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Ask HN: Is Hacker News a Waste of Time?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News a Waste of Time?

#11

It doesn't necessarily start out as a waste of time but it can become one if you spend too much time on it. I try to restrict myself to reading YC when recompiling stuff on my powerbook. At the beginning of the build I use open -a Opera http://news.ycombinator.com and at the end I have open -a Opera make.out That way the browser automatically takes me to the build output when it's time to get back to coding.

Awesome.

Though at first I thought you were opening Hacker News then going back to a relationship or something.

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News a Waste of Time?

#14
I very quickly gave up reading the comments on the guardian web site. Many, even a majority, are insulting and regurgitated opinions by people unopen to changing their mind, they simply want to shout their (often unappetising) opinion at you.

HN on the contrary is populated by people (like myself, I hope) who wish to learn. They engage in discussion in order to improve themselves, not to win arguments.

4 hours is far too long BTW. I'm sure there must be better things you can do.

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News a Waste of Time?

#15
Great question. I don't have an answer although I do know that reading hacker news != hacking. I too think I spend far too much time reading all the interesting topics posted to this site and that I should probably be doing something more active and less passive. You're not alone.

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News a Waste of Time?

#16
First, only your post is a waste of time. (Zing!) But seriously, that all depends on what your goals are when you come here, how you use the site, and whether or not the site meets your goals.

Second, some meta-advice about the "Trollish question? Although question might be trollish, it isn't because..." meme: Don't do it. If you have a question like that, then it really is trollish. If you think it isn't trollish, then you need to think about it some more, because you're missing something obvious. When you figure it out on your own, you're going to be so glad you didn't embarrass yourself by asking the smart people on HN such a--let's be frank about it--dumb question.

I normally don't respond to posts of this kind, but it has become a line-in-the-sand issue for me because this meme, and so many others like it, seem recently to be running rampant through an otherwise useful site. We get replies of the form, "I'm obviously unqualified to talk about X, but here's my opinion on X," the afore-mentioned "Trollish Q? Not so because I think it's interesting," and so on.

Think of it as being like farting loudly in an elevator. It doesn't matter if you have really bad gas, you wait until you're alone. Similarly, if you've got a vacuous question or opinion so unjustified that you have to qualify it by saying so, just don't air it in a public forum. You're wasting people's time.

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News a Waste of Time?

#18
I hang around a lot of websites (passing the time), and websites like HN are full of entertainment ... but if I was honestly seeking self-improvement I would open some study material and study it.

So, yes, I use it to waste my time. I could be doing better things assuming you believe in objective measures of such things. The addictive low-cal-information-firehose nature of the internet is my one weakness, as Miss Lane never said with a twinkle in her eye.

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