For a founder reading programming.reddit.com or ycnews IS to work. It's just a matter to manage to read a bit to relax and earn interesting information and then back to work instead to burn the whole day in news sites.
Agreed. If you're in a startup, it's good to spend a little effort now and then looking at this sort of news since occasionally you'll learn something relevent to what you're doing.
Building a startup correctly takes research and knowledge (out of many things), which, if tallied as part of the building process, amounts to work. The various resources and the affluent discourse presented by news.YC presents knowledge in a host of fields, but is primarily focused on the subject of startups, as hinted by the title of the aforementioned site. Thus, we can deduce that by being on this site and reading this topic, in an attempt to further our startup knowledge through means of discourse, is in fact 'work.'
In theory, I am working on my startup by being on this site, possibly by even reading this thread.
Of course, when all is said and done you could have probably been working on your startup instead of reading all of the above BS. :)
"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."
