frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Ask HN: Ive quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

8•Abh1Works•2d ago
Hey everyone, I am a 20 year old college student who was recently diagnosed with seronegative spondyloarthropathy. Over the last 3 years, Ive tried apps, paper journal, Google Sheets, and notes to track/catalogue my journey. I always ended up quitting within 2-4 weeks and not keeping accurate track.

Is this a common experience or do I just have to be better at tracking? Is there a unique/non habit-building way to track/catalogue/recall?

Im building something for this (part of the reason why I am asking) - and if anyone is open to a longer conversation, Ill gladly pay for you time!

Comments

brudgers•16h ago
Serious questions:

Why do you try to track it?

Do you want to track it?

I don't know anything more about your condition than a few sentences from Google.

So I don't know if tracking would or would not provide useful information for making daily choices that mitigate symptom or if tracking would have substantial on medical treatment outcomes.

And most importantly, I don't know if tracking will or won't benefit your mental well-being. Everybody copes with chronic disease differently...both the physical /medical dimensions and the emotional/psychological ones. good luck.

onlypassingthru•12m ago
> Im building something for this

You've probably answered your own question here. Welcome to the age of bespoke LLM coded apps where almost everyone can build the thing they want.

arionhardison•10m ago
The reason these things did not work for me is because they were things I had to "do" as in remember/initiate so I made Crohn's AI - because its a program that runs and I just have to reply or answer when the AI-GIs contact me.

Intent: https://wiki.crohns.ai/agent/posts/ibd-biologic-therapy-init...

Program: https://crohns.ai/program/71174-eim-joint-pain-flare

Protocol: https://crohns.ai/protocol/71174

This allowed me to essentially set it and forget it until and each program is specific to each condition so its not just a dumb daily alert or something like that.

I can make you a program so you can check it out if you like. No charge or weird shit like that just LMK if it helps.

Normal_gaussian•7m ago
I have an app I built for myself (because I couldn't find anything appropriate) to ask me questions via notifications like rating how I feel, how's my sleep, am I alert, eating well etc. its probablistic both in when it alerts and what it asks and I power a self monitoring dashboard off the back of it.

There were two key insights for me:

- too frequent or predictable and I'll ignore it

- always being reminded about something negative is bad for you

You didn't give a lot of information in your question; so that is my two cents.

coldpie•4m ago
> Is this a common experience or do I just have to be better at tracking?

I don't know anything about your illness, but I have Type 1 Diabetes, which is a pretty high maintenance chronic illness. Many T1Ds put a lot of effort into tracking their daily numbers and routines. For example, see all the settings in this popular third party continuous glucose monitoring app[1]. It does all sorts of tracking and monitoring and giving you feedback. My sister-in-law is also T1D and uses some similar app to manage all this stuff, always putting in all her injections and food intakes and CGM data and using that app to make predictions and judgments. It's very useful for her.

I've tried these a couple times and they just don't work for me. I'll keep up with it for like two days and then skip a few entries and then just stop.

I think part of it is, I just don't find the output from all that input very useful. I've been diabetic for more than 20 years so I'm just kinda good at it and don't get much reward for all that effort. But also my personality is very detail-oriented and my daily routine is pretty stable, so for me personally, I just don't get the value from all the tracking that people with other personalities do.

So I guess for your situation, I would ask what you expect to get out of all this effort. Find a way to make the amount of effort you have to put in match the amount of value you want to get out of it. If it requires a ton of effort to do all this tracking and all you get out of it is a couple of charts that you don't care about, then maybe your particular situation doesn't justify spending that effort. If you do actually get some value out of it, but the effort is still too high, then maybe you can find a way to reduce the amount of tracking effort, even if the actual fidelity of the end results is somewhat lower.

Just some ideas from my parallel perspective. Good luck, chronic illnesses are a never ending adventure.

[1] https://navid200.github.io/xDrip/docs/Settings/MainSettings....

punknight•2m ago
For tracking in general you need a system and a medium. The bullet journal method has worked well for me for many years. The systems and structures within the bullet journal change over time, but you can jump back years, and see what you were thinking at the time. More recently I have been using GTD within the bullet journal framework. I highly suggest reading at least those two methods before building your own system.

Claude: Degraded Performance for Multiple Models

https://status.claude.com/incidents/q7txxvbsftgq
52•matt89•24m ago•27 comments

Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-announces-changes-for-apps-in-the-european-union/
46•newusertoday•30m ago•32 comments

Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

https://philo.gay/linecam/
243•otherayden•4h ago•42 comments

The Amazon Tax

https://seths.blog/2026/08/the-amazon-tax/
404•herbertl•3h ago•288 comments

How I Under-Engineered My Book

https://chriskiehl.com/article/how-i-under-engineered-my-book
44•goostavos•21h ago•11 comments

Fixing a Bricked Framework Laptop

https://quantum5.ca/2026/08/16/fixing-bricked-amd-7040-series-framework-13-laptop-with-20-tools/
178•jp_sc•3h ago•100 comments

Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

https://pixelcluster.dev/VRAM-Overcommit/
403•flaburgan•9h ago•160 comments

Python Polars Cheatsheet (based on our O'Reilly book)

https://opensource.posit.co/resources/cheatsheets/polars/
73•jeroenjanssens•3h ago•12 comments

Launch HN: machine0 (YC S26) – Persistent CPU and GPU VMs from the CLI

https://machine0.io
6•bwm•25m ago•2 comments

Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative

https://cursor.com/changelog/origin-code-hosting
142•tomasreimers•23h ago•89 comments

Teaching my kid to code with a modern MUD

https://tau.dev/2026/08/07/canon
142•andrewjanke•6d ago•46 comments

Composable Tests

https://newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/composable-tests
42•vinipolicena•3h ago•33 comments

Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

https://www.fairphone.com/nl/stories/the-fairphone-gen-6-is-all-about-giving-you-more
225•Vinnl•4h ago•114 comments

Babies born under sugar rationing grew into adults with lower cancer risk

https://theconversation.com/babies-born-under-sugar-rationing-grew-into-adults-with-lower-cancer-...
106•zeristor•2h ago•26 comments

Splitting a Git Commit

https://blog.gnoack.org/post/git-history-split
35•signa11•3d ago•17 comments

Code-native generation of highly programmable 3D assets (2026)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22738
18•baigy•1h ago•19 comments

Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/18/google-buys-crashed-airline-spirits-data-at-auct...
444•pseudolus•6h ago•318 comments

Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/memory-prices-climb-500-percent-in-12-months-up-to...
126•haunter•22h ago•93 comments

Meta Files Patent for Facial Recognition, Automatic Recording of People

https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/08/17/meta-files-patent-for-facial-recognition-automatic-...
170•DeepLogin•4h ago•117 comments

How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots

https://timmarinin.net/2026/bluesky-screenshots/
659•gavide•18h ago•416 comments

Show HN: Shoehorn – Quantize any model down to run on your machine

https://notactuallytreyanastasio.github.io/shoehorn/
17•rhgraysonii•2h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Openleetcode – local LeetCode runner where tests live in the repo

https://github.com/therepanic/openleetcode
5•therepanic•1h ago•1 comments

Rethinking Database Programming

https://acadia.engineering/blog/rethinking-database-programming
177•honungsburk•9h ago•91 comments

California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year

https://grist.org/transportation/californias-new-tire-efficiency-rules-could-save-drivers-1b-a-year/
50•littlexsparkee•13h ago•57 comments

The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2uAsJ5EPAw
45•neom•2h ago•2 comments

Ask HN: Ive quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

9•Abh1Works•2d ago•6 comments

Baking a Model: A Metaphor for LLM Training

https://newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/baking-a-model
26•KentBeck•3d ago•1 comments

Finger: Social network that never died

https://en.andros.dev/blog/54572bc7/finger-the-1971-social-network-that-never-died/
126•andros•9h ago•40 comments

Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

https://fabiensanglard.net/quake_shareware_cd/index.html
456•shdon•18h ago•193 comments

Show HN: Saggar, a Mac terminal that keeps sessions and your attention organized

https://saggar.marginalutility.dev/
42•mcclowes•1d ago•46 comments