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Comment by ntaso | Hacker News Reader

Great idea, especially since many popular cycle tracking apps have a bad rep of sharing data eagerly with Facebook and other entities.

One thing though: I know it's popular in these apps to show the cycle as a "clock face", but if you think about it, this is a weird representation, because of the variations in cycle lengths (of natural cycles not changed by contraceptive hormones). So, if one cycle is 26 days long and the next cycle is going to be 30 days long, the clock face will show an average of 26 days for the next cycle and the handle looks stuck "5 minutes before 12" and every day, the handle doesn't tick one further, but the unit (day) becomes more compressed.

This makes comparing cycles unintuitive and suggests that natural cycles always have the same length. In reality, the majority of women have fluctuations of 8 days or more in their cycle's lengths per year.

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> many popular cycle tracking apps have a bad rep of sharing data eagerly with Facebook and other entities

Many no longer have a choice as to whether to turn their data over to law enforcement who may use it to deny lifesaving medical care. (Florida briefly tried to make reporting periods mandatory for student athletes, too, but that fortunately failed)

In my opinion if you're running something like this in a location where you might be forced to share the data for such malicious purposes with law enforcement then it should be your responsibility to (re-)design the app to provide users with a local-only option for data such that there's then nothing personal on the servers to be requested by law enforcement.

> Florida briefly tried to make reporting periods mandatory for student athletes, too, but that fortunately failed

Your wording is false. Florida is a state and the state never did this. The reporting is already on the form, but is optional. Some private industries wanted to make it mandatory, but the gov has no control over this.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-desantis-florida-sport...

>law enforcement who may use it to deny lifesaving medical care

what? details please

There are no details because it didn't happen and never would.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar : pregnancy is a condition which can be used to deny care, in this case causing the death of the mother.

Cycle makes a ton of sense to me, because it is a cycle.

The issue of lack of exact ability to predict will be an issue no matter what, because the whole point of this app is to help you predict when your next period will start. It doesn't matter if that's displayed as a countdown, or as a calendar, or what.

But perhaps one way to alleviate the "5 minutes to midnight" issue is to have the entire section between, say, 9 and 12 be the potential start of the period, with a less-certain color at the start and a more certain color by 12. For people with a lazier period, the "maybe it will start here" section could be wider, and for people who are super regular it could just clearly show it starting at 12.

For comparing between cycles, it looks like there's a very clear statistics tab with that info.

Yeah - you are right. But I like it that I can see how many days are left - even if it's not 100% correct and I get stuck at "5 minutes before 12" because then I see that it can appear every time. Maybe I'll add an option for another representation... something like the commit graph in github (don't know the name...) That would be nice too.

To compare the cycle length there is an extra statistic section. I want to add a graph there to make the fluctuations more clear.

Options / customizations is often the way the go

Do you mean the contributions-in-the-last-year block at the bottom of your user profile? I can see that being a good alternative to the monthly clockface, because it's broken out by weeks and not months. Color intensity might be useful when you get around to tracking things like mood.

Yes, thats what i meant. I will definetly Play around with that idea..

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