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by epaga·7y ago·view on hn ↗
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.

2 comments
This. TagTime (which is Free, made by the Beeminder people, and plays nicely with their goal tracking product if you want it) is scheduled such that you are equally likely to be 'pinged' at any moment as any other, with an expected value of every 45 minutes.

I have been using it for the past five years or so. Apart from being a gloriously hacky bundle of perl scripts (and not playing wonderfully well when run on multiple machines) I've found it perfect. There's also an Android version nowadays I think, though.

That blog link explains it well.

I especially like this obscure bug in the RNG algorithm they're using, which is referenced in their Github README (https://github.com/tagtime/TagTime): http://github.com/dreeves/TagTime/issues/62#issuecomment-239...