
Show HN: Journal Your Life as Data with Thyself.io - feniv
https://thyself.io/
======
iM8t
I really like the idea of tracking myself (e.g. books read, weight, steps
taken etc.), but as a hacker I'd never let anyone else hold this data. I mean,
Facebook is one thing, but highly personal details about my personality is
another thing.

That said - it would be cool to see something like this open sources.
Currently I'm using excel to track most of the stuff I'm interested in, but I
know that there must be a better alternative.

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feniv
I totally understand. I'm the kind of person who keeps a diary inside an
encrypted true-crypt folder, so security and privacy have been my primary
concern from day one. The main reason I'm deploying this as a web-service
rather than a downloadable app is so that you can track things from anywhere
(without having to be technical enough to manage your own servers). It's much
harder to do that with excel or true-crypt, even if you use it with things
like google-docs or dropbox.

~~~
goldfeld
Still, and I don't mean to bash your work, I think this is a disservice to the
internet because it perpetuates cloud tools and keeps the state-of-the-art
even for something as personal as journaling in the cloud. That's a very, very
sorry situation. Paraphrasing the old adage, if you haven't something to
contribute that's in the best interests of people, better not to contribute at
all. I keep my private stuff local as well, and you yourself admit to doing
the same. Why not focus on making it easier for people to do the same, instead
of riding the popularity contest of the quick-start cloud?

~~~
feniv
Because I believe that privacy and the cloud can co-exist in a mutually
beneficial fashion. Just because the app is online doesn't mean that it has to
be "social" (there is intentionally no social-sharing options for the log or
journal entries). But by being online, the application itself can improve over
time by analyzing aggregate data to detect anomalies (like Mint.com), give
predictions, refine the natural language parsing etc.

If this was just a journal, I would agree with you and make it self-contained.
But it's not. In the next 5-10 years we're going to be seeing a massive number
of wearable sensors embedded in our clothes, appliances and tools. A managed,
online API will be better able to be always available, consuming this tsunami
of data and turning it into useful insights for you.

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feniv
By the way, the site's running entirely on a single ec2 micro instance (nginx,
redis, posgres and go). I'm curious to see if my optimizations pay off and if
it can continue to handle the HackerNews traffic.

~~~
pallandt
It appears you've done a pretty good job :)

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magicarp
That's crazy, I've been developing something very similar for personal use:
[http://rcrd.org/](http://rcrd.org/)

~~~
feniv
That looks pretty good! You have an interesting model of abstraction with the
records, cats and magnitudes. For me, each data point is an Entry. Entries
have a primary Metric/Action and many details, which may have a numerical
amount associated with them. Free-form representations like yours and mine
make logging data easy, but analyzing it can get pretty tricky.

~~~
magicarp
Awesome, if you're open to talk some time I'd love to learn more about your
way of doing things.

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janekk
This is executed very well. I love the natural language processing for diary
entries.

However I think you need to change your pitch if you want more incoming
traffic. At the moment this has an aura of creepiness and vainness to me and
no chance of SEO (who googles for "track every moment of my glorious life in
detail"?). You should configure this for whitelabelling and create a version
for different markets.

This is just one idea because I knoe my wife would love it:

Dieters to track calories eaten each day and exercise done. Would be awesome
to see energy counts of food eaten vs energy consumed by exercise done - maybe
like a weekly comparison of energy in and out.

~~~
feniv
Thanks, do share it with your wife!

I definitely need to work on my pitch more. As for search engines, I tried to
target the words Online Diary/Journal (which seem to get searched a lot (1M+
queries per month)) without coming off as spammy.

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morganwilde
I'm confused by this, because there doesn't seem to be a clear "do this, to
achieve this" message anywhere on the page.

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pearjuice
For privacy concerns you could store the keys (i.e. sleep, running) locally
with identifiers to retrieve the values (i.e. hours, kilos) from your database
and display/handle them in your app. This way the user keeps track of what
exactly is being journaled. Of course, this brings along several other
problems like data preservation (local storage).

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lucaswoj
Pretty solid running pace for 2.5 miles.

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skram
This is pretty impressive in that it uses NLP to allow you to track most
(any?) verb.

Any chance in making it open source?

~~~
feniv
Sure! I can release it as a library if there's interest. It's basically a go-
client querying a redis instance which has been pre-fed with the NLTK
categorization for most common words (about 8000 or so).

~~~
skram
I think there would be some interest in both the NLP as well as the tracking
in general (many say they want to track themselves but privacy is an issue)

~~~
EFruit
I for one am massively interested in Go NLP, and this project as a whole. I'd
really love to see this project opened up.

~~~
ragekit_
So do I, but mostly because i'd like to deploy it on my own private server.
I'm a bit paranoid when it comes to my data.

