Daniel Reeves
messymatters.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Daniel Reeves is a developer and Beeminder co-founder who writes about time tracking, personal finance, and self-binding commitments.
What HN saysHN commenters link it mainly for TagTime, his stochastic time tracking tool, and discuss his post on naming the study of names, Nominology.
33HN people shared it
13linked it in comments
46stories submitted
475story points
3 years agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1TagTime: Stochastic Time Tracking for Space Cadets (2011)8 people · 66 points · first shared 2011 · 4 comments on HN
- 2How to Evaluate Startup Names7 people · 8 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 3Throwing Money Away (Buying vs Renting)3 people · 11 points · first shared 2010 · 4 comments on HN
- 4Financial Autonomy in Marriage3 people · 1 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Stochastic, Nerdtastic Restaurant Bill Splitting2 people · 33 points · first shared 2012 · 47 comments on HN
- 6Throwing Money Away (Buying vs Renting)2 people · 29 points · first shared 2009 · 50 comments on HN
- 7Nominology2 people · 11 points · first shared 2011 · 6 comments on HN
- 8How To Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding2 people · 7 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 9Google Glass(es)2 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 10Popping the Filter Bubble2 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 11Paul Graham's long-lost 2006 Infogami essay, "Startup Names"1 people · 157 points · first shared 2011 · 65 comments on HN
- 12Products Don't Spread Virally1 people · 49 points · first shared 2011 · 15 comments on HN
- 13If you could write a check and go on with your life, don't insure against it1 people · 24 points · first shared 2011 · 42 comments on HN
- 14How to Set Deadlines for Your Students1 people · 22 points · first shared 2012 · 6 comments on HN
- 15Flexible Self-Control1 people · 18 points · first shared 2012 · 2 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
awwstn · 2020-05-19
Same, though I think the BikeTours/GoSojourn thing may just be an imperfect example of a point that is correct.
A better example (for me at least) would be backroads.com vs. something like biketourstoday.info. The former is distinct, trustworthy, memorable, greppable, and just good. I thought a lot about these things in starting my business. While capiche.com doesn't say anything about SaaS, I think it resonates with people more than, say, saasreviews.io or whatever would've.
btw, this post is highly relevant and is one I reference often: http://messymatters.com/nominology/
dreeves · 2014-10-22
Ha, nice! I mean, "onomastics" really should win simply for already being the established term. But if one were picking the name from scratch then I'd say "nominology" has probably...
* greater evocativity (at least for us philistines)
* nearly equal brevity (same number of chars, one more syllable)
* equal greppability and googlability
* greater spellability, maybe (again, at least for us philistines)
* equal pronouncability
* equal verbability (nominologize/onomasticize, nominological/onomastic, nominologist/onomastician)
Of course "nominology" mixes Greek and Latin roots so that's presumably fingernails on a blackboard for more educated folk than me. Cf http://messymatters.com/nominology/#comment-530036107
profstasiak · 2024-03-03
anyone here tracks those kind of blocks each day in a good way?
I like this stochastic way, but it's not really user friendly https://messymatters.com/tagtime/
tra3 · 2023-03-28
Ahh I found it: http://messymatters.com/tagtime/
The idea is that it's fully manual and only precise across weeks.
epaga · 2019-08-06
What would be awesome is to include an option for random time, stochastically centered around a certain length, since that is perfect for not being able to game the system. I know that a tool called "Beeminder" had something like this back in the day.
Found the blog post they did back then: http://messymatters.com/tagtime/
I used this for a while and it really was extremely helpful since it activated the "gamey" part of my brain.
unimpressive · 2019-06-19
Reminds me of: http://messymatters.com/tagtime/
Which is a pretty well formed solution in this vein, unfortunately written in Perl.
thesteamboat · 2015-05-18
You may be interested in this article written by a couple that doesn't agree with you. Granted, they seem to be extreme outliers in many other ways, but it's evidence that it works for some people.
http://messymatters.com/autonomy/
enraged_camel · 2013-07-08
>>If I plan to own the house for multiple years, a large chunk of my money goes to equity: I'm banking away value for later that you will get back when you sell the house. (Assuming the market doesn't go pear-shape: a big assumption.) In contrast, money you spend on rent is a pure cost, and irrevocably lost.
This logic is fundamentally flawed. Contrary to the popular conventional wisdom (repeated by our Baby Boomer parents), renting is not "throwing away" money. You are getting something for that payment, which is a place to live.
Conventional wisdom says that with a mortgage, you are building equity instead of paying the money to someone else and that makes more sense financially. But this is not true. You should read this piece to understand why, specifically the Epilogue part: http://messymatters.com/buyrent/
alecdbrooks · 2013-05-07
If I understand correctly, you are marked active if data is sent in without logging in, say if you are replying to the emails or using Gmail Zero [0] or TagTime [1]. So logging in is neither necessary nor sufficicent to be considered active.
If automatic data entry is enough to be considered active, maybe you should warn people that the data points entered automatically will make them count as active.
[0]: https://www.beeminder.com/gmailzero
[1]: http://messymatters.com/tagtime/
buddydvd · 2011-11-01
EVOC Evocativity Conveys at least a hint of what it’s naming
BREV Brevity Shorter = better
GREP Greppability Not a substring of common words
GOOG Googlability Reasonably unique (and domain name available)
PRON Pronounceability You can read it out loud when you see it
SPEL Spellability You know how it’s spelled when you hear it
VERB Verbability The name (or variant thereof) can be used as a verb
Source: http://messymatters.com/2011/10/31/nominology/
caroline_o · 2011-01-02
Beeminder is really interesting, although they're in Beta and I don't think taking new users. Their post on "How to do what you want" is useful even if you're using something else to keep track. http://messymatters.com/2010/11/15/akrasia/ It's also an interesting answer to why you would want to have a New Year's resolution (so long as you find a way to self-enforce it.)
gknoy · 2014-02-14
Thanks for mentioning "yootling", as otherwise I would never have found (noticed?) his wife's guest article on the same subject [0]. It was a nice complementary article.
In that article, she mentions in passing the general case. From this, it seems like it would totally work with three people.
There are n participants, each with some share — i.e.,
some fraction — of a decision. Everyone submits a sealed bid,
the second highest of which is taken to be the Fair Market
Price (FMP). The high bidder wins, and buys out everyone else’s
shares, i.e., pays them the appropriate fraction of the FMP.
A caveat is, some things you wouldn't want someone to bid for -- putting the kids to bed -- but other than those kinds of things, I suspect that they would not mind in the slightest if a roommate wanted to subsidize their rent by doing dishes or laundry.
My biggest question is how to handle this when the household has a single source of income.
0: http://messymatters.com/autonomy/
mitchtbaum · 2018-01-21
Caution: etymologically-oriented answers generally miss important nominological / nymological / onomatological / onomastic foundations. This namespace is a "synthetic" social construction. It has interesting "quirks", "gotchas", and "zingers".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomastics
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/onomatology
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nomen
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-nym
http://messymatters.com/nominology/