1-3 minutes. I open the front page, glance through the stories I haven't read yet, open them in new tabs, then click on 'threads', check if there's any replies

1-3 minutes. I open the front page, glance through the stories I haven't read yet, open them in new tabs, then click on 'threads', check if there's any replies to things I posted earlier, then click on 'new' to see if there's any interesting posts in the 'new' queue that are about to be overlooked. I then ignore the HN tab until I've read through the articles I was interested in (in some cases, I've opened the comments... not sure if that counts as strictly an HN visit). Usually the whole thing takes about 5 minutes including reading the article (I read fast and I'm very harsh at skimming and discarding stuff that had an interesting headline but no substance... working on swombat.com has helped hone these filters even more). When an article makes me want to comment, I go back to HN, find the article, and comment. Also, sometimes (rarely, I think) I'll get quite involved into a particularly heated discussion and spend a sizeable chunk of time on a thread (e.g. 30-60 minutes). That's a bit compulsive and I try to do that less. For reference this comment took me about 2 minutes to write. It's on the long side.