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Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

261 points david927 | 3 comments | 23 Feb 25 23:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.99s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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heltale ◴[24 Feb 25 11:01 UTC] No.43158146[source]▶
I've recently been prototyping a mobile application to track your food nutrition. The key feature lies in auto-detecting the food based on a given image, and breaking it down into it's ingredients and then into it's macros.

Existing apps such as MyFitnessPal and HealthifyMe fall into two ends of the spectrum where you either need to add ingredients one by one, or your food is logged with a standard macro count where you cannot change the ingredients used.

Weit ideally provides a seamless experience in taking a picture to retrieving ingredients to retrieving macros per ingredient. Once that's sorted, food tracking should be granular enough to build intelligence around it to improve one's diet based on their requirement.

Honestly, I used to constantly struggle with the realisation that none of my ideas are unique and whenever I see someone having built something similar, I feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm getting better at dealing with it now though.

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Bnjoroge ◴[24 Feb 25 15:49 UTC] No.43160897[source]▶
Not sure if you are already familiar but I use Cal AI and think it does a pretty decent job. How granular do you track the macros? hard to figure out from a picture if I used some cheese or how much oil.
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asdev ◴[24 Feb 25 17:07 UTC] No.43161978[source]▶
CalAI is a scam. It's highly inaccurate, there's no way to determine calories from a picture for a multitude of reasons
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Bnjoroge ◴[24 Feb 25 18:40 UTC] No.43163163[source]▶
works fine for my use case and found it alot better than myFitnessPal, ymmv and yeah of course it's impossible to determine with certainty but it gets you 80/90% of the way there.
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1. asdev ◴[24 Feb 25 18:42 UTC] No.43163194[source]▶
if you cooked a meal with a ton of butter or oil, it would not be able to detect the quantity. it could possibly undercount by hundreds of calories, making it useless. if you're not serious about the counting then it could be fine
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2. Bnjoroge ◴[24 Feb 25 20:39 UTC] No.43164675[source]▶
that's what I mentioned above, read again
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3. nake89 ◴[25 Feb 25 11:37 UTC] No.43170659[source]▶
Not to be pedantic. But being able to be 100s of calories off per meal is not 80-90% there.

I'd be surprised if it came close to the accurate amount of calories even 50% of the time. If by there you are talking about accuracy.

How would it know how many calories my curry has from a photo? It cannot. It could be full of oil or have none.

How can it know how big the bowl of food is? It cannot.

It cannot know the actual fiber content of any baked good just by looking at it.

The promotional photo gives 7/10 nutritional score of pancakes with syrup? Why? because it has a couple of blueberries sprinkled on top? I'm sorry, but this does not seem like a useful app.

The promotional text on their site says: "It is consistently 90% accurate when predicting nutritional value of food" They might as well say 100%. They get to cherry pick the food they photo. It would be impossible to be 90% accurate if they actually included similar looking foods with different fat contents. Mash potatoes made with butter, without butter. Mash potatoes in a big bowl vs small bowl.

The site just reeks scam.