New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

by pg • 19 years ago

64 46 19 years ago

ycombinator.com

pg6• 19 years ago

Ironically, I got banned by noprocrast upon submitting this, because I had maxvisit set to 1 to test it.

e1ven• 19 years ago

Interesting feature.. I think this falls under the heading of Keeping Honest people Honest.

Of course it's easy to get around. Log in anonymously, or use a proxy, or any number of other things- The point as I understand it isn't to hold you iron-fisted to the whims you had when you set it up, but more to act as a gentle reminder.

"Hey, it's been 2 hours already. Stop wasting time on news.yc, and get back to work"

There have been some similar program that extend the concept, and read the title of the browser window to let you graph your productive time. I can't find any at the moment, though.. There's certainly a lot that could be done in that area. Maybe someone will apply for a Fall 07 YC to track productivity effectively.

On thinking about it, I was reminded of this link from MyDreamApp (A contest to pitch apps for the Mac)

http://mydreamapp.com/contestants/view/danlundmark/

nostrademons• 19 years ago

This is wonderful. I'm off to limit my visits to daily, or maybe twice-daily if I login once in the morning and once at night.

Will this kick you off in the middle of writing a comment? That's my one qualm about it - that I'll start writing a response and then won't be able to submit it because maxvisit has timed out. Maybe exempt the comment-posting URL (it should block you from further reloads afterwards, though)?

pg6• 19 years ago

Will this kick you off in the middle of writing a comment?

No, it doesn't apply till the server tries to generate the page following the submission. If you want to know what it's like, just set maxvisit to 1 and try it.

pius• 19 years ago

That's a pretty sweet feature.

foodawg• 19 years ago

Awesome addition, I'm sure I'll get around to turning on noprocrast sometime. ;)

dfranke• 19 years ago

During application season, you might want to make sure it still lets you in to edit your application.

pg6• 19 years ago

Don't worry, it doesn't apply to those pages, just news.

kcl• 19 years ago

Can someone post how to do italics and code indentation?

pg6• 19 years ago

For italics use stars, for indentation use indentation.

aston• 19 years ago

Can someone post how to show a star in a post?

tlrobinson3• 19 years ago

Does it use Markdown? I guess there's one way to find out...

emphasis

strong

This is an H1 =============

This is an H2 -------------

### This is an H3 ######

[Y Combinator](http://www.ycombinator.com)

tlrobinson3• 19 years ago

Nope, just similar I guess...

davidw• 19 years ago

It's a feature request:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27783

jkush• 19 years ago

Paul, this is a cleverly elegant solution!

nanijoe• 19 years ago

This has to be the first time in the history of the internet that a website makes provision for you not to waste your time on that same website. Good job guys!!

Alex3917• 19 years ago

If you Google for "self-exclusion tools" there is a standard that most of the mainstream gambling sites implement. I did a quick search on ProQuest and JSTOR, but I couldn't find any information about their efficacy.

tocomment• 19 years ago

Speaking of yc.news settings, what does "showdead" do?

rms• 19 years ago

Spam/otherwise inappropriate posts/submissions are marked by admins as dead. This removes them from the view of everyone that doesn't have showdead on. It's a great way of avoiding claims of censorship -- it's all there to be viewed if you want.

nmeyer• 19 years ago

roflmao

bluishgreen• 19 years ago

Damn, now I have to create another account to procrastinate smoothly.

dcurtis2• 19 years ago

This is probably the least user friendly feature implementation I have ever seen.

Why not call it something better than "noprocrast?" If I didn't read that news post, I would be completely confused as to what it does or what the other two values do.

It's a cool idea/feature, just implemented very, very badly.

dood2• 19 years ago

Just having a little link to the news post next to the noprocrast dropdown would pretty much clear this up.

dcurtis2• 19 years ago

That doesn't really solve the usability problem, it just cures the symptom.

rokhayakebe3• 19 years ago

I think this is a bad idea. Just my thought

rokhayakebe3• 19 years ago

Why is it that every time you state your opinion (even in a respectful manner) someone has to down mod .

dood2• 19 years ago

Probably because opinions without explanations aren't very interesting.

plinkplonk• 19 years ago

How did you think of this one? did someone ask for it? I like it!

cstejerean• 19 years ago

I don't know if anyone asked for it but I started a thread a little while ago about how news.YC was damaging my productivity and several other folks seemed to agree so I'm wondering if this is in any way related. I think it was done more to help the folks accepted into YC procrastinate less and work more.

byrneseyeview• 19 years ago

Excellent! 10 minutes a visit; 1440 minutes between visits. My productivity is saved.

Xichekolas• 19 years ago

Maxvisit: 960 Minaway: 480

For the first time in my life I'll force myself into a regular sleeping schedule... or at least YC will...

tlrobinson3• 19 years ago

My psych major friend is working on a theory that procrastinators have naturally low levels of endorphins, so they subconsciously use the stress of procrastination to raise those levels.

I thought that was a pretty fascinating theory.

voidstar• 19 years ago

I'd heard that procrastinators were perfectionists, and so all of their tasks loom like enormous projects because they envision all the thousands of tiny details they'd have to get just right, while normal people just have this rough idea of the task that doesn't look so hard. So then the procrastinators put it off because they just don't feel like taking on an enormous project. Which is funny, because in saying this I'm reminded of pg's essay that talked about starting with easy small projects rather than big earthshattering ones, because you'll never actually finish those.

kirse• 19 years ago

I generally procrastinate because I simply don't want to do the task, not sure if that's the case for anyone else...

jadams• 19 years ago

removes news.ycombinator.com from marketing plan

prakash2• 19 years ago

awesome!!

prakash2• 19 years ago

PG: Is there any way to remove the override function as well, so that there is no way for the user to well override the settings? Thanks:-)

brlewis• 19 years ago

This is will do great things for news.yc, temporarily.

People here to procrastinate have a lower average quality contribution than people here out of genuine interest. The average submission/comment quality will go up as they temporarily leave.

What will happen is that they will find some other way of procrastinating. The problem isn't that news.yc draws them too strongly; it's that what they should be doing doesn't draw them strongly enough.

pg6• 19 years ago

Most (maybe all) of the most ambitious people I know waste more time than they'd like checking email and visiting news sites. Including me. I added noprocrast partly because I wanted it myself.

umjames• 19 years ago

lazynews.yc: If it restricts by your username, then all you have to do is clear your cookies and you can look at the site, right? You won't be able to comment, but you can read everything.

I guess we are going to have to exercise some self-control. That's fine.

PS. It is a great feature though!

webwright• 19 years ago

If you'd like to know EXACTLY how much time you spend on news.YC (and when you spend it), give me a shout (tony@rescuetime.com) and I'll give you a beta invite code to RescueTime.

euccastro• 19 years ago

FWIW,

When I find something is distracting me from work really bad, I overindulge until it wears off, rather than trying to limit it. But even if I was trying to limit my news.yc intake, this wouldn't work for me.

Normally, I open all links I'm interested in in new tabs, and then I proceed to read them, closing them as I go. I sometimes follow links from interesting articles, but links within news.yc are rare.

So given my current habits, maxvisit would be actually limiting the time I get to skim the frontpages opening tabs. A couple minutes of that could spawn hours of time wasting, if I wasn't otherwise careful.

dang• 5 years ago

(The submitted URL has long since broken but you can see the page as it was by going to https://web.archive.org/web/20071109094843/http://ycombinato....)

New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand

Related Stories