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Comment by basdp | Hacker News Reader

What the actual fuck... You can automate or collect data about anything, but some things are going just too far. From experience I know that the forecasting and predictions you can do with this kind of data is very, very limited. The time and costs you need go through are way too high. I sincerely question why anyone would use this, aside from the hobbying and gadget-ness of this.

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You got kids? Because you're factually wrong. When we had a kid, we used a mobile app, and it was _fantastic_, especially since it synched between my wife's phone and mine.

My turn to take care of the baby, while she gets badly needed sleep? I can easily check when the kid ate last, when she last had a wet or dirty diaper, without needing to check on the wife - and that kind of information is very useful when she's crying, and you're trying to find out which one of a dozen things is the problem.

It's also very helpful at doctor visits - you can quickly pull up information on how often your kid pees and has a dirty diaper, how much she's drinking throughout the day, and if you have a scale, you can record information.

[3 kids, youngest a toddler]

A dozen things? Temperature, hunger, 'nappy', burps ... there's nothing else a baby ordinarily cares about.

Also it's not formulaic, a key thing IMO that those caring for infants need to realise is that babies cry. They don't decide to cry, they sometimes just cry.

Ever have a day when you feel sad/happy/emotional/excited/whatever and you don't know why? Babies do too, and what they do is cry, because they can't write posts on social media yet.

"They cry all the time, I'm doing something wrong", are they failing to prosper (put on weight after the initial dip), then it's highly unlikely the crying has anything to do with you at all.

Stick your finger in the nappy elastic to see if they've dumped, you now know if they're too hot/cold too; give them a hug and a chat, offer them milk.

IMO you need to learn to read your baby rather than treat like a car with a service schedule.

"Normally they wake at 3:13+/-12, not 3:50; and their median time to evacuation is 80mins, not 115; ..." you're going to stress yourself out. Babies are not machines.

Knowing something and using that to schedule something are different. The primary value here is knowing what happened.

That sounds useful. I didn't think of using an app but post it notes did do the trick!

Haha, a year ago I probably would have agreed that this seems a bit ridiculous. But after months of reading about caring for newborns and raising children, it became abundantly clear to me that data like this can be useful.

After about a month of collecting data, we have a pretty good handle on baby's "schedule" and can take a quick look at our dashboard to help determine why he might be crying his little face off. After many weeks of frustrating struggle with this, I can't even put a price on the value of the data we now have. YMMV (:

Helping out with another person's baby, I found that it was useful to see things like "is the baby behind on their usual food intake?" or "has the baby been asleep for a long time?" Tracking (via any means) was helpful to find such information, as you say.

This actually makes me think the app needs some sort of quick statistical data in the dashboard, or somewhere, for non-regular caregivers (e.g. a friend/new babysitter). My wife and I have spent so much time with the data that we "just know" the timing of things and the "last X (feeding, sleep, etc.)" is enough for us. But that wouldn't necessarily suffice for others.

Thanks for the insight!

It seems to me a lot of time and effort went into this. If it serves OP's needs then it has served it's purpose even if they are the only one to ever use it (which I doubt).

As a side note, this is not Reddit, there is no need for that kind of language on this site.

As with many things, the majority of optimization is necessitated by the minority of cases.

I was lucky and had an easy enough time with my son to not need an app, but not everybody is. Medical or other complications can increase the value of a solution like this.

My coworker's pediatrician disagrees; she's been logging everything on his insistence.

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