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Comment by greggsy | Hacker News Reader

This post is interesting, but the whole project seems like a vanity project to put on your resume. I’d argue that it’s peak vanity project.

Once you have the basics of collect>summarise>publish metrics, it’s trivial to add just one more.

Do people really need every single aspect of their lives measurable to this degree?

Does anyone (other than your mother) really care?

I, for one, would hate for this to become a thing. It’s like a personal Facebook, but with infinitesimally more extra junk that I don’t want to know.

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If you read to the bottom of the site, you'll find that the author agrees with you that the end result was not particularly useful:

> 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 facts. There were some, and it’s super interesting to look through those graphs, however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.

But calling it a vanity project seems overly dismissive. Sometimes you start a project and don't know how it's going to end up. Sometimes it's the journey and not the destination that makes a project worthwhile. I think Felix deserves a lot of credit for writing up his conclusions and sharing them.

I think what greggsy's point is that why begin something when you could foresee that it wouldn't really amount to anything?

it was a vanity project - Felix just found out that it's not worth it later than sooner

Enlightenment

I also feel like it gets to a roundaboutway of 'proving' things people already know. More sleep is nicer, unless it's so long it's bc you're sick. Drinking more means more dancing. Days when you sit all day working are less fun than walking around with friends (and, of course, not working then)

I feel like keeping a rough journal and manually revisiting would be more helpful than quantifying and correlating. But financial tracking can be useful, to a smaller degree, and tracking mood changes over big life changes can be valuable I guess. Otherwise, does feel vanity

True, but it seems like it would be nice to know where to draw the lines. More sleep is good, but how much more? Etc.

Sometimes, it feels like there's so much going on that it's hard to know if it was the sleep, the diet, the events, or something else. That's where the data might be nice.

Sleep, diet, life events all negative. GIGO.

Although, I probably could do with some life changes, they need to be manageable.

> seems like a vanity project to put on your resume

What's your problem with vanity projects? And since when is doing side projects for your CV wrong?

> Do people really need every single aspect of their lives measurable to this degree?

No, but it's fun? "Do people really need X" can be said about anything.

> I, for one, would hate for this to become a thing.

No-one is forcing you to look at it and even less participate in it.

I thought Wolfram's version of this resulted in some interesting analysis: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-ana...

I think the main value in the "quantified self" area is (1) when there's something wrong and you're working to fix it (food allergies, mood disorders), and (2) insights gained by comparing data from millions of users.

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