What resources do they need to launch exist? 30k per founder for 6 months seems like quite a lot of money.

Perhaps its a good way to validate the idea / test the market? I wouldn't pay a $1 myself, but if they can get 1,000 people to pay $60, more power to them.

Putting up a high friction point seems like a unintuitive way to validate the idea.

I'm taking the founders at their word--they need the money to launch their product. It just seems like they could do it for less--however I don't have much detail so I'd like to understand the money breakdown.

Re: Exist

#33

Post by prawn »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #8

So, what is the deal with the quantified self obsession? Is it a young persons thing? Has it always been that way and I just missed out on it? Or is it a newer phenomenon that is catching on due to technology making it easier to capture data about ourselves? I'm really curious.

Maybe a shortcut to feeling like you can improve or collect any data that might help you improve. At what and how, who knows.

Makes me think of the concept that telling someone your idea while leave you less likely to act on it, as you'll feel like you've taken a significant step already.

Re: Exist

#34

Post by PavlovsCat »

amwelles wrote: post #18
djb_hackernews wrote: post #8

So, what is the deal with the quantified self obsession? Is it a young persons thing? Has it always been that way and I just missed out on it? Or is it a newer phenomenon that is catching on due to technology making it easier to capture data about ourselves? I'm really curious.

I tend to track things I'm trying to improve on or get in the routine of doing. Checking something off as being done is very satisfying to me. I've been using an iOS app called Balance (no affiliation to them) to do this, and it works perfectly with gentle reminders.

Yes, I think tracking something you already know about and are working on is very useful. Expenses, weight, time spent walking or working out, time spent working on specific projects etc., there are many things that can quite easily be turned into actually interesting graphs, even if it's just to motivate oneself, and certainly to get a more objective look at things or keep track of something over longer periods of time.

But number of tweets, or number of checkins per day? Nah.. or maybe it's a play on something Oscar Wilde wrote.. "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." Not that I mean to be snarky, I assume it's up to the user what stats to display and hopefully how to display them; but to get me excited, it would have to be the "Piwik version" of itself, if you catch my drift.

Re: Exist

#35

Post by jonnybgood »

This kind of tech reminds me of a story from Einstein's Dreams. It's a world of two kinds of people. Those who live close to the Earth living out there lives happily with no reservations and those who live at high altitudes because they believe the higher you are, the longer you'll live. Those who live at high altitudes measure the time they're at lower altitudes with stress and worry then haste back up so as to not get older.

So busy quantifying your life, you forget to actually live your life. My 2 cents.

Re: Exist

#36

Post by dimadima »

Sterile, cold. Existence is more than identifying the next self fulfilling prophesy.

Also, by the way, correlation != causation. Live it.

Re: Exist

#37

Post by hueving »

orofino wrote: post #4

Connect literally five other services for a broader view This copy seems quite strange. Using literally in this context would traditionally precede an impressive number. "We have literally thousands of service intergrations"... or something.

I literally agree with you.

Re: Exist

#38

Post by yawz »

tedks wrote: post #12
djb_hackernews wrote: post #8

So, what is the deal with the quantified self obsession? Is it a young persons thing? Has it always been that way and I just missed out on it? Or is it a newer phenomenon that is catching on due to technology making it easier to capture data about ourselves? I'm really curious.

It's hardly new; people had commonplace books in the 1600's. I think QS is probably more popular in communities like hacker news because there are a lot of people here that understand: 1. Computers think faster than you 2. Computers remember more than you 3. You can use the above to solve interesting problems. Combine that with pervasive computing/surveillance and you enable yourself to remember arbitrary amounts of…

1. Computers think faster than you

Not yet. But they make calculations faster.

Re: Exist

#40

Post by wakeless »

balls187 wrote: post #26

What resources do they need to launch exist? 30k per founder for 6 months seems like quite a lot of money.

These guys live in here Melbourne, cost of living is pretty crazy high. Sure, you could get away with paying yourself less than that, but 60k (less business expenses) puts them in the realm of basic office clerk.

Maybe the startup founder's lot in life is to be poor while they are starting up, so could probably do it with less. But they are hardly overstepping the mark.

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