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I sense a bit of irony here: the guy who started HN is telling you not to waste your time by sitting around being unproductive... and you are seeing this articl

by tansey 16y ago

I sense a bit of irony here: the guy who started HN is telling you not to waste your time by sitting around being unproductive... and you are seeing this article because you are on HN. :)

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
howcool 16y ago
Of all the things to do online, HN is probably the one thing that is not a waste of time
nickpinkston 16y ago
Haha - quite true. Though it must be said that, after a streak of productivity, a break is prudent. HN is some of the most productive downtime I get to enjoy. Besides, PG put the "procrastination settings" in here for a reason ;-)
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Didn't the article just warn you about downtime that we think is productive? ;-)
- whimsy 16y ago
  Where is the documentation for noprocrast, maxvisit, minaway, delay?
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    noprocrast is the switch that turns it on and off, maxvisit minites is the longest you're allowed to look before you get kicked off for minaway minutes. I forget what delay does.
    - kgermino 16y ago
      Delay is the amount of time (in minutes) between when you hit submit and when the comment is posted, its for people (like me) who post something than immediately decide to edit it. From http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html: ...There's a new "delay" field in your profile that lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them. Also 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
pg 16y ago
I do worry about this a lot, actually. HN is a huge time sink for me, and I worry that it is for other people too. It's way worse for me of course-- moderating a forum is exactly the sort of pseudo-work I'm talking about in the essay-- but I often think about whether HN is too engaging for users too, and whether there are things I could to make it less so.
- michael_nielsen 16y ago
  Sounds like it might be a good topic for an Ask HN.
- jerf 16y ago
  It's an investment. I'm not being funny, despite the fact that's the obvious snap response. I compare where I would be in my personal development with and without HN (and programming.reddit when it was good, and some subreddits that still are good, and my RSS feeds), and net-net it's a good time investment as long as you don't go absolutely nuts. We don't have technology that can filter news based entirely on "what is 'good' for me" for any non-trivial definition of good. "Interesting to me" we can at least pretend to have filters for, but not "good for me". The only solution is to have something a bit far-ranging like HN or a subreddit and just deal with the misses. The alternative, never get any hits, is worse. Heck, I'm not even 100% sure which articles are good for me after I've completely read them. Often I can only make the call in retrospect, weeks later. Your mental image of a well-rounded person probably includes a large library of books and a stack of newspapers. There are reasons for this, even though the newspapers and large libraries ultimately suffer the exact same problems for the exact same reasons, albeit being a little less addictive since the internet is interactive.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Problem is that it's virtually impossible to tell what's a good investment until well after the fact. In money as well as in time. When I was in college, I wasted a lot of time on Harry Potter fanfiction. I justified it to myself as an investment. I figured that I'd learn how to write better. I was involved as a tech admin on one of the sites, so I figured I could polish my technical skills. After all, where else could a college student actually write code that faced real-world traffic from real-world users? And if nothing else, the fandom was 99.9% female, so I figured I might even end up with a girlfriend. After about three years of this, I figured "Who the fuck am I kidding?" and realized that it wasn't an investment at all. The hard part of writing is coming up with a believable plot and characters, and fanfiction didn't exercise that at all. I was going into financial software, using Java and custom databases, and so my PHP/MySQL webapp was completely irrelevant to my professional experience. Nobody really respected fanfiction anyway, so it's not like it was a resume boost. And I still didn't have a girlfriend. Except that in the end, it was an investment. Three years after that, after a couple years in the financial software startup and then a failed startup of my own, I ended up getting back in touch with one of my friends from the fandom , who had since started a job at Google. They were hiring. Partially on the strength of her referral, and partially on the web skills that I'd built up since my time with that fansite, I ended up getting a job there. Anyone remember Steve Jobs' commencement address, the one with the calligraphy story? It's sorta like that. We keep trying to structure our lives so that everything leads up to achieving our goals, but oftentimes, the goals themselves aren't apparent until we've reached them. It's only in retrospect that we can put things together and say "I meant to do that, yeah really, I did."
jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
Like anything, it depends on how you use it. I spend quite a bit of time here, but it's worthwhile and enjoyable investment (I hate using that term in this case). I learn a lot and have met some awesome people through here. I would not trade a single minute of it back.
alexro 16y ago
Playing devil's advocate: the guy who started HN did it to increase productivity in seed applications screening. That's us who took it onto the dark side :)
csomar 16y ago
HN is good, the People are great and so are the comment. I learned a lot here and if the smart people leave, HN will die. So where's the problem? In HN? No, it's in you. Learn to organize your time. Give HN a limited period of time per day.
mvp 16y ago
and also reading and then replying to your comment :)

by tansey 16y ago

I sense a bit of irony here: the guy who started HN is telling you not to waste your time by sitting around being unproductive... and you are seeing this article because you are on HN. :)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

howcool 16y ago

Of all the things to do online, HN is probably the one thing that is not a waste of time

nickpinkston 16y ago

Haha - quite true. Though it must be said that, after a streak of productivity, a break is prudent. HN is some of the most productive downtime I get to enjoy. Besides, PG put the "procrastination settings" in here for a reason ;-)

nostrademons 16y ago
Didn't the article just warn you about downtime that we think is productive? ;-)
whimsy 16y ago
Where is the documentation for noprocrast, maxvisit, minaway, delay?
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  noprocrast is the switch that turns it on and off, maxvisit minites is the longest you're allowed to look before you get kicked off for minaway minutes. I forget what delay does.
  - kgermino 16y ago
    Delay is the amount of time (in minutes) between when you hit submit and when the comment is posted, its for people (like me) who post something than immediately decide to edit it. From http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html: ...There's a new "delay" field in your profile that lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them. Also 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.

pg 16y ago

I do worry about this a lot, actually. HN is a huge time sink for me, and I worry that it is for other people too. It's way worse for me of course-- moderating a forum is exactly the sort of pseudo-work I'm talking about in the essay-- but I often think about whether HN is too engaging for users too, and whether there are things I could to make it less so.

michael_nielsen 16y ago
Sounds like it might be a good topic for an Ask HN.
jerf 16y ago
It's an investment. I'm not being funny, despite the fact that's the obvious snap response. I compare where I would be in my personal development with and without HN (and programming.reddit when it was good, and some subreddits that still are good, and my RSS feeds), and net-net it's a good time investment as long as you don't go absolutely nuts. We don't have technology that can filter news based entirely on "what is 'good' for me" for any non-trivial definition of good. "Interesting to me" we can at least pretend to have filters for, but not "good for me". The only solution is to have something a bit far-ranging like HN or a subreddit and just deal with the misses. The alternative, never get any hits, is worse. Heck, I'm not even 100% sure which articles are good for me after I've completely read them. Often I can only make the call in retrospect, weeks later. Your mental image of a well-rounded person probably includes a large library of books and a stack of newspapers. There are reasons for this, even though the newspapers and large libraries ultimately suffer the exact same problems for the exact same reasons, albeit being a little less addictive since the internet is interactive.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Problem is that it's virtually impossible to tell what's a good investment until well after the fact. In money as well as in time. When I was in college, I wasted a lot of time on Harry Potter fanfiction. I justified it to myself as an investment. I figured that I'd learn how to write better. I was involved as a tech admin on one of the sites, so I figured I could polish my technical skills. After all, where else could a college student actually write code that faced real-world traffic from real-world users? And if nothing else, the fandom was 99.9% female, so I figured I might even end up with a girlfriend. After about three years of this, I figured "Who the fuck am I kidding?" and realized that it wasn't an investment at all. The hard part of writing is coming up with a believable plot and characters, and fanfiction didn't exercise that at all. I was going into financial software, using Java and custom databases, and so my PHP/MySQL webapp was completely irrelevant to my professional experience. Nobody really respected fanfiction anyway, so it's not like it was a resume boost. And I still didn't have a girlfriend. Except that in the end, it was an investment. Three years after that, after a couple years in the financial software startup and then a failed startup of my own, I ended up getting back in touch with one of my friends from the fandom , who had since started a job at Google. They were hiring. Partially on the strength of her referral, and partially on the web skills that I'd built up since my time with that fansite, I ended up getting a job there. Anyone remember Steve Jobs' commencement address, the one with the calligraphy story? It's sorta like that. We keep trying to structure our lives so that everything leads up to achieving our goals, but oftentimes, the goals themselves aren't apparent until we've reached them. It's only in retrospect that we can put things together and say "I meant to do that, yeah really, I did."

jasonlbaptiste 16y ago

Like anything, it depends on how you use it. I spend quite a bit of time here, but it's worthwhile and enjoyable investment (I hate using that term in this case). I learn a lot and have met some awesome people through here. I would not trade a single minute of it back.

alexro 16y ago

Playing devil's advocate: the guy who started HN did it to increase productivity in seed applications screening. That's us who took it onto the dark side :)

csomar 16y ago

HN is good, the People are great and so are the comment. I learned a lot here and if the smart people leave, HN will die. So where's the problem? In HN? No, it's in you. Learn to organize your time. Give HN a limited period of time per day.

mvp 16y ago

and also reading and then replying to your comment :)