Top all-time · #2121
Beeminder Blog
Company blog · blog.beeminder.com · on HN as dreevesproductivitystartups
Beeminder Blog is the company blog at blog.beeminder.com, writing about productivity and startups. Since 2011, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 137 times, most often “How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link the Beeminder blog for its writing on akrasia, self-binding and commitment devices, and for posts explaining its own choices such as autocancel, cheating and competitors.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Beeminder is goal-tracking with teeth. We plot your progress on a graph with a Bright Red Line (formerly Yellow Brick Road). If your datapoints cross that line, we take your money. The Beeminder blog is a hodgepodge of productivity nerdery and behavioral economics written by the founders and various
Most-linked posts?
- /competitors/4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-12-30
- How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-08-10
- Socially Efficient Commitment Devices (2013)2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-12-04
- /akrasia2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-04-17
- How To Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-09-25
- /cheating/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-29
- /anticharity2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-31
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-09
- Flexible self-control2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-09-28
- There’s no such thing as willpower (2016)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-15
What Hacker News says?
We don't feel awkward about it! We're leaning into it hard. See https://blog.beeminder.com/focus and https://blog.beeminder.com/defail But it's definitely not for everyone! If your reaction to Beeminder is "I would not do anything differently and just waste money" then you are probably right and should not use Beeminder. We've been around for about a decade which we think is evidence that there are people for whom i…
Comment linking /defail
on “Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it”Submitted Time-lapse video of Bethany's maniac week of coding as a story · 96 points
HN discussionBeeminder https://help.beeminder.com/article/25-how-do-auto-canceling-... https://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel/
Comment linking /autocancel/
on “Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it”Submitted How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011) as a story · 65 points
HN discussionI like user andlarry's characterization: "very hill-climby optimization". The other technical CS term is "greedy". This is related to a much less bad (but still kinda bad) thing that companies often do, namely sending smarmbot emails: http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot You could call what Angel List sent "nonconsensual smarmbot emails".
Comment linking /smarmbot
on “Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile”Submitted Beeminder API as a story · 44 points
HN discussionRead the Beeminder blog if you want to understand why pay more for failure... let me find one[1][2] (link below) You should want to avoid the payment! Is the short version. If you _only_ paid when you failed, you might go out of your way to not fail, if it meant you could avoid the payment. Especially as a conditioned response -- eg. planning to fail sometimes. You won't mind losing $5 once in a while, if most of th…
Comment linking /punishment/
on “Boss as a Service – Hire a boss, get stuff done”Submitted Auto-Canceling Subscriptions as a story · 36 points
HN discussionThis seems like a good excuse to plug Beeminder but I'll try to be at least slightly less self-promotional and point to our collection of all our competitors who offer commitment device apps of various kinds: http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors We call this the granddaddy of first-world problems.
Comment linking /competitors
on “'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia”Submitted 1000 Days of User-Visible Improvements as a story · 25 points
HN discussionHaving money on the line often helps, but otherwise they have zeno polling[1]. [1] http://blog.beeminder.com/zeno/
Comment linking /zeno/
on “Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma”Submitted How You Talk Yourself Out of Reporting a Bug as a story · 18 points
HN discussionAnd to help yourself remember to do your pomodoros, you can use a tool like Beeminder[0], which can track and show you your progress towards your goal as well as act as a commitment device[1] to keep you working on goals over time. [0] https://www.beeminder.com/ [1] http://blog.beeminder.com/akrasia/
Comment linking /akrasia/
on “Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma”Submitted The Startup Egg-Basket Principle as a story · 17 points
HN discussionAs far as fighting procrastination (and more generally: akrasia) I'm a big fan of going straight for the nuclear option: commitment devices! Here are all the startups I know of that offer commitment devices: http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors Disclosure: Mine is one such startup!
Comment linking /competitors
on “Procrastination is Not Laziness”Submitted Beehind the Curtain: Secrets of our Support Success as a story · 17 points
HN discussionFunny, I just wrote "The Out-Loud-To-Your-Friend-Constraint For Writing" -- http://expost.padm.us/outloud (It's kind of self-indulgent musing on the idea of constraints for writing.) And for customer support we call this the BFF Heuristic -- http://blog.beeminder.com/curtain Excerpt: "If you read what you've written to a user out loud and it's possible to tell that it's not being spoken to your best friend, rewrite…
Comment linking /curtain
on “Write like you talk”Submitted In greenfield markets, your competitors are your friends as a story · 15 points
HN discussionOh! Beeminder's not actually affiliated with TaskRatchet. We're just friends with the creator of it and have promoted it a lot and have an autodata integration with it, etc. See https://blog.beeminder.com/taskratchet -- which is a guest post by the TaskRatchet creator on the Beeminder blog (so, um, I can see where the confusion came from!).
Comment linking /taskratchet
on “Procrastinatory Doom Loops”Submitted The Shirk and Turk Principle (related to Do Things That Don't Scale) as a story · 10 points
HN discussionHave you tried https://www.beeminder.com/ ? It is more flexible than it appears at first, and you can easily use it on top of a traditional todo app ( https://www.beeminder.com/todoist ) or just a plaintext document ( https://blog.beeminder.com/nebulous/ ).
Comment linking /nebulous/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on?”Submitted Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts as a story · 10 points
HN discussionThis depends how trustworthy you are in general, and is definitely an interesting question. Would Gandhi take a pill which made him 1% less likely to not commit any murders, if it meant receiving a million dollars with no other strings attached? The answer seems to be, "he would use a Schelling Fence" if that was an option. https://blog.beeminder.com/schelling/ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SdkAesHBt4tsivEKe/gandh…
Comment linking /schelling/
on “Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)”Submitted Productivity Hack: The sedimentary filing system as a story · 9 points
HN discussionIf you want to make the challenge even more intense, you can try a service like Beeminder that'll charge you if you don't commit every day. It can hook into Github, I believe. https://www.beeminder.com/gitminder The founders actually use this themselves, making a mandatory UVI (user-visible improvement) every day, inspired by pg's advice "startups rarely die mid-keystroke... so keep typing!" See here for more on tha…
Comment linking /rails/
on “What I learned from getting my side project acquired”Submitted Beeminder Integrates With Trello as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> Did you ever feel like you were answering correctly, on close cards specifically, not because of an improved understanding but because you were associating the correct answer with the prompt/excerpt? I actually suspect that associating the word with the context helps , as surprising as that might be. Let's say I grab a few sentences from an interesting article, and I boldface a word. I'll mark the card as "pass" i…
Comment linking /hieroglyphs/
on “FSRS: A modern, efficient spaced repetition algorithm”Submitted How to Write Functional Specs; Spec Spectrum: Elevator Pitch to Production Code as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThat last one is similar to my litmus test for Akrasia [ http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia ]: 1. How certain are you that you *want* to do it? 2. How certain are you that you *can* do it? 3. How certain are you that you *will* do it? If your answers are "absolutely", "definitely", and "given historical evidence, not entirely" then this is classic akrasia. I think the only solution in that case is some form of self-b…
Comment linking /akrasia
on “Fooling myself to work”Submitted How To Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
