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)?
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.
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!!
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
