Flying stats dashboards always amuse me. I get it, for the non-pilot it's kind of like a status thing, "Well I traveled X times in 2025!". As a pilot though, I have gobs of stats I could put up there but from flying for 15 years I realize there's not really anything meaningful in there other than "Gee whiz, I flew a little more/less than last year." I know some other professional pilots do track some of their stats a little closer as they try to optimize for hours flown:hours paid but I've never cared to hyper optimize my schedule in that way.
I put my whole life into a single database
121–130 of 239 posts
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#122The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable: > Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting f…
I never spent as much time as OP on this but I did collect a lot of data during peak quantified self. I liked having automatic data collection and being able to see trends, for example. I stopped because of a few issues, not related to time:
* Hardware companies went out of business, stopped supporting devices, etc. It became obvious that there was no long term commitment to make good quality hardware that lasted a long time.
* Many devices and/or data collection was consolidated big, data hungry companies Google and Apple. Competitors have similar anti-consumer uses of data. I don't want any of these companies to have my data.
* Related to the last one, limited to no offline or local only data collection.
It is very hard to gather most of this data with off the shelf hardware and keep your data private.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#123The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable: > Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting f…
You're equating two different things here: "building a custom web application" with "quantified self". These are two entirely different things.
Felix's statement isn't a condemnation of quantified self. I think that sometimes, when you're applying algorithms that aren't well-studied, you get pointless or bogus data. I feel much this way about sleep tracking algorithms from the likes of Apple and Whoop. Vitals, too, although it seems remarkably good at detecting when I'm about to get sick.
As a person in the older demographic of HN, having an Apple Watch quietly collect useful data over years and store it in a database has been immensely useful in helping resolve medical issues.
I used to really be into QS, and if I'm training for a marathon, I'm still studying graphs and drawing conclusions. I'm still into QS, but now I just silently log data to Apple Health and use it for medical histories or to identify certain trends (vo2max, cardio fitness, blood pressure, etc) a couple times a year.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#124A simple back of the envelope calculation shows that Felix causes between 70 and 110 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year just from flying. Paris accord says 1.5t per person per year, from all activities, Felix's flying alonre is ~10-15x current European yearly per person emissions and ~50-75x those compatible with +1.5C.
That was my main takeaway as well. How do you do this without any shame? My man is emitting an amount of CO2 on par with an small African country
Most people don't spend a lot of time wistfully considering their CO2 usage, myself included. The religious zeal by which people feel the need to tell me about the ever-warming planet is honestly more off-putting than most actual religions.
Of the very few "f*cks" I can give in my life, I prefer to spend mine as I choose rather than being scolded for not giving mine to the pressing issues that others deem important.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe for some it's a lot more extreme than for others, but even if it's not so dramatic as to be categorized as a mental illness wouldn't you want to know if, say, there were a direct correlation between whether you went for your morning run and your mood later in the day?
Is this something that needs to be tracked to bring into your awareness? We have a memory storage device sitting on top of our spine. When I drink I feel drunk. Easy. If the change is noticeable you will notice it and remember it. I am just trying to save you time and escape the cycle of "optimizations" which is where all this data logging leads.
Yes? As I wrote, the mere act of writing down your feelings forces you to acknowledge them and see patterns in them. Sometimes while writing something down I realise "wait, I've been through this before" or "every time this person is around, I feel this way". It helped me be more self-aware, for my own good.
It turns out that our memory storage device uses a very lossy form of compression. Memories get simplified and distorted over time. Heck, I can't even remember when something started hurting, so how should I notice a year-long pattern of thinking around a certain topic?
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was my main takeaway as well. How do you do this without any shame? My man is emitting an amount of CO2 on par with an small African country
Most people don't spend a lot of time wistfully considering their CO2 usage, myself included. The religious zeal by which people feel the need to tell me about the ever-warming planet is honestly more off-putting than most actual religions. Of the very few "f*cks" I can give in my life, I prefer to spend mine as I choose rather than being scolded for not giving mine to the pressing issues that others deem important.
The thing is that everyone alive today and in the future is footing the bill for that indifference. It's nice that you don't care, but it's not something I'd brag about.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#127I can see the value of doing this but I think that this is a case of the 80-20 rule. Just the low effort 80, which could be keeping a journal where you reflect on how you felt a given day, why that might be, and what steps to take to avoid it from happening (or keep it happening) should get you pretty far.
Most of the things that really hinder my productiveness and happiness are the same things that everyone tells you about; sleep, diet, sunlight, not being stuck indoors all day, socializing. And most of these can be improved by making changes to my habits.
Other than that, is that I think that it's important to get into the habit of self reflection. Having a feedback loop on my own life has helped me find out what works and what doesn't. It's too easy to just go through the days slogging through and not making any changes because you don't even realize what's going on.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you didn’t spend hundreds of hours on it, so when it did happen to be useful it seemed like an outsized benefit. I would wager that for most people, most data about themselves will be useless and not worth collecting. Of course you can’t know what data will be useless or not, so unless the cost of collecting it is minimal or nil (wearing a smart watch, writing down your weight each day/week), it’s probably not wo…
Right, but you don't necessarily need to spend hundreds of hours to capture most of this; the data is already out there. If there were a tool that could collect it all in one place and give you insights with minimal effort that would be pretty neat.
agree. I would never do what OP did. But I also won't throw out my smart watch (Context: other people in the thread said they stopped using them because the data was useless)
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#129The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable: > Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting f…
It's pure armchair psychology, but this type of project always makes me think about anxiety. Who really needs this level of self observation and control? At the same time, I really enjoy reading about it and I find the window into somebody else's world intriguing.
> Who really needs this level of self observation and control
I liked doing similar things in the past. There's no anxiety in the equation, just pure curiosity. How many times have I done a thing a month/year? I was always curious about stuff like this, much like the OP. There's also the hacker spirit in play - designing the apps for tracking stuff.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#130The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable: > Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting f…
This whole site is a rich persons humblebrag. That renders all of it moot as far as value.