
Gyroscope: A personal site powered by your life - tburger
https://gyrosco.pe/
======
pierotofy
Very cool animations on the UI side. I'm one of those users that wouldn't
trust to share all of that data though. Like others pointed out, maybe if
there was the option to run it on your own infrastructure...

~~~
kordless
I second this opinion. We're getting ready to enter the era of being able to
host our personal data on our own infrastructure. Let's start making that
available with all offerings, instead of making these centralized hosted
solutions that all require different types of access.

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ehmorris
Ah so this is the consumer version of the
[http://aprilzero.com](http://aprilzero.com) site:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8043203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8043203)

~~~
aprilzero
Yep! Took a while to figure out an elegant setup process and generalize the
design but we're finally getting close

~~~
ehmorris
It's taking a while to connect to everything, but I'm really pumped to see my
data in this interface. I've been working on something similar — an automatic
journal based on Moves/Instagram/Dropbox etc. One reason I'm scared to publish
is data security — are you storing any of this data, or pulling from 4+ APIs
every page load?

~~~
aprilzero
Sorry, the site is under heavy load right now but should get faster soon. We
process the data and store the results in our database.

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mortoc
Q: "What does it do?" A: "This is what it looks like!"

-_-

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AbeEstrada
I can't create an account because it uses Facebook, I'll wait for the next
version.

~~~
harlanlewis
This is a product for tracking everything you do, and tries to accomplish that
by pulling data from other services that track everything you do.

Is Facebook uniquely untrustworthy in this category? Is there anything about
Gyroscope that makes it uniquely trustworthy, if only they gathered your data
directly?

~~~
seanodonnell
I would have signed up via facebook, but then I noticed they wanted my friends
list. Nope. Nope. Nope.

~~~
draven
IIRC the friends list is in the default app permissions, and calling the graph
API only returns the friends on your list who also gave the same permission to
the app.

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egypturnash
I really hate it when websites override Safari's scrollbar and substitute a
5px one that may fit the theme of the site, but is virtually impossible to
grab because its hotspot is only a tiny bit larger than the edge of the
window.

~~~
cbhl
Can you actually grab it at all?

I'm under the impression these kinds of designs are built for the Macbook
monoculture and assume you scroll using a touchpad gesture.

~~~
egypturnash
Barely. I have to try a few times.

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pkinsky
502 bad gateway :(

That said, I would pay money for a license to run a personal instance of this.
The data aggregation you need to make it work would be much less scary that
way.

~~~
ericflo
Our worker processes are overloaded at the moment, working on spinning more up
right now.

EDIT: And we've now got more workers!

~~~
chrischen
Hope you guys aren't hiring illegal immigrants and paying them under the
table.

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cfstras
The writing telling me "You are xyz.12345 years old" is kind of disturbing,
always frantically counting up...

~~~
ngoel36
It's way too quick and makes me uneasy. Even a X years, Y months, Z days would
be a bit more comforing

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camdenre
That is a very fancy website. I envy your web developer's front end skills.

~~~
gkoberger
By "your web developer's", I think you mean "your" :) Gyroscope was created by
Anand Sharma, who did all the design AND front end development.

[https://medium.com/gyroscope-innovations/introducing-
gyrosco...](https://medium.com/gyroscope-innovations/introducing-
gyroscope-30b63d542f75)

~~~
sahaskatta
It should be illegal to be this good at design. The site is responsive, is
HDPI optimized, and is damn beautiful. I'm envious. :)

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chdir
Absolutely beautiful design. I wish I had the skills to design something like
this.

As a user, it would be fun to look at your journaled life years from now.
However, the skeptic in me thinks advertisers must be drooling at that much
data. Also wondering what impact could it have on potential health insurance
providers. Or perhaps one day big G or FB would swoop up all my data.

All that aside, congratulations on a fabulous job. I'd definitely give it a
try someday. Please enable sign-up without FB.

------
joeblau
Everything looked great until I saw Facebook login.

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izolate
It's crazy to see how far @aprilzero has come with this. Actually bringing his
idea to life, and turning it into a profitable business. There's a lesson to
be learnt here in regards to working passionately and finishing your side-
projects.

Designers who can engineer are a step ahead of everyone else IMO.

~~~
jkestner
Is it profitable?

~~~
izolate
Apparently. They have paying customers.

~~~
sdrothrock
They have 133 customers paying $7/mo. I don't think that's quite enough to be
profitable after paying for taxes, web services, and the team's salary; I'd be
surprised if it could cover everything. It's a nice start, though!

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joelrunyon
Echoing a lot of thoughts here.

Would sign up in a second w/out fb login.

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sdrothrock
I'm glad this is finally out! I signed up for the notifications about this
back when it first started, but never got an e-mail about Gyroscope... so I'm
glad I saw it on HN today.

I hope there are plans to integrate data from Google Fit. I know my watch
tracks my steps and heart rate, so it seems kind of redundant to get Moves for
the former and not be able to use data I have for the latter.

~~~
ericflo
Good news! We already support Google Fit. I used to wear a Moto360 and was
using that to track my steps for a while, and it all ended up in Gyroscope.

~~~
sdrothrock
Interesting. I don't mind using Moves for that, but I didn't see anything
under Vitals that indicated that it would use my Moto360 heartrate
measurements.

Looking forward to playing with a real account once I get through the
waitlist!

Also, I'm glad and impressed you guys are responding so quickly (I asked about
FourSquare/Swarm on Twitter a little while ago).

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jarnix
It seems beautiful etc and fun to watch from time to time but what is the use
of gyroscope ? What will it do for me ?

------
ElectricFeel
Gyroscope looks really cool.. it REALLY REALLY reminds me of Gamesphere

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Karunamon
I really like the design of this site!

Question: Moves (which I already use) tracks cycling and runs - why do I also
need to link Runkeeper/Strava/Fitbit in addition? This appears to be
redundant.

Other question: How do you get back into the "follow these steps" page once
you've clicked away? The link on the front page has been replaced with a
notification that i'll be emailed when my account is set up.
([http://gyrosco.pe/setup/](http://gyrosco.pe/setup/))

~~~
aprilzero
Moves does theoretically track that stuff, but it is not reliable enough. For
example, walking quickly or being in a car often ends up being considered
cycling for half a block.

On the other hand, if you turned on Runkeeper or Strava and say you're going
for a run, that's probably 99% reliably what you actually did.

Also I think the page you want is the dashboard:
[https://gyrosco.pe/dashboard/](https://gyrosco.pe/dashboard/) \- we are
working on building a more intuitive global nav so people don't get lost.

~~~
adminprof
I also tried Moves and found it really bad if you're actually interested in
accurate tracking your location. Runkeeper and Strava seem to use a lot of
power because it's GPS only. Is there a GPS+celltower combo app you've found?
I found GPSLogger for Android tries both GPS and cell tower, and stops when
one of them returns with an accurate enough coordinate. So it gets amazing
accuracy and uses very little power at the same time, since 95% of the time it
uses cell tower.

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urza
Must be great for NSA & CIA guys.

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rotub
I signed up for "early access" ages ago and I still haven't been granted
access, while it sounds many here are signing up and getting straight in?

~~~
aprilzero
Sorry about that. I don't think many people here are getting straight in, I
imagine they're commenting on the homepage and the pages that other users have
made publicly viewable.

We haven't automated the invite system yet and still have only sent out a few,
but we plan to accelerate that process now. Scaling is hard so we want to make
sure we get it right and everyone has a good experience.

------
4lejandrito
I have been working with a couple of friends on something like this for the
last couple of weeks as a fun/side open source project.

It sucks when you see that there is no point on working on anything because it
is or will already be made by someone else. I guess we will carry on just for
the sake of doing it, learning and having fun.

Any advice on how to deal with this constant struggle with my motivation?

By the way, congrats to the guys, it is an awesome piece or work!

~~~
chdir
A pre-cursor was launched almost 8 months ago [1] but perhaps you missed it. I
can imagine looking at such a refined design and feeling like you can't
measure up. But if you are really passionate about whatever your are
developing, you'll find a niche. Moreover there's always room for more than 1
player and competition is good to shape up the landscape for everybody. If you
share your open source project, you might get a lot better feedback and
perhaps more contributors.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8043203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8043203)

~~~
4lejandrito
Yes I missed it, thanks for the link. In any case we are very far from being
able to compete ha! We all have our day jobs and it is hard to find time to
build our thing. However, I hope one day we can post here a link to a working
version no matter how simple it is ;)

Regarding the opensource aspect, we are already working on Github but it is
too early and hacky to be shown to other people.

Thanks for your answer!

------
warrenpeace
Anyone recommend running apps?

I use Nike Running but it doesn't integrate with this.

Any recommendations between Strava and RunKeeper?

(I run and will be getting into cycling shortly.)

Thank you!!

~~~
aprilzero
Strava and RunKeeper are both amazing apps. I'd suggest to try them both and
see which you prefer. It's a great time to be a runner!

~~~
lisnake
Can you consider integrating Nike running into gyroscope? I believe they
recently introduced new API for that, and I already have hundreds of km logged
in

------
buremba
I'm OK with the personal data but it doesn't seem to be good idea to allow you
to access my private repos in Github.

~~~
aprilzero
Yeah that makes sense. We've started to switch more towards things like
Rescuetime for that information, since the github auth options are very all or
nothing.

I wish there were more granular scopes so we could use just the metadata or
timestamps, which is all we care about and not nearly as sensitive.

~~~
brianshaler
I had only thought about this for Twitter before, but it would be nice if a
trustworthy third party could act as a mediator between some of these APIs to
give developers the ability to request less information or for users to
restrict/filter what personal data is given away. That would help with this
github all-or-nothing problem.

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tux3
It looks really cool, although the 3D part is incredibly aliased for me (FF
31, Linux), to the point of being barely readable.

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twampss
I'm already a fan because of @ericflo.

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Jemaclus
It says there are 5 steps, with the first four steps containing free apps, and
the 5th step containing an integration to RescueTime, which appears to cost
money. I don't particularly want RescueTime. Am I just going to be on the
"waiting list" forever, then?

Also, please provide a way to cancel the account. :)

~~~
aprilzero
Rescuetime is free. They have a paid upgrade but you don't need it.

And you don't need to have all of the steps complete, just a majority of them.
There isn't an exact threshold, we just want people to have a good experience
and not start off by landing on a mostly empty page.

~~~
Jemaclus
Awesome, thanks for your response!

------
BaconJuice
Hey @aprilzero what was the backend stack you went with to build something
like this? Just curious :)

~~~
ericflo
We've split the backend into a service layer written in Go, a data fetching
and processing layer also written in Go, and a web layer written in
Python/Coffeescript. We use Kafka to connect a lot of the pieces together, and
data is stored in PostgreSQL and Cassandra.

~~~
ekarulf
This is awesome. Congrats on the launch Flo :)

~~~
ericflo
Oh hi Erik, cool to see you here and thanks! Haven't seen you in way too long.

------
tabrischen
Dear @aprilzero, I'm loving the dashboard. Hope you can add in more
integration with other services, like kanbanflow for productivity (it comes
with a nifty pomodoro timer) and miband for fitness.

~~~
aprilzero
Thanks! There are so many more integrations we are excited to start using,
can't get to them fast enough. PS: We're hiring :)

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Tideflat
In Linux Firefox the 3d rotations are aliased and ugly. Could you just give us
a normal web page? This web site has all the problems of bad flash websites
but built in JavaScript.

~~~
Kiro
Don't attribute opinions to "us", please. I don't agree at all. I think it's a
beautiful page.

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tonydiv
This is displaying all of my health data on a sexy website? Hmm.

~~~
creativityhurts
It actually shows more than health data, it's like a personal dashboard for
your activity, may it be physical (fitbit, jawbone and so on) or digital
(instagram, twitter, foursquare)

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zample
Ahh amazing! We met one of the creators at Famo.us earlier in the year. He was
truly inspirational and the css work he has done on April Zero is mind
boggling.

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fredkelly
I created an account a while ago, but it still just shows "we'll email you
when your account is ready" \- am I missing something?

~~~
aprilzero
We haven't fully launched yet - we've started sending out invites as we slowly
scale up to everyone. But we just updated our site with more details about
Gyroscope and are starting to accelerate that process now.

~~~
fredkelly
Thanks - look forward to it!

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xasos
Anand never fails to impress with his design!

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uberneo
Looks very good .. but its very slow right now .. have you hosted in on EC2?
or your own dedicated machines?

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madsravn
I'm only using Facebook. After creating an account, it seems kind of
lackluster.

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morgante
It'd be great to have some indication of how long the waiting list is.

~~~
aprilzero
We just added that information to the top of our about page:
[https://gyrosco.pe/about/](https://gyrosco.pe/about/)

Scaling is hard so we want to make sure we don't break everything, but we're
really excited to have everyone start using it as soon as possible and doing
everything we can to make that happen quickly.

We're also doing multiple passes, starting with people who already have enough
data connected, because we know they will have a great experience. If someone
only has a few photos connected there and not much other data, we still have a
lot more work left to do to give them a great experience.

------
vinceyuan
The UI of this web site is very cool. How to make this 3D animation?

~~~
brianshaler
Look up CSS3 3D transformation and transition tutorials for the basics. Then,
a 3D tilted stack effect would go something like this:

Apply 3d perspective and rotate the parent/container element about the X axis
".container{perspective:400px; transform:rotateX(-45deg);}" (or maybe a
positive 45deg)

Next, push the children forward along the Z axis ".child{transform:
translate3d(0,0,100px);}"

Then, add transitions to the properties being changed, z-translate different
amounts for different items in the stack, add some interactivity, and you're
set.

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gchokov
How does it integrate with Apple Health?

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x0
Well this looks cool but I don't have a foursquare or any of those other small
accounts it asks you for.

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milkers
Why people are so eager to ruin privacy? That is ridiculous.

------
Dewie
Now I can finally _quantify_ how little I do of everything that I _should_ be
doing. Before it was vague; now the guilt really can come to life with
exciting (or rather, flat?) graphs and visuals.

