February 2, 2026
Weigh Wars: Pipes vs Packages
Valanza – my Unix way for weight tracking and anlysis
Nerds track weight with 'pipes'—then R vs Minimalism breaks loose
TLDR: An experimental weight tracker called Valanza strings together tiny command-line tools to chart your weight. The comments erupted over whether adding R makes it “not simple,” with some pushing the classic Hacker’s Diet math and others defending the DIY vibe—turning simplicity into the main battleground.
Valanza is a DIY weight tracker built the old-school Unix way—tiny tools chained together like Lego—but the real story is the comment war. One camp cheered the pure, simple vibes: “small programs through pipes” had folks swooning for retro elegance. Another camp fired back: does “simple” still count if you need R (a statistics language) and a stack of add-ons? That sparked a mini food fight over what “minimal” really means.
The most heated take? A call to skip the fancy pieces and crib from the classic Hacker’s Diet using easy smoothing math. Translation: fewer downloads, more step-on-scale-and-go. A helpful voice swooped in saying you can tweak the R script to avoid extra packages—think “use what comes in the box.” Meanwhile, a hipster cameo dropped: someone did this in the rc shell on Plan 9 (a research OS), prompting a chorus of “ok, nerd king.”
And then the punchline: a commenter revealed “valanza” means “scale” in Southern Italian—chef’s kiss naming. So the vibe is equal parts nostalgia, purity police, and weight-loss math. Whether you love terminals or just want a chart, this thread turned into a weigh-in—literally—on what counts as simple, and who gets to decide.
Key Points
- •Valanza is an experimental Unix-style weight tracking tool composed of small programs connected by pipes.
- •It requires bash, R, awk, gnuplot, and optionally the rc shell; R packages dplyr, tidyr, and zoo must be installed.
- •Usage is via ./valanza.sh or ./valanza.rc with a weight data file (e.g., weight.txt).
- •Pipeline components include interpolate_lin.R (gap filling), mov_avg.awk (moving average), and lp1.awk (first-order low-pass filter), with gnuplot for visualization.
- •Data flows through named pipes and uses process substitution to run parallel filters before recombining outputs with paste; the project is MIT-licensed.