Too much. In fact, there is a plateau past which repeated checking turns up no new posts and comments. Haha, but seriously, quite often and closer to 10^2 times a day.
Poll: How often do you visit HN?
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: Poll: How often do you visit HN?
#42It's not addiction as much as it is boredom and a thirst for novelty. I only recently discovered HN and added it to my RSS feed.
Probably should do something about out-of-control RSS reading one of these days. It takes an outrageous amount of time albeit interstitial time between actual tasks. As far as "addictions" go, RSS-reading isn't so bad compared to say... heroin, chewing-tobacco, alcoholism, violence, smoking and philandering.
Re: Poll: How often do you visit HN?
#43I visit HN while in the bathroom.
(TMI?)
Re: Poll: How often do you visit HN?
#44The data here is likely going to be biased towards the people who actually DO check HN all the time even if there are more of the once in a while folks unless you factor in the likelihood each group in seeing this poll before it gets buried.
Here's quick correction: Toss out the poll look in the server log. (Requires access to server log)
Re: Poll: How often do you visit HN?
#45Boys and girls! Set noprocrast to yes to reclaim your lives! ;-)
Re: Poll: How often do you visit HN?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if there's some statistical technique you could use to correct for this..
Not placing the poll on HN will help a little... ;) 1.) Need a random sample 2.) Need large enough sample size I guess placing the poll on another popular site (not in the same genre as HN, preferably) would help
Oh, but doesn't that mean you're measuring Hacker News to another popular site?
Re: Poll: How often do you visit HN?
#47I definitely have a case of the CTRL/CMD+N then 'n' and it is just too easy, it is right there in the history.
Code compiling (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), db query taking > .0005ms (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), pondering the change I just made (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), etc etc and on and on.
Re: Poll: How often do you visit HN?
#485-10 times a day, I have pinned HN to my chrome's most visited list.
Re: Poll: How often do you visit HN?
#49Recently I'm down to a couple of times a week, and it's been great. I've recently finally restarted an old part time project I had kicking around gathering dust, and since I actually starting having something better to do in my spare time I don't feel the urge as much.
When I read HN a lot I get a pretty strong paranoid feeling that I'm going to be missing out on lots of amazing stuff that I won't be able to live without, but it turns out I can live without it just fine.
Re: Poll: How often do you visit HN?
#50The data here is likely going to be biased towards the people who actually DO check HN all the time even if there are more of the once in a while folks unless you factor in the likelihood each group in seeing this poll before it gets buried.
I wonder if there's some statistical technique you could use to correct for this..
Figure out how long the poll stays on the home page. For each group, scale that group's number up by the reciprocal of the probability of a person seeing the poll conditional on their membership in that group. (This conditional probability will be equal to min(the amount of time the poll stays on the home page divided by the average length between visits for a member of that group, 1).)
This assumes a person's visits are evenly distributed with time, and that members of all groups are equally likely to respond to the poll if they see it.
Probably less frequent visitors are less likely to have registered accounts and therefore less likely to respond to the poll if they see it.