Rationalist horoscopes: A low-hanging utility generator.

The code for this project can be downloaded here

The code is written in PHP, and uses a MySQL database. A cron job is set up to post each day's horoscope to the Tumblr account.

This is completely free software, so you're welcome to do whatever you like with it.

Contributions and feedback are appreciated.

Update:

A git repository for this project is online now at https://github.com/PeerInfinity/Weighted-Horoscopes

Fortune cookies used to be deeply cool, because they made predictions. Then at some point, they turned into Advice Cookies, complete with a back telling you to learn Chinese. At that point, they became far less interesting, including both in and except in bed.

I think in general the phrasing/attitude is off on these horoscopes. "Today is an excellent time to start a new project" is superior to "Start a new project today, and spend two hours on it." Yes, the second is more actionable, but may not be possible or wise, which makes the user feel bad and damages their link to the horoscopes. The first encourages something new, but without imposing a burden and leaving the person with full agency.

I think it would be useful to be able to rate a horoscope "confusing." This wouldn't be a numerical rating that got averaged in, but a separate tally. Then now and then you could look at what is most frequently rated "confusing" and see if it's an issue of jargon or if it's just too vague. They need to be vague enough to apply to a broad scale of people but not so vague that they stop applying.

For example, today I rated yesterday's horoscope as "not useful" because I spent the entire day trying to figure out what it meant, how I could apply it to my life and interactions with the universe and never came up with an answer. (It was "Are you asking the right things?" which I guess isn't the right thing to ask me. I wasn't really sure what 'things' meant in this context, or 'asking' or 'right' but I don't think it's a jargon problem.

Most questions I ask myself are ones that I go on to find answers to. The most recent one was "Hungarian used to have a lot more grammatical tenses than it currently does. I've seen them enough in old texts that I have a vague sense for their meaning but I wonder how they were differentiated from each other." so I googled and bookmarked a few pages and if I read through it a few more times I should be able to communicate effectively the next time I travel to 16th century Hungary, for all the good it'll do me. Most of my questions are of this type: how does x work? what is y like? and then i do research and find out.

One question that puzzled me for weeks was "how can I get the cat to stop pooing on the chair?" The answer ended up being "by putting some paper trash in a corner for the cat to poo on instead." (Keeping the litter box clean was my first hypothesis, but the cat disproved it.)

Don't try to change something unless you've paid attention to it first.

This is a piece of advice I figured out that I need because I have a bad case of free-floating perfectionism-- a standard comes into my consciousness, and I'll immediately try to make things "better" (the things are frequently my state of mind) without any further consideration.

I suspect that the lack of respect implied by this habit contributes to depression and akrasia.

Give moment-by-moment attention to something you usually do.

Is there a chance that something you're doing to make things better is actually making them worse?

In the interests of removing trivial inconveniences, I'm in the process of setting up a system that will forward any comment containing either "Horoscope version:" or "Horoscope:" to my email. Hopefully this will encourage others to horoscope-ify new posts as they're made. The same system will also pick up any posts that have either of those two phrases before the jump.

(This is not actually a good way of drawing my attention to things, since these emails are shunted to a folder that I'll only look at when I'm ready to update the database.)

The following horoscopes have been added. There are now 33 horoscopes in the database, with 1 scored below 0; horoscopes can repeat at most once every 16 days.

• Today, before you ask for someone's opinion, consider the answers that they might give. What kind of answer would you consider useful? If their answer is not the one you want to hear, what will you do?

• When you notice yourself procrastinating about something, figure out the first step, count down from 10, and then do it.

• Today, before making changes to something, make sure you understand why that thing is in the state it's in. Just because something appears wrong or sub-optimal doesn't mean it is.

• Today, give moment-by-moment attention to something you usually do.

• The precedents that you set for yourself may be the most important factor determining your behavior. Make a point of setting a good precedent or repairing a bad one today.

• Today is a good day for sharing. Take a moment to overcome trivial obstacles which may be preventing you from sharing useful endeavors, insights, or wisdom with those around you. Alternatively, offer something useful to a friend, or give something away.

• Project your voice and speak loudly.

• Smile!

• Keep eye contact with everyone you talk to today. If you find your gaze wandering, force yourself to focus on the person you’re talking with.

• It is a good idea to change your passwords once in a while, even if they are secure and well crafted passwords. Take the time today to change your passwords on many accounts both online and on your computer.

• Today is a good day to finish up a project you’ve been working on that is almost done.

   8  16  19  18   5   2  15  33  28   1  25  24  26  31  32  10   4  27  20   7
   3  16  23   6  33  17  22  13  21  12  14  30   9  19  29   8  11   2   5  18
  15  28  25   4  24  26   1  10  32  31  27   3  20   7  16  33  23  19  17   6
  13   8  22  21  12  14  30  29   9  25  15   5   2  11  18  28  26  24  32   4
  27   1  20  10   3  31  33  23   7  16  17  19  13  29   6   8  14  24  22  21

What ended up happening to this? seems like an interesting project though site doesn't load now unfortunately

Hello everyone, I am an artist working in the UK and I'm currently working on a project that involves the creation of a 'newspaper of the future'. To make it more realistic, we're having a back section with crossword puzzles, cartoon strips and horoscope. I came across your blog when searching for alternative horoscope generators, and not being a big fan of the traditional one, I was wondering if you would allow me to use some of your actually useful horoscopes in my project. Please let me know if I can provide you with any additional information. All the best

Project Premortem. Imagine your project has failed in the worst possible way. What does that look like? How did it happen? What can you do now to prevent that from happening?

If a horoscope's score becomes negative, it is removed from the pool of active horoscopes; otherwise, its chance of being chosen is based on the average value of the votes it has received compared to the other horoscopes, disregarding recently-used ones.

Why not use a Bayesian method, like the one described here.

EDIT: I misremembered; this is not actually a Bayesian method.

0 harmful
2 useless
3 s/o useful
3 useful
0 awesome

0.000 harmful    (*-15 = -0.000)
0.071 useless    (*-1 = -0.071)
0.137 s/o useful (*1 = 0.137)
0.137 useful     (*3 = 0.411)
0.000 awesome    (*10 = 0.000)

0.324 harmful    (*-15 = -4.860)
0.590 useless    (*-1 = -0.590)
0.694 s/o useful (*1 = 0.694)
0.694 useful     (*3 = 2.082)
0.324 awesome    (*10 = 3.240)

0.000 harmful    (*-15 = -0.000)
0.206 useless    (*-1 = -0.206)
0.397 s/o useful (*1 = 0.397)
0.397 useful     (*3 = 1.191)
0.000 awesome    (*10 = 0.000)

0.123 harmful    (*-15 = -1.845)
0.225 useless    (*-1 = -0.225)
0.264 s/o useful (*1 = 0.264)
0.264 useful     (*3 = 0.792)
0.123 awesome    (*10 = 1.230)

What happened to this? It seems like the Tumblr is defunct?

If a horoscope's score becomes negative, it is removed from the pool of active horoscopes; otherwise, its chance of being chosen is based on the average value of the votes it has received compared to the other horoscopes, disregarding recently-used ones.

Wouldn't this system doom a horoscope if the first person to ever get it didn't see anything valuable in it, even if other people would have found it more beneficial?

"When you notice yourself procrastinating, you will be able to muster the courage to do what you're trying to avoid."

When I actually realize that I am procrastinating, I often can, by this pure insight, get myself to doing that task. To me, it serves as a mind-hack, similar to "The Game".

Awesome! Well done for putting this idea into action.

Thanks for creating this new service! I'll definitely check it out. Another service in this space that I'd also recommend is SmartUp.

They offer productivity/effectiveness/motivational tips designed to match what you're most likely to need given what time of day it is!

It's not perfect yet, but it's good and has been getting better the past few months. Also, I met the founder last year and was impressed with his overall vision.

I think making it depend to the birthday is also rational. Otherwise there is more possibility of some sort of resource congestion if horoscope compels every user (rather than 1/12th of the users) to do same thing. This is not a big concern in the Internet with few thousands users spread all over the world - but imagine a small village, where there's just 1 horoscope, and it tells everyone to think about failure modes of their plans - they are all farmers, they all think what they're gonna do if crops fail, they all try to buy same equipment at same day.

Awesome! One suggestion: consider a different background or theme. I find that black on brown combination hard to read.

How about making it possible to leave comments on the horoscopes? Probably with making optional to have them easily accessible, so they aren't too great a temptation to kill time?

If you were starting over from scratch, what choice would you make? Sometimes we weight things we can't change too much, and need to give ourselves permission to look at the situation with a fresh start.

Awesome idea! It just so happens that I've been thinking about daily goals - for example, "Strike up a conversation with a random person", or "Remember to project your voice and speak loudly", or even something as simple as "Smile!".

The interface for horoscope submission is somewhat awkward - if I want to submit multiple horoscopes, I have to re-type my name/email address each time.