Documentation of aggregation methods would be nice

[dreev]

@tomjen, ping me for the IFTTT preview link. It seems to be working beautifully for the other people who are helping us beta test it. (And please publish any recipes you create with it. They won't show up publicly till we launch the channel but they'll help other beta testers.)

As for jolly aggregation, we made that for @jolly since he's been so good to us that we'll pretty much do anything he says, but I was never sure it was a good idea. It seems like a shame to only visualize such a pale shadow of the actual data being collected. I guess triangular beeminding also means you're visualizing something quite different from the underlying data, though technically no information is actually lost in that case, since the function is invertible.

Definitely let us know if you try jolly beeminding. But I agree with @chipmanaged that autoratchet is probably a better way to accomplish this.

[drtall]

has this ever been used for any goal ever?

Absolutely! I've found it very useful: https://www.beeminder.com/drtall/goals/median

[jolly]

I like my secret Jolly function.... Although I have no idea of anyone other than me uses it....

[bigmusic]

I have some ideas planned for the jolly data type now that I know what it is.

[insti]

Not to devalue Jolly's contribution, but maybe you could add an alias to it called 'binary' which may be more indicative of what it does.

[dreev]

Absolutely! I've found it very useful

I can't tell if you're serious!

maybe you could add an alias to it called 'binary'

Good call. Done.

[dreev]

I just added another aggday setting: count. It just counts the number of datapoints each day, ignoring their actual values. I'm beeminding Mark Forster's productivity system called Final Version and wasn't sure if I should beemind chains gotten through or total individual tasks. I decided that counting total tasks, with a datapoint for each chain giving the number of tasks in that chain, was the best of both worlds. Then if I change my mind later I can set aggday=count and beemind number of chains instead.

I have no idea if I'll ever use that but since I came up with a reason to want it in theory I went ahead and added it!

[philip]

I moved 5 posts to an existing topic: Complementary Tools: Mark Forster's Final Version(s)

[insti]

I'd like to request a new aggday setting: 'ceiling' which I guess would be:

lambda x: ceil(x) # round the number up to the next integer.

I would use this on a goal for which the usual values are between 0 and 1 and I currently use 'binary' . But that does not allow me to report a zero value.

[drtall]

lambda x: ceil(x) # round the number up to the next integer.

I think x is the list of data points, so I don't know what it means to take the ceiling of a list.

If all you want is binary but where 0 elements don't count, I think that is

lambda x: 1 if any(x) else 0

[adamwolf]

+1. I definitely would use "1 if any non-zero datapoints." I would replace all my binary goals with it.

[philip]

I've just realised that 'binary' checks for the presence of a datapoint, not for the presence of a non-zero datapoint.

Which interestingly means that it's not binary at all: the aggday code will only ever return '1' because it'll only be called in contexts where datapoints exist. So maybe it should be renamed to 'unary', with 'binary' rewritten as something like @drtall's proposal, or

'binary' : lambda x : 0 if ( np.sum(x) == 0 ) else 1

---

updated to reflect things that I'd skipped over in my suprise and haste.
updated again to retract the lousy code I wrote
and yet again to replace and redact my lousy code for overall coherence of the thread (:

[drtall]

or @drtall's proposal of

Just FYI these two are not equivalent. Yours will return 0 if the data consists of [1, -1] whereas mine will return 1.

[philip]

You're absolutely right. Don't let me write code today.

[philip]

Quick straw poll: is anybody currently relying on the 'jolly' (unary) behaviour currently exhibited by 'binary'?

[adamwolf]

Not me.

[insti]

yes. (Apart from the zero handing, which I'd prefer to work differently.)

[adamwolf]

Ha! I thought he was asking "who likes binary with how zero works today"?

I use binary on fiveish goals, and if non-zero datapoints didn't count, they'd work better.

Adam Wolf

[insti]

I thought he was asking "who likes binary with how zero works today"?

oh. In which case, no.

Now I'm just confused.

[philip]

I ought to leave the straw polls to @dreev, apparently.

Other than the eponymous @jolly, seems as though everyone would welcome a redefinition of 'binary' to count the existence of any non-zero datapoint as aggregating to '1', and '0' if there are no datapoints or all datapoints are themselves zero.

All of which may have added to the confusion, of course. Sounds like a quick and easy #UVI.