ejain

I've been wearing a Fitbit One for almost two years now. I'm not too interested in the motivational aspect, but use the data to back up health-related decisions.

For example, I was able to use the data to confirm that getting exercise late in the evening doesn't affect my sleep (so no need to change my gym routine).

I ended up building an entire service to support these kinds of analyses (zenobase.com), hoping to find enough people who care more about data than badges :-)

You can minute-resolution step counts through their Web API.

If you're interested in raw accelerometer data, why not just write an app that uses the accelerometer in your phone?

I can't help but notice that the display of <ul> items is broken (current Firefix, 14pt min font size)...

This needs more data layers! Heart rate, movement, blood sugar, EEG etc :-)

I'm guessing that with $1.2M in funding, the valuation is more likely to be something like $12M? So a $3M "aquihire" might not be such a good deal...

Regarding the "undesirable drunk people", aren't there other laws (e.g. zoning laws) that deal with that?

There's a difference between pivoting to a random new exciting idea when the previous idea doesn't pan out, and pivoting e.g. when you discover that your product happens to have a feature that a significant number of people are willing to pay for.

I'd follow more companies on Facebook (or Twitter) if most of what they posted where product updates etc, not inspirational messages and fitness tips.

All companies strive for profits, but some take a more short term view than others.

Elasticsearch isn't really schemaless, but you can have it guess and extend the schema as fields are encountered (or you can have it treat specific field as blobs of unindexed json).

Socrata and Statwing are both very useful services, but without some domain knowledge and a good understanding of how the data was collected, even the best tools won't get you valid insights.

It seems near impossible to create a service in this space that is both general purpose and also usable enough to get the kind of adoption that a company the size of Apple needs to justify its involvement.

So I'm really eager to see what Apple has come up with, and how it's going to be different from Microsoft HealthVault, Google Health, RunKeeper's HealthGraph, and Samsung's SAMI.

Hyped, yes. Fluff, no.

This looks like a good resource. But be sure to understand all the implicit assumptions in each data set before announcing your amazing discoveries!

To keep your jaw and teeth in shape, use chewing gum?

There are lots of good reasons for moving your headquarters from the Caribbean to Switzerland, but "strong privacy laws" and "legendary neutrality" are not among them.

If you really wanted to reduce speeding, you'd just charge a small administrative fee, and suspend driving licenses after a few infractions.

The bigger the importance of revenues from tickets, the lower the incentive to enforce speeding too well, because then too few people would speed...

I'm using LAB.js, which lets me declare dependencies between scripts, and then handles sequential or parallel retrieval and execution. Not sure how I could easily replace this as suggested in the article, unless I merge all js into one big file?

You don't really need a gadget to meditate, any more than you need an app to go running. But it's nice to be able to keep track of your progress, and maybe even use the data to see how variables like sleep or exercise affect your ability to stay focused and relaxed.

I wrote a small app to record short meditation sessions using a NeuroSky MindWave [https://github.com/zenobase/zenobase-mindlog]. But I stopped using it because getting this device positioned correctly was a pain...

I thought Perl is what is holding the turtles together?

Net Neutrality does not require ISPs to charge the same price regardless of how much bandwidth a customer is using, and it does not prohibit ISPs from having rates on a sliding scale in order to penalize heavy users (as some water utilities do).

Water utilities btw have "pipe neutrality", i.e. it's none of their business what you do with the water you are paying for, and they certainly can't shake down dishwasher manufacturers for money to compensate them for the water that's being used by their customer's dishwashers :-)

> the ability for users who need it to pay a premium for fast or reliable service, a la first class mail

Net Neutrality does not prohibit an ISP from charging their customers more for a faster or more reliable Internet connection; it simply prohibits the ISP from accepting money from Dominos to speed up access to their website (or slow down or even block access to Pizza Hut's website).

I blame the current state of Google Maps on micro-optimization, and overconfidence in the ability to predict what you want.

The gradual disappearance of the terrain mode is ironic, given how their ads always seem to show happy young people on outdoor adventures...

Nice, but as they say, actions speak louder than words.

The China Daily? Is that the same paper that quoted the Onion when they ran an article about Kim Jong Eun being the "Sexiest Man Alive"?

Neat! Jackson also has a tree data model that can be used like so:

    user.path("them").path("public_keys").path("primary").path("bundle").textValue(); // null if any node is missing

I'd use it, if only I could get them to index my site...

Where are you located? If possible, pick a lawyer who is used to working with tech startups. Such lawyers will sometimes do free "office hours", which is a good opportunity for you to "interview" the lawyer.

Brain 1.0