Tag: nerdery

Here’s an obvious principle of personal finance: If you can spend $100 now to prevent spending $200 next year, definitely do that. But in startup finance, it can totally make sense to decide to pay the $200 next year. Because your business is growing exponentially and $200 next year may easily be less...

Today I would like to pick a fight with WordPress. I’m still a huge fan of the company (Automattic). They’ve done a lot for us over the years and I have good friends who work there. But blog posts work better as beefs so forget all that. Let’s talk about what a wrongy-wrongpants WordPress is with their...

A fun fact about predicting your own behavior, particularly publicly, is that the act of predicting it changes the prediction. “I’m 75% likely to maintain my Duolingo streak all year, but now that I’ve said so I’m actually 90% likely, but now that I’ve said that, …” Or what happens when the probability starts very low but you add a wager? It’s like this self-describing xkcd

This is another X-Treme Nerd Interlude post. Last time we announced, mercifully briefly, our shiny new blog redesign and if you’re a normal human you should read that, nod thoughtfully, say “looks lovely”, and be on your merry way. The rest of you can frolic deep in the weeds here with

There are a lot of things in the category of “nerd tendencies I’ve had to unlearn”. I often turn them into capital-P Principles as a way to drill them into my head. Eventually I intend to collect them all into a meta post but here are a few random examples in the meantime: the Anti-Magic Principle, the Anti-Settings Principle, the Shirk-n-Turk Principle, and the Anti-Robustness

The Beeminder Lichess integration is officially launched! Lichess is basically the cool kids version of Chess.com. As yet more evidence of what huge nerds Beeminder users are, a chess playing website got voted up towards the top of our list of candidate autodata integrations. And not just voted up....

Circa 2019 or so Stripe released a big update to their Checkout product, the previous iteration of which we’ve been using to collect your payment info on Beeminder for over 11 years now. This is the tale of how it took us four years to migrate to that new version. Alright, it did not literally take four...

As you likely know if you’ve ever beeminded your weight, you can add a moving average line on top of your data on your Beeminder graph. You can also add a so-called aura around your datapoints. The idea is to see trends in your data without being distracted by daily fluctuations, particularly when data...

It’s official! Beemind anything with an RSS feed! This is a slightly nerd-oriented integration but copying and pasting URLs around is really the only skill you need to set this up. And then once it’s set up, you don’t need to do anything at all ever (except for the thing you’re beeminding of course)....

It’s official! The Beeminder StoryGraph integration! The StoryGraph is basically a better, nerdier version of GoodReads. I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I really (really really really) love books and reading. I’ve talked about it on the blog before, I talk about it in the forum, I have umpteen...

This is still pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing but it makes me very happy. Not just because I love pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing (we could say Product Vision if we wanted to sound more respectable) but because a couple years ago this sounded preposterously theoretical and fantastical...

Earlier this year we completed a lovely Beeminder book club to read behavioral scientist Katy Milkman’s new book, How To Change. The discussion all happened in the amazing Beeminder forum but as a private group of 18 of us, so we could trash talk the book guilt-free (or just to be able to talk more...

This is part 1 of a two-part series. First we explain loss aversion and how it’s distinct from the endowment effect. (Spoiler: loss aversion is a generalization of the endowment effect.) Asking Google how those things are different currently yields a fog of opaque logorrhea, so we hope this is enlightening....

This is a revised and slightly expanded version of something we originally wrote as part of our post on Bayesian Willpower. Immediate incentives are inordinately powerful. Beeminder’s philosophy is to find ways to make your immediate incentives match your long-term incentives such that willpower needn’t...

Beeminder creates a series of intermediate daily deadlines, working towards some desired long-term goal. As you probably know, it does that with real-money commitment devices. It’s common to come down to the wire on those deadlines every dang day. It’s powerful motivation. But is it… too powerful? If...

A couple weeks ago, Scott Alexander wrote “Toward a Bayesian Theory of Willpower”. This is my recap of the theory, my tentative verdict, and what I think it means for Beeminder and motivation hacking more generally. Let’s start with defining terms! Akrasia means failing to do something you rationally...

Previously on the Beeminder blog: debating negative vs positive reinforcement and, in case you care about using these psychology terms correctly, clarifying that negative reinforcement ≠ punishment. Also “Beeminder: Like Pact Except All We Do Is Take Your Money”. Here’s a common (pointed) question about...

Look what we found in the attic! Our original Support Czar, Chelsea — known for such classics as “Beemind Easy Things” and “Weasel Heart-To-Heart” — wrote this screed in 2017. It was a much better screed when she wrote it, because Beeminder was way worse then than it is today. (Yay!) So we modernized...

For years we’ve gotten advice to widen our appeal. We shall now explain why you’re all wrong. Let’s start with an intuition-shaping factoid: GitHub is focused 100% on developers even though writers and designers and many other categories of people could be — ought to be! — using version control. (Additional...

Are you somehow stumbling upon this blog post without knowing anything about Beeminder? Hoo-boy are you in the wrong place. But here’s a frenzied attempt to catch you up in time: Beeminder graphs your progress toward goals by drawing a bright line, called the Yellow Brick Road, that you commit to having...

What’s the most absurdly provocative way I can put this? Never imagine what your users will want! Apps must only ever do one single thing! If-statements considered harmful! Yes, this is all pretty rich coming from the people who built a goal-tracking app with, if I’m doing this math right, multiplying...

This is another tech nerd post. Normal humans seek cover!   Abstract: Fail loudly and immediately.   (I sure hope all the normal humans took cover already because that sentence sure would sound different to them than to us! I also hope this isn’t all too obvious for actual programmers but I predict you’ll...

Until today Beeminder had a fundamental design flaw that was baked in from literally day one. The first line of code for what would become Beeminder was to draw a line on a graph in Mathematica from a target weight to a goal weight. But weight fluctuates, I thought to myself. Or maybe I said it out...

Being a fan of overly provocative titles, I was tempted to title this “If-Statements Considered Harmful”. Meaning that it’s so tempting to add little bits of intelligence to your app to make it do the sensible thing in different circumstances. And that’s usually perfectly correct but the Anti-Magic Principle...

For background on the Yellow Brick Half-Plane that a normal human could conceivably care about, see our previous post on how we’re killing the custom lane widths feature. This post is strictly for abnormal humans, and/or, more realistically, for ourselves, because math is fun, and for our future selves,...

We’re assuming here that you’re already conceptually on board with writing specs. If you’re skeptical, Joel Spolsky will set you straight! Here’s my own mini-pitch for specs: Writing software involves a lot of backing yourself into corners. For even the simplest-seeming program, you find yourself adding...

The startup egg-basket principle is: put all your eggs in one basket. Be laser-focused on the one thing you’re best at. If you’re scrambling for survival, focus only on the one most promising thing for making the startup sustainable. For example, most startups should focus exclusively on their premium...

We have a new official integration partner! Except arguably not official, nor a partner. Project Euler is philosophically opposed to any kind of commercialization. So much so that the founder and all volunteers who contribute to it have committed to never profit financially from doing so. Pretty hard...

If you’re a fan of Mark Forster (as we certainly are) then this whole post amounts to giving a name — “redqueening” — to step 2 of his Backlog Method, which I summarize like so: (1) Isolate your backlog, (2) make sure you’re redqueening and not feeding that backlog, and (3) (bee)mind the backlog. There’s...

This is part 3 of a 3-part blog series! Previously we defined Pareto dominance and what that means for software, and then we made our case for and committed to the Pareto Dominance Principle. This post demonstrates what we have in mind when we say we’re committing to publicly justifying every non-Pareto-dominant...

This is part 2 in a 3-part series. Part 1 defined Pareto dominance and Pareto-efficient software. Part 3 is a case study.   I have some advice that now feels (to me, subjectively) too obvious to bother to tell you. But it was once pretty contentious here in the beehive. So I predict you’ll either find...

Content note: I started writing a post announcing a (Pareto-inefficient) change to the pledge cap interface and realized I first needed a post about what we call the Pareto Dominance Principle. But before that we needed a post about Pareto dominance. So, hooray, a whole mini blog series! Stay tuned...

It’s funny how universal it is for users (including programmers, including myself) to gravitate so strongly to “it’s probably just me / my crappy phone / my timezone / me not reading the webcopy / me not being deserving of love or working software / etc”. It might be an impulse to be kind and not blame...

Lawrence Evalyn has been beeminding for almost 7 years and we’re very proud to have him guest posting for us. If this whets your appetite, check out his professional blog where he’s written about beeminding his comprehensive exams. (Graphs and charts and spreadsheets oh my!) And if you like spreadsheets...

“Potentially Paying Customers” We ended the last blog post with what you might think is an unfortunate epithet for new Beeminder users. Being buried at the end of a bunch of nitty-gritty about business reasons for the timing of collecting payment info, approximately zero percent of people noticed it,...

Nicky Walters is Beeminder’s new Support Czar! The Support Czar (a position previously held by such luminaries as Alice Monday and Chelsea Miller) is in charge of answering most of the email you send to [email protected] and coordinating us other workerbees to answer the rest of it. And I guess...

UPDATE for webdev nerds: We realized we meant “403 Forbidden” rather than “401 Not Authorized”. Here’s a little information leak we noticed and fixed some months (ok, the better part of a year — blush!) after we publicly launched in late 2011: Say our user Alice has two goals. One is her book reading...

We’re honored to have Marcin Borkowski guest blogging for us today. Dr. Borkowski is a professor and programmer in Poland, and a hardcore Beeminder user for four years now with 39 active goals. This post is highly nerdcentric but starts with some examples of powerful beeminding that should be inspiring...

First, this guest post is an absolute inspiration and we implore you to read it. We’ve talked about Brent Yorgey before in press roundups but we’ll assume you don’t read those and repeat our gushing in this introduction. If you don’t know him, Professor Yorgey is well-known in the Haskell community and...

In case you’re not a programmer and the title didn’t already scare you off, we’ll start by explaining why this matters for end users. Until now, anyone who wrote a 3rd-party autodata integration — automatically sending data to Beeminder — had to implement their own strategy for how often to check for...

META-UPDATE August 2020: All the updates were cluttering this up so we moved them to a changelog section at the end. UPDATE 2018 Mar: We made some changes! Like changing “REQ” for “feature request” to the semi-standard “RFE” for “request for enhancement” (because the former looked too much like “required”...

The tagline for Amazon Mechanical Turk is “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”. As in, faking your AI by using humans. Mechanical Turk is named after the contraption in the title image, which was a seeming chess-playing automaton from the late 1700s that was secretly operated by a small human hidden inside....

Remember back in the day (yesterday) when Beeminder’s interface was all cluttered and intimidating and looked like it was made in 2011, by kernel hackers and accountants? Or computer scientists and behavioral econ nerds who gradually agglomerated a multiheaded beast of a system to implement their crazy...

Big news today: we have grown! We’ll leave it to Lillian to tell the backstory but we are pretty over the moon about this. We’ve been courting Lillian forever, even before it was financially realistic, since it seemed pretty clear she’d be able to whip our marketing and advertising and social media-ing...

This is part two of our announcement of the official Beeminder + Complice integration. It is also the second guest post by Malcolm Ocean. As you’ll see, this is powerful stuff for serious productivity nerds! The Beeminder + Complice integration gets better and better. I’m really excited to announce...

It’s our first ever listicle! We tried these out in a daily and weekly beemail and even among those most hardcore users, many didn’t know about many of these features. For the average feature in this list, 30% of daily subscribers and 40% of weekly subscribers weren’t aware of it. So here they are, listed...

Anyone remember our old blog post from 2012 about accidentally running a query that started deleting our whole database? It’s pretty entertaining and helpfully demarcates the parts that non-nerds should skip. If you’re a non-nerd I’d stick with (the non-nerd parts of) that post. The executive summary...

The doctrine of revealed preference — that you can infer someone’s utility function based wholly on what they choose to do — has an illustrious history. John Locke said “the actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.” And Ludwig von Mises said “the scale of values or wants manifests...

We’re honored to have Team Habitica here on the Beeminder blog to tell you more about Habitica and about using Habitica and Beeminder together. They’re in some ways very different but also quite compatible! For new year’s eve we wrote a guest post for the Habiticans, introducing them to Beeminderland....

For those just tuning in, let’s review the Three Great Beeminder Epiphanies. The Yellow Brick Road —  bringing long-term consequences near (and using the graphs as the basis for commitment contracts) The Road Dial and the Akrasia Horizon —  flexible self-control (getting the most out of commitment contracts...

This was tied for the most popular topic for us to write about in a mini straw poll of the daily beemail readers. I decided to blog it instead because a surprising number of people have proposed this over the years (also it’s a blog beemergency day). Beeminder users being, to put it mildly, rather sophisticated,...

One of my vices is that I drink a bit too much. Not to the level where I have a problem, but it would be strictly better if I cut out about 2 or 3 of the drinks I have in a typical week. This seems like an obvious use case for Beeminder. I’ve previously beeminded units of alcohol consumption and concluded that, measured as a total number of units per week, I’m completely

Last week Bee talked about Tocks. That’s our neologism for 45-minute pomodoros, as well as our characteristically over-engineered system for minding them. She listed some gamification-y tips for effective tocking and assured everyone that all our other ideas involved money. That of course included beeminding tocks, as discussed last time, and certainly includes

If you’re reading the Beeminder blog there’s a 95% chance you know about the Pomodoro Technique. The idea is to decide a task, do focused work on it for 25 minutes, and then get up and take a 5-minute break. Rinse and repeat. Apparently it was invented in the 1980s but Danny independently invented...

Another integration! And one that I personally use daily (well, nightly). Sleep as Android is a popular sleep tracking app that’s delightfully nerdy and quantified-self focused. (Much like Beeminder!) As a welcome to Sleep as Android users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. For Beeminder...

Last week Leah Libresco blogged about beeminding rituals. This week we’re continuing the Catholic theme with a guest post by veritable Renaissance man, Pedro Paulo Oliveira Jr. Pedro Paulo has a popular iPhone app for praying the rosary and has used the Beeminder API to include beeminding one’s praying...

We’re beaming with pride at being the latest official Zapier integration. See also Zapier’s announcement. This is arguably our biggest announcement since the Beeminder API two years ago. In case you don’t already know about Zapier, it’s a more

HabitRPG and Beeminder have a remarkably similar history and remarkably similar users. We consider this a match made in heaven. In fact, we and the HabitRPG folks have been talking about this for literally years now, so we’re very excited to finally be shipping it, thanks to the hacking skills of our own Alice Monday, and with assistance from Alice Harris. As a welcome to HabitRPG users new to Beeminder, we’re starting with a

We committed in a beemail recently to announcing a series of things that we’ve been brewing, culminating in our 3rd anniversary blog post, coming this month. This is one such thing. Drumroll… Beeminder has a new Discourse forum! It lives at forum.beeminder.com and all of the following are fair game...

In which the CEO of Beeminder quibbles with Patrick McKenzie, aka patio11, about what we call smarmbot emails, while noting how much we adore Patrick McKenzie (else we wouldn’t bother quibbling with him). Humans of the internet! This post isn’t really for you, but if you’re curious what we’re talking...

We’ll start with the non-nerd version. Last week there was a massive security breach in some very standard software used by most sites on the internet, including Beeminder. Let us first quickly reassure you that your credit card info gets secured by our much more savvy payment processor, Stripe, and...

Earlier this month some dozens of you got a delightful little email from us like this: this is super embarrassing but there’s a chance you were affected by a bug where we thought we canceled a charge but then it went through anyway. partly as self-punishment we’re just refunding all the charges where that could possibly have happened. so either you’re rightfully getting a refund or you’re getting a random reprieve on a past derailment! either way a refund of $

Bethany and I woke up at 7am on March 7th to a text message from Jill that some graphs seemed to be fubar. Panic ensued as we hacked away nonstop till 5pm or so, never getting dressed or leaving the house. What was the problem? The night before we had run a seemingly innocuous

You may have noticed the shiny new design of Beeminder. For nerds who know about such things: we switched to Ruby on Rails. For non-nerds: we added buzzwords to our internets! Either way, it was kind of a big deal, even though it doesn’t look like much just yet. Step one was to replicate everything that...