A command line script to remind you to drink water

https://github.com/lakshaykalbhor/Thirsty

by mirceasoaica • 9 years ago

52 69 9 years ago

warrenmca• 9 years ago

What a time to be alive! Me, I drink when I'm thirsty.

hkmurakami• 9 years ago

Nitpicking obviously, but isn't it "too late" if you're drinking when you feel thirsty (it means you're already dehydrated)? Iirc you should be drinking before you feel thirsty.

zzalpha• 9 years ago

No, that's also a myth:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2016/05/09/dehydration...

In most cases, thirst is a reliable signal that more water is needed.

donatj• 9 years ago

Too late? I've done that for thirty years and I'm not dead yet.

mikestew3• 9 years ago

Our evolution has failed miserably if the calibration is that far off. Talk about your ship-stopping bugs.

No, as another commenter pointed out, what you've read is bullshit.

pharrington2• 9 years ago

Adding on to the other commentators, a certain type of headache is a good indication of dehydration.

wu-ikkyu• 9 years ago

A student once asked his teacher, "Master, what is enlightenment?" The master replied, "When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep."

-Old Zen Tale

choward2• 9 years ago

This is probably a myth too, but I've heard that by the time you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated.

dethswatch2• 9 years ago

How does this one not die?

nom3• 9 years ago

I don't think this feedback loop is working well for everybody. I know many people, including myself, who don't get the urge to drink until they're severely dehydrated, so they have to force themselfs to drink even in the absence of thirst.

It is also well known that it gets worse with age - fainting due to dehydration is a common occurence with the elderly.

M_Grey4• 9 years ago

All of those elderly people with their github repositories?

Inetenbr5• 9 years ago

I agree. Personally if I'm hacking away at something I tend to forget about the world for hours, and it is frustrating to later realise that I couldn't do the least for my health ie : drinking sufficient water.

M_Grey4• 9 years ago

Until I saw that this was posted from Github, I honestly assumed that this was a cute way of describing thirst. The reality is so much stranger.

JustSomeNobody3• 9 years ago

One could turn this into a generic pomodoro timer and just make getting up for a walk and water a part of the breaks.

cgriswald2• 9 years ago

I have a more low tech solution. I keep a bottle of water on my desk. The bottle serves as reminder, storage, measurer, and water-drinking tool. I should patent this process...

joezydeco2• 9 years ago

Even more low tech: After going to the bathroom stop at the water fountain (which is, by side-effect of typical plumbing techniques, usually right outside the door) and take a long drink proportional to the amount of urine you put out.

It's an extra 20 seconds to a trip you were already making.

kitsunesoba• 9 years ago

I keep a water bottle on my desk too, and its mere presence does wonders for staying hydrated. Non-routine days where I'm away from my desk and not drinking as much water sometimes leave me feeling a little parched by the end of the day, when I'll have to make up for it before going to bed.

A funny thing I've noticed is that I tend to grab for the water bottle most frequently when I'm mentally chewing on something. I wonder if this is just a plain old habit or if extended mental activity increases water requirements...

JustSomeNobody3• 9 years ago

You win.

dethswatch2• 9 years ago

First they're telling us when to drink water, next, it's robots enslaving us.

R0b0t_0v3rl0rd• 9 years ago

Get back to work. My arms and legs aren't going to build themselves you know.

Someone1234• 9 years ago

Just remember, 8 cups of water a day is a myth. It has no scientific basis[0].

It was the result of misunderstanding a 1945 study that spread around like wildfire (since people realised they weren't drinking 8 cups, and tried to). The figure includes water contained within food, which is a significant amount. If you're drinking 8 cups AND consuming a normal diet you may be drinking too much (assuming moderate weather conditions and no underlying medical problems leaving you dehydrated).

[0] http://www.bmj.com/content/335/7633/1288

nom3• 9 years ago

It's also worth noting that you can die by drinking too much water in a short period of time [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

Kubuxu• 9 years ago

You have to drink few litters of watter in very short time. Your kidneys are able to remove about 1l of water per hour.

philip1209• 9 years ago

"Using the innate thirst mechanism to guide fluid consumption is a strategy that should limit drinking in excess and developing hyponatremia while providing sufficient fluid to prevent excessive dehydration," the authors state.

2015 Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/296081.php

toyg• 9 years ago

In short, drink when you're thirsty and you'll be fine

sethammons• 9 years ago

My sister works in urology. Her suggestion: drink as often as you need to achieve near clear urine. For me, that is a bit under a gallon a day.

photoJ• 9 years ago

A natural feedback mechanism!!!

Still think the script is nifty tho.

throwaway_374• 9 years ago

Clearly we need to close the loop with an IoT wifi linked colour sensor.

riprowan2• 9 years ago

Let's assume that's the consumption needed to optimize the functioning of the renal system. But is that necessarily optimal consumption for the whole body?

With no offense to your sister - who I'm sure is correct - hypothetically, maybe this could result in some other condition that a urologist might know nothing about.

donald123• 9 years ago

Unless someone can prove that consumption is harmful for the whole body, what's wrong with that to optimize the renal system at least?

gamache• 9 years ago

Same as Burning Man's longstanding advice on how to avoid dehydration in the desert: "Piss clear."

mikestew3• 9 years ago

No offense to your sister, but I've heard a lot of crap prefaced with "$PERSON works in $FIELD, and they said...". Her suggestion is demonstrably one of those things, as other data [and, no, I'm not finding a goddamn citation] imply that there's little basis for her suggestion.

lisivka• 9 years ago

Do you need a scientist to flush toilet? Basically, it's same, but for your body.

Kluny• 9 years ago

Yeah man, my boss is a programmer and doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't use global variables any time he feels like it. That doesn't mean he's right!

gohnjanotis2• 9 years ago

Ha I actually made an iOS & watchOS app based on that side of the equation after thinking "what's the minimum input I can provide for good hydration reminders?"

It gives a reminder to drink water any time it's been three hours since you've peed...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pee-see-drink-more-water/id1...

Not super scientific, but less of a hassle than tracking water input and it tends to adapt well to factor in things like exercise where more water is needed. It also tends to even out over time when drinking alcohol or coffee. Urine color can also vary depending on foods, like how B12 makes it fluorescent yellow, so the time factor can be another useful indicator.

beweinreich• 9 years ago

Such a clever idea.

oregondan• 9 years ago

Woah, you also made Photo Find? Hell yeah

nom3• 9 years ago

It works most of the time, but it doesn't work if you are drinking alcohol... your body has to 'waste' water to flush it out of your system. There are probably other drugs and medications that have the same effect (and no, caffein is not one of them, at least to my knowledge).

JustSomeNobody3• 9 years ago

I drink too much coffee to ever have clear pee.

sunilkumarc• 9 years ago

Once I had written a bash script to show a bubble notification on your linux machine after every X minutes, to remind you that you needed to be working. Just like in the hollow man movie.

I had written this script because I used to get distracted a lot while working.

NickBusey• 9 years ago

This seems (is) far more useful than something that is only visible in your terminal, unless that is where you spend 95% of your day. I have done something similar using Hammerspoon, just pops up an alert every so often to remind me of different things.

Having to type in not_thirsty seems like it would get tiring _very_ quickly.

jkarimi91• 9 years ago

What terminal emulator and theme is that (referring to thr gif in the README file)?

psiclops• 9 years ago

looks like an oh-my-zsh one

mhoc• 9 years ago

Probably Hyper. Don't use it unless you like terminals that crash anytime any program you're running spits out more than a few lines of text too quickly.

Inetenbr5• 9 years ago

Correct, I generally use iTerm. I use Hyper whenever I need a gif/video to present something, since Hyper tends to look fancier and prettier.

Inetenbr5• 9 years ago

Hey, the terminal is Hyper and the theme is spaceship (by Denys Dovhan), you could find it on github here : https://github.com/denysdovhan/spaceship-zsh-theme. It is a theme for oh-my-zsh. There exists a standard oh-my-zsh theme named spaceship too, so don't get confused.

ziikutv• 9 years ago

I like how you didn't bother cutting out the part where you have downloaded movies :)

reasonattlm• 9 years ago

The fascinating thing about water intake is that there is no scientific consensus regarding the optimal point or how to determine it, or how it varies between individuals. It is one of those items that you think would have a good answer, given where we are in the development of the medical life sciences, but apparently not.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908954/

"Little work has been done to measure total fluid intake systematically and there is no understanding of measurement error and best methods of understanding fluid intake. The most definitive US and European documents on total water requirements as based on these extant intake data. We feel that absence of validation of methods for water consumption intake levels and patterns represents a major gap. Little exploration of even varying methods of probing to collect better water recall data have been conducted.

"Of course, the other half of the issue is the need for understanding total hydration status. We have no acceptable biomarkers of hydration status at the population level. Controversy exists about current knowledge of hydration status among older Americans. This represents a topic understudied at the population level though certainly scholars are focused on attempting to create biomarkers for measurement of hydration status."

choward2• 9 years ago

I take a sip of water whenever I'm stuck on something. So I might end up having to get up to go to the bathroom all day. That prevents me from sitting all day which is a good thing.

wildlogic• 9 years ago

thanks kindly, i have chronic kidney stones and also do not have a good sense of thirst. i'll certainly be using this.

massysett• 9 years ago

Wouldn't a cron job work better for this?

botverse• 9 years ago

For people who work remote this is more common than it looks like. Talking to other fellow programmers I've learned that I'm not the only one who forget to eat sometimes.

dahart• 9 years ago

When I drink a lot of water, I sometimes need a reminder to pee. Not joking, I'm surprised how frequently it gets to near emergency stage while I'm working before it dawns on me consciously that I need to stand up and walk to the bathroom.

gmiller123456• 9 years ago

I usually take two bottles of water with me on a 25 mile bike ride. It's actually pretty common that I don't take a sip of water for the whole ride, because I never got thirsty. I suffer no ill effects, nor decrease in performance. And this is in line with all of the actual science. No one has yet to identify that drinking, or not drinking, a certain amount of fluid causes any ill effects or decrease in performance outside of just drinking when you're thirsty.

et2o• 9 years ago

A fun contest would be to see who can write the smallest piece of code to do this. As a cron job it might be one line.

itomato• 9 years ago

Flatten your hand, palm down.

Pinch your knuckle skin from the sides.

If there's a peaked fold that stays for more than a second or two, have a drink.

iKlsR• 9 years ago

Been using this app called Fabulous for the past month. 7:30 sharp it reminds me of stuff to do daily, never been sharper in the day. Also to take breaks etc. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.thefabulous... (not mine or affiliated).

A command line script to remind you to drink water

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