You seem to assume that a day always has 24 hours. Common (but not only) non-24h day lengths are:
- 23 hours
- 25 hours
- 24 hours 1 second
- 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds
You could assume that a day isn't exactly 24 hours, but it's close-ish to 24 hours. Nope, not even close.
And that assumes that we can treat an hour as a precise measure of time (we can't). On some systems, even a second is not a precise measure of time (second smearing).
To make things worse, those are "simple" edge cases.
Time is hard. I'm not sure if I can make any statement about time that is true.
I am saying that you shouldn't use day as a unit of time. You should use second, minute, hour, etc, because these have a constant duration. sleep(86400) should reliably make your thread sleep for at least 24 hours.
It depends on the context and the system you’re working with. In some systems, an hour may last 3599, 3600 or 3601 seconds (due to the leap second), a minute may be 59,60 or 61 seconds. Even a second is not always a „true” second.
There’s no single time unit that works for all situations.
You don’t need the other person to be in the same room - a video call works just fine. In fact, it can be even better for productivity since there's less chit-chat.
It is my anecdotal experience that a whole bunch of my current friends are from a pre-pandemic in-office job and I’ve made zero lasting friendships at my remote jobs.
I work every day with people addicted to YouTube. A WorkMode client shared this approach; we tested it with a small group. Anecdotal but consistent - it works surprisingly well, cuts usage sharply, and seems to hold up long-term.
That is reasonably fast. We wrote entire games in PHP where we aimed for wall time under 100ms. That is a challenge, but often doable. Some routes managed to respond in under 50ms.
You probably haven't heard of them. We were a German studio, and most of our games only reached a few tens of thousands of players. The biggest hit was Xhodon — it had a bit of a following among World of Warcraft fans. It was a fun time.
Blog posts don’t change much. Even if your rendering code is horrendously slow (though, why?), you can just cache the resulting html and serve it up with each request. Or slap nginx in front of your web server locally and let that deal with the load. ‘Course you’ll need your http headers set correctly, but you needed that anyway for cloudflare.
Your server has to be pretty badly configured for a personal blog to run out of CPU handling requests.
Everything you wrote is true, but this is not how it works in practice. Usually, the person running the blog uses WordPress, and doesn't know about caching. They add a few plugins that significantly increase response time and make the response dynamic (for example, CSRF nonces). Add to that some "static" AJAX requests (which usually are POSTs and not cacheable), and it all adds up.
I wouldn't bet on an average dev being able to set up and configure nginx + Cloudflare correctly.
>Course you’ll need your http headers set correctly, but you needed that anyway for cloudflare
Not if you don't use CF to cache "dynamic" content.
mklepaczewski was probably talking about end-to-end. I.e. the number you see in the network tab for request duration - whereas the pricing will only care about the time that the application is actually doing something.
That basically means it starts after the connection was established by the proxy (cloudflare) and terminates before the response is delivered to the client.
Doing the whole round trip within 65ms is actually pretty challenging, even if you are requesting over the wire. It would mean you have maybe 10-20 Ms to query data from the database and process them to html or json. Any kind of delay while querying the database is going to ruin that.
If you had a 65ms in the application, you would probably get a round trip average of something above 90, likely closer to 150 then 90.
Sure, but this particular case clearly wasn't using cache, that's why the free tier limit for an application was reached. Hence it's highly likely that each request hit a database.
The message would've been different if it was cached.
Cloudflare Workers run in front of cache -- which is generally useful since it allows you to serve personalized pages while still pulling the content from cache, and since Workers can easily run in <1ms and run on a machine you were already going to pass through anyway (the CDN), it doesn't hurt performance. But it also means that the free tier limit of 100,000 requests per day includes requests that hit cache.
> Your comment could use a better tone, but I do agree that, especially with the difficulties that people are having finding a job these days, there has been elevated interest in ADHD and thus there are more attempts to prey on people with genuine issues
When you say “prey,” what kinds of products or services do you have in mind? I’ve seen some pretty dubious offerings, but I believe most creators genuinely want to help fellow ADHDers. Whether those solutions continue to work after the initial novelty wears off is another question.
I gave the example - IMO body-doubling is an arrificially created hype to take advantage of people with real problems. It's just perfect -- a subscription service, no permanent effect, added sprinkling of human contact to take advantage of people feeling lonely as well. No medical oversight or any oversight whatsoever...
Maybe some of the companies marketing it, of course there are people looking to exploit it just like in nearly every other industry. But the concept itself isn’t some ADHD specific thing, it’s just using technology to exploit a quirk in human psychology, and there are free options available. I’m in a discord server that has hundreds of people spread across various video call rooms at any moment. I haven’t used it enough to say how effective it is, but I definitely wouldn’t call that exploitative. If it works it works, if it doesn’t don’t use it.
I haven’t checked the app, I just saw screenshots. In my opinion the leaderboard is a bad idea, especially global one. It will be unachievable by vast majority of your users, and may lead to toxic behaviours such as working for 12h/day. It will also remind others how bad their productivity is, possibly causing more stress and self-blaming.
Think about something else than gamification. In my experience and the experience of our users (https://workmode.net/) gamification very quickly stops to work.
I wish you all the best as I know how devastating procrastination may be. Stay productive:-)
No need to be snarky. If it helps someone be more productive then it’s a win, even if they spend 50% scrolling and 50% working.
I haven’t checked the app, but the description says it uses social accountability, focus music and gamification. I’m sure it’s the right combination for some people, even if only for a while (in my experience gamification works only short term).
I assume that scrolling through productivity feed of friends is less engaging than scrolling through social media content designed and tailored to you to spend as much time on it as possible.
The app has other features to help with focus and to jumpstart productivity.
Delaying action is sometimes useful. Procrastination is never useful. The deliberate decision to postpone something because it's beneficial is very different from postponing something because we prefer to read HN.
> procrastination is healthy and stops premature projects from getting copied and ruined.
I disagree. By definition, procrastination means delaying or avoiding actions you should be taking, which is inherently unhealthy. If you're not doing what you ought to, it's counterproductive.
Often, people confuse procrastination with:
- resting,
- relaxing while playing games,
- doing nothing,
- giving themselves time to cool of when they have a new idea.
These activities can be beneficial. For instance, after a stressful week, taking time to relax isn’t procrastination—it’s prioritizing mental health. Likewise, if your body needs sleep, getting rest is necessary, not a delay of important tasks. This is what you should be doing.
Even delaying action is sometimes exactly what we should be doing. If I have a billion-dollar idea that demands a significant investment of time, effort, or money, it's crucial to give myself space to think about the idea, and to cool off. That’s not procrastination—it’s a deliberate, thoughtful strategy.
You could assume that a day isn't exactly 24 hours, but it's close-ish to 24 hours. Nope, not even close.
And that assumes that we can treat an hour as a precise measure of time (we can't). On some systems, even a second is not a precise measure of time (second smearing).
To make things worse, those are "simple" edge cases.
Time is hard. I'm not sure if I can make any statement about time that is true.