What will I look like?

http://whatwillilooklike.com/

by omnibrain • 12 years ago

76 86 12 years ago

whatwillilooklike.com

johnchristopher• 12 years ago

It would be really nice to add the option to select metric units.

Aardwolf2• 12 years ago

Yes please!

slashink• 12 years ago

Yes, first thing i thought about. I sadly never learn to have a simple conversion baseline between these two, even if i travel a lot between the different continents.

sergiosgc• 12 years ago

One pound is half a kilogram, three feet is a meter[1], one inch is the size of my thumb. No, they're not precise, but it's easy enough to memorize, close enough to understand a text. (I also use one mile=2km but I have the notion the error on that one is huge, although I never remember if it is actually 1.8km or 1.6km)

For Fahrenheit, I never managed to memorize a conversion rule. Weatherwise 0 is friggin' cold, 100 is friggin' hot seems to be enough for daily consumption.

[1] Actually, my mnemonic is that I measure 6ft (1.82m), but I don't think my mnemonic is useful for anyone else.

EToS• 12 years ago

I think this is a great way to gain motivation, especially when your seeing slow weight loss running 30+ kilometers a week etc..

rbinv• 12 years ago

This is pretty cool. Maybe add the total pounds lost for each entry? Also, it's not clear that "weight range" refers to "before", not after.

smartera• 12 years ago

Agreed, and filter by pounds lost.. also calculated BMI before and after would be great!

rikkus• 12 years ago

Could do with some explanation, e.g.:

Set the sliders to a range around your own height and weight. You will be shown pictures of people who are within the height range, and have (at least at one time) had a weight within the weight range.

gambiting6• 12 years ago

Could we please change that to metric units? I have absolutely no idea what my weight and height are in feet and pounds.

collyw6• 12 years ago

Google isn't so difficult to use.

gambiting6• 12 years ago

Using SI units also isn't.

welly• 12 years ago

Neither are metric units.

imgabe3• 12 years ago

Really? You have no idea how to perform simple multiplication or division? How do you manage to function in the world?

collyw6• 12 years ago

How did I mange 4 down votes for suggesting google, yet you got none?

gambiting6• 12 years ago

I can, I just don't care enough to know the ratio between kilograms and pounds, and metres and feet - both pounds and feet are so exotic in my country you only hear about them on the TV sometimes so I do not bother my head with those units.

omnibrain• 12 years ago

I "found" this on reddit and think it's pretty neat. The creator spoke up in that thread and I try to point him to this thread so he can see the suggestions.

Octplane• 12 years ago

Seriously, IMPERIAL UNITS ?

xyproto• 12 years ago

Why these local banana-state measurements instead of international standards?

krzrak• 12 years ago

You know, that in the civilized world we use meters and kilograms? ;)

hoektoe• 12 years ago

Thank You

edent• 12 years ago

Actually, we prefer "metre" :-)

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/metre

nailer• 12 years ago

And civilised.

onion2k• 12 years ago

At least the US is consistent. In the UK we use a weird mix of different things - short distances are metric (centimetres, metres), long distances are imperial (miles). Temperatures are in both depending largely on the age of the person talking. Vehicle speed is entirely in imperial (mph). Area is in metric for small things (wallpaper is meters^2), imperial for big things (fields are in acres). And so on.

quarterto• 12 years ago

I've never heard anyone use Fahrenheit in the UK.

ulfw• 12 years ago

At least the UK converted to the world standard. Of course these things take time. Of course older people (who have been used to the imperial standard for decades) will have a harder time converting. That's normal. But the UK did it/tries. The US doesn't even bother. Their attempt back in the 70s/80s was half-hearted at best. And then they just gave up.

rprospero• 12 years ago

You forgot measuring weight in stone. I always mess up that conversion.

kosinus• 12 years ago

The UK is only a small part of said civilized world. ;)

tzs• 12 years ago

Temperatures are in both depending largely on the age of the person talking

The biggest argument for metric for length and mass is the uniform way of making larger and smaller units. If you need to cover 1875 square centimeters with something that is priced by the square meter, the conversion is going to be a multiplication or division by a power of 10. Figuring out how many square yards you need to buy to cover 1875 square inches is much more annoying.

There is no such argument for temperature. For both C and F, we use a decimal system to get units smaller or larger than a degree. The only advantage C has is that a difference of 1 degree C = 1 Kelvin, so converting between C and K just requires addition or subtraction of an ugly number (273.15). Converting between F and either C or K requires both a multiplication or division (by 1.8) and an addition or subtraction.

F, on the other hand, has the advantage of a smaller degree (1 degree C = 1.8 degree F), giving us a finer scale when we are sticking to integers.

The F scale and choice of reference points aligns it very nicely with the weather. 0 F to 100 F is pretty much the range that a world traveller will encounter as they visit various major cities. In C, that's -18 C to 38 C.

The most sensible system would be to use metric for length and mass, F for temperature when you don't need your 0 point set to absolute 0, and a Kelvin like scale where 1 K = 1 degree F instead of 1 degree C when you do need the 0 point to be absolute 0.

shin_lao2• 12 years ago

I came here to say the same thing. It might sound like nitpicking, but the site is unusable as is for us, civilized people. :-)

jalanb2• 12 years ago

Except for the civilized ones with search engines

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=77+kg+in+pounds

:-)

nsetu• 12 years ago

true that.. :)

toolslive• 12 years ago

A proper English gentleman utters his weight in stone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_%28unit%29

(just kidding, I'm Belgian and only know SI)

virmundi• 12 years ago

Once I started to play around with the sliders, I completely lost the ability to use the browser's back button. I had to retype news.ycombinator.com to get back to post this comment.

aaronem• 12 years ago

For those who apparently never bothered learning any system but SI, here's some help:

2.2 pounds to the kilogram; 0.454 kilograms to the pound.

3.28 feet to the meter; 0.304 meters to the foot.

You are reading this on a machine powerful enough to handle unit conversions. Do them, and find something substantive to say.

thisjepisje• 12 years ago

Makes perfect sense, I'm gonna learn the imperial system right away!

jackvalentine3• 12 years ago

For those who apparently never bothered learning any system but imperial, here's some help:

1 vershok = 1 3⁄4 inches

1 arshin = 2 1⁄3 feet

1 funt = 0.903 lb

jackvalentine3• 12 years ago

Came here and noticed that ~70% of the comments were about, or replies to comments about, the imperial measurements.

Just goes to show how you can so quickly alienate your audience and derail any conversation if you don't localise the product (or in this case, de-localise).

rplnt2• 12 years ago

What it shows is that most of the US population is sleeping right now. Those comments would most likely be down-voted.

koyote• 12 years ago

Why would it be downvoted?

I think this is akin to posting a link to a page in a language that is not English. Surely there would be many comments reflecting the users' annoyance of having to use Google translate to read the page; no matter 'who' is sleeping or awake.

That being said, a single upvoted comment on the matter should be enough to make the OP aware.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

I'm US, and voted the complaints up because I found them both funny and useful - pointing out a flaw that makes it tougher to use for many people.

jackvalentine3• 12 years ago

I don't think that your point and my point are mutually exclusive.

collyw6• 12 years ago

We are on a site full of pedantic programmers.

laichzeit0• 12 years ago

This looks exclusively focused on fat people losing weight? I was kinda hoping to see what I would look like if I put on another 5kgs of lean muscle and reduced body fat by another 2%.

Xcelerate2• 12 years ago

Haha yes, that would be kind of interesting. I've been kind of thin/ectomorphic my whole life and have been trying to put on some more muscle lately.

yincrash• 12 years ago

There are some that are examples of weight gain as well

rectangletangle• 12 years ago

Wow, that's really amusing to mess around with. However their method for sourcing the data isn't quite perfect. Messing with the height option to get the tallest few women returns a few men (or possibly very manly women?). Regardless, it's more than good enough to be useful.

Xcelerate2• 12 years ago

A question for the site author: I'm working on an idea that involves user uploaded photos of themselves; however, I'm wondering how you get an initial "batch" of photos. Clearly, I'm not going to use anyone's photos without permission, but how do you get roughly 50-100 photos to start with? Just contact people and ask? A stock photo website would be even better if I knew one that I could just pay for portraits of a variety of people.

edgecrafter• 12 years ago

Site states on front page: "the accuracy of the data on this site is limited to the accuracy of the user-submitted data on reddit.com and the automated scraping of that data" - apparently scraped from subreddits r/loseit and r/progresspics

diggan• 12 years ago

This particular site seems to be scraping reddit for images so asking the site creator about using photos not without permission might be slightly off.

cordite• 12 years ago

The history seems to be quite spammed by the sliders and such, made it difficult to come back here to comments about how it made me smile.

serkanh• 12 years ago

Just when i thought i had the perfect idea that nobody thought of as of yet :(.I just started almost identical side project 3 days ago, same idea utilizing sub-reddits and other websites.

Aardwolf2• 12 years ago

Please implement it anyway, but then with SI units! Thanks! :)

ThomPete• 12 years ago

Nice. Feature request. Kilograms

breitling• 12 years ago

Just a personal pet peeve: almost all apps are targeted for weight loss. I really wish apps would start considering people wanting to gain weight.

I started using MyFitnessPal to keep track of calories and although I set my goal as weight gain, it tells me I'm doing great when I'm 500 calories under my target for the day/week.

danesparza• 12 years ago

This SO makes me think of Arrested Development ....

http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121126034756/arrestedde...

imgabe3• 12 years ago

There is no snobbery more obnoxious than metric snobbery. Please get over yourselves.

mproy• 12 years ago

I think it's perfectly reasonable assumption that the majority of this apps users will be in the US and trying to lose weight.

It's fine to want features that aren't there (yet) but it's obnoxious to presume that the developer simply didn't think of them.

webmaven• 12 years ago

Nice project! I found a few in my height/weight range that were very inspirational!

gms7777• 12 years ago

There should probably be a way to flag things as wrongly categorized. Just in a quick glance, I came across a decent amount of wrong gender posts.

mobiuscog• 12 years ago

It would be very useful to add a slider for age range, even if bracketed.

Someone who's middle-aged won't really get much use from seeing someone who is in their early twenties, even if the weight ranges are similar.

What will I look like?

Related Stories