Learn more about Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Don’t say ‘it will take five minutes’

It’s commonplace to emphasize that your product will let users achieve their goal in next to no time:

“Follow one of our quickstart guides to get started in minutes.” - Firebase quickstart

“Be up & running with Pusher in 3 minutes” - Pusher tutorials

“Learn how to build an Android Chat App in 10 minutes” - Pusher tutorials

“Deploy a serverless microservice With Lambda, API Gateway in ~2 minutes” - AWS console

There are two possible reactions to this:

Other guides are more honest:

“You can go through the whole tutorial in a couple of hours or you may want to spend a pleasant day really digging into it.” - AngularJS tutorial

“25 min read” - Nix by Example post on Medium

I believe this approach is more successful. Consider our characters again:

What causes the unrealistic push to lower time estimates?

What can computers do? What are the limits of mathematics? And just how busy can a busy beaver be? This year, I’m writing Busy Beavers, a unique interactive book on computability theory. You and I will take a practical and modern approach to answering these questions — or at least learning why some questions are unanswerable!

It’s only $19, and you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

After months of secret toil, I and Andrew Carr released Everyday Data Science, a unique interactive online course! You’ll make the perfect glass of lemonade using Thompson sampling. You’ll lose weight with differential equations. And you might just qualify for the Olympics with a bit of statistics!

It’s $29, but you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

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