
New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand - pg
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html
======
nostrademons
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)?

~~~
pg
_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.

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nanijoe
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
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.

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

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

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

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dcurtis
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.

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

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

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euccastro
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.

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brlewis
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.

~~~
pg
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.

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e1ven
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/>

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

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webwright
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.

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

~~~
cstejerean
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.

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prakash
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:-)

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

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

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umjames
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!

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

~~~
Xichekolas
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...

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pius
That's a pretty sweet feature.

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kcl
Can someone post how to do italics and code indentation?

~~~
tlrobinson
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>)

~~~
davidw
It's a feature request:

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

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jadams
_removes news.ycombinator.com from marketing plan_

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

~~~
rms
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.

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jkush
Paul, this is a cleverly elegant solution!

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prakash
awesome!!

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nmeyer
roflmao

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rokhayakebe
I think this is a bad idea. Just my thought

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

~~~
dood
Probably because opinions without explanations aren't very interesting.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Oops. You forgot to explain why. Use your own remede

