This is ridiculous. YOU decide when to waste your time and not the web.
And think of Europeans (like me) who eagerly read Hacker News.
Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
111–120 of 137 posts
Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
#112I'm surprised that personal responsibility is losing right now (37 to 29).
How is voting for a binding commitment a vote against personal responsibility? As Jon Elster shows, if we take hyperbolic utility discounting seriously binding commitments like these are a key part of personal responsibility.
Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
#113What about taking the override option off noprocrast?
What if instead of an override link it made you answer a Mechanical Turk question? Then at least you'd be accomplishing something useful with your procrastination.
Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
#114If people want to procrastinate, they're going to procrastinate anyway. They'll just do it on other websites -- and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently. As for the notion of improving the feeling of community by having everybody turn up at once... do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all…
Don't you think if people came to the site at certain hours and there was a page saying "get back to work, we'll reopen in 1 hour and 14 minutes" it might interrupt their procrastination in a useful way, and make them think, "Ok, I'll work for a couple hours, then read the news?" I find when I've been procrastinating and there's some kind of reward coming in an hour or two (e.g. dinner) that often makes me buckle dow…
I think this is an interesting experiment worth trying if nothing else. You'll probably see the polls weigh against trying the change, but that's generally because people don't like change.
The way I look at it, no one loses anything by trying it... and it's not hard to put things back to normal if it doesn't work out.
Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
#115What about taking the override option off noprocrast?
Good idea! Noprocrast with override option is (for me) about as effective as hiding the ice cream beneath a bag of frozen peas would be for a kid.
You could limit the max length of minaway to prevent people from accidentally blocking the site forever. I think max is about 190 years at moment (although if a singularity occured that could become a relevant timespan for procrastinators).
Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
#116What about taking the override option off noprocrast?
Which problem(s) are you trying to solve? Is it simply the time sink?
If you think folks spend too much time here, then why not a daily limit? Make noprocrast a fixed limit for everyone.
If you think quality would improve during "open" hours, then why not limit submissions to certain hours? Read-access all the time, but write-access only sometimes.
Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
#117What about taking the override option off noprocrast?
Sounds good to me, although of course you'd want to either limit the noprocrast lock-out time or allow a "let me in an hour from now" override to prevent permanent lock-outs.
Or, if your concern is simply that YC-funded companies aren't getting work done, you could just lock them out for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. I wouldn't complain about that. :-)
Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
#118Grow some self-controlling balls.
Alternatively, only read articles that look interesting in a once-every-24-hour RSS grab and don't otherwise visit the site. Works for me.
Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
#119Some of us legitimately have nothing better to do. Us college students can only spend so much time per day learning, at some point your brain needs to rest.