Comment by sebular | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebular | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard of the Vessyl before, but it sure looks like something that'll be gathering dust in people's cupboards.

It might be a valiant engineering effort, but the concept strikes me as a poor way to digitally tap into peoples' diet information.

The real solution is ultimately going to be at the point of purchase. Sales already happen in the digital space, so that's the logical point to start building a database of food intake. If you had a digital grocery bill, that information could be used by your digital fridge (or just a simple phone app) to track what's been purchased and consumed by each member of the family.

Taking that idea a step further, the marketing / monetization of being able to sell that usage data back to advertisers, or creating a "diet API" that knows peoples' habits after they leave the grocery store would be a gold mine. In that light, the Vessyl just seems insanely shortsighted. It's a shame that Colbert had to be the one to tell them.

Honestly, who uses the same cup every time they pour a drink?

This is pretty much what we're trying to do with Eat This Much (http://www.eatthismuch.com/). For the people that follow our meal plans, we're basically a lead gen for every single thing that person eats, and we're working on making it easier to integrate the generated meal plans with your existing habits. Combine this with automated grocery delivery, and we already know all of the foods in your fridge so you don't even need a smart fridge (though it would still help for eating things outside of the plans and tracking them).

Honestly, who uses the same cup every time they pour a drink?

Well, I do. I buy 2-liter bottles of soda because they're cheap, but they're unwieldy for consumption. At work I just have one cup, so that's what I use. I feel like lots of people already have a personal coffee mug or something. And more people would if they bought one of these.

Grocery stores already know what you purchase through tracking with the the club/value cards they promote. The information is sold to marketers, etc. and even in some cases used by the police and insurance companies.

I would love love love for someone to make a loyalty card with an API. It would be a win for grocery stores since they would have more accurate data and more users, who would actually be more loyal if they're able to get real personal value out of shopping at a particular store. Fine detail on what I'm buying, and when. I could see a slew of services for brick-and-mortar that can compete with some of the data that Amazon keeps to itself.

I've been using a 1 liter nalgene for about 8 years now for almost all my drinking. Which is only water anyway. I'd love for an automated way to track the water consumption instead of measuring by hand.

Use a scale. 1 liter == 1 kg.

> who uses the same cup every time they pour a drink?

That is my biggest (but not only) issue with this. And if both my wife and I have one, that each syncs to our own phone, now we need to keep up with which cup is whose? Too complicated.

[Edit: I was not being sarcastic. Having two identical cups in the same house would make it difficult to make sure we are using the right cup each time. We already run into that problem occasionally with our Up bands.]

It seems like it would be pretty easy to mark them.

Where? And with what (that doesn't look stupid or come off in the dishwasher)?

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