I sense a bit of irony here: the guy who started HN is telling you not to waste your time by sitting around being unproductive... and you are seeing this article because you are on HN. :)
I do worry about this a lot, actually. HN is a huge time sink for me, and I worry that it is for other people too. It's way worse for me of course-- moderating a forum is exactly the sort of pseudo-work I'm talking about in the essay-- but I often think about whether HN is too engaging for users too, and whether there are things I could to make it less so.
It's an investment. I'm not being funny, despite the fact that's the obvious snap response. I compare where I would be in my personal development with and without HN (and programming.reddit when it was good, and some subreddits that still are good, and my RSS feeds), and net-net it's a good time investment as long as you don't go absolutely nuts.
We don't have technology that can filter news based entirely on "what is 'good' for me" for any non-trivial definition of good. "Interesting to me" we can at least pretend to have filters for, but not "good for me". The only solution is to have something a bit far-ranging like HN or a subreddit and just deal with the misses. The alternative, never get any hits, is worse.
Heck, I'm not even 100% sure which articles are good for me after I've completely read them. Often I can only make the call in retrospect, weeks later.
Your mental image of a well-rounded person probably includes a large library of books and a stack of newspapers. There are reasons for this, even though the newspapers and large libraries ultimately suffer the exact same problems for the exact same reasons, albeit being a little less addictive since the internet is interactive.
Problem is that it's virtually impossible to tell what's a good investment until well after the fact. In money as well as in time.
When I was in college, I wasted a lot of time on Harry Potter fanfiction. I justified it to myself as an investment. I figured that I'd learn how to write better. I was involved as a tech admin on one of the sites, so I figured I could polish my technical skills. After all, where else could a college student actually write code that faced real-world traffic from real-world users? And if nothing else, the fandom was 99.9% female, so I figured I might even end up with a girlfriend.
After about three years of this, I figured "Who the fuck am I kidding?" and realized that it wasn't an investment at all. The hard part of writing is coming up with a believable plot and characters, and fanfiction didn't exercise that at all. I was going into financial software, using Java and custom databases, and so my PHP/MySQL webapp was completely irrelevant to my professional experience. Nobody really respected fanfiction anyway, so it's not like it was a resume boost. And I still didn't have a girlfriend.
Except that in the end, it was an investment. Three years after that, after a couple years in the financial software startup and then a failed startup of my own, I ended up getting back in touch with one of my friends from the fandom , who had since started a job at Google. They were hiring. Partially on the strength of her referral, and partially on the web skills that I'd built up since my time with that fansite, I ended up getting a job there.
Anyone remember Steve Jobs' commencement address, the one with the calligraphy story? It's sorta like that. We keep trying to structure our lives so that everything leads up to achieving our goals, but oftentimes, the goals themselves aren't apparent until we've reached them. It's only in retrospect that we can put things together and say "I meant to do that, yeah really, I did."
I tend to engage in a lot of (sometimes unhealthy) introspection, and the only conclusion that I can draw is that all the little (and big) decisions we make about what to do with our time can have a wide range of impact on our lives, from "little to nothing" all the way up to "life-changing." And it's usually so hard to tell ahead of time whether or not those decisions will end up giving us a net positive or negative.
And to make matters worse (or better, depending on how you think about it), the effects might not even be related to the "good thing" you expected. Like in your example, you ended up getting a referral at a new job, which was probably not what you expected. I think so far in my short life I've figured out that the biggest bang for your buck comes from forming relationships and connections with other people. All that, "it's not what you know, it's who you know," cliched stuff that we smile-and-nod at but rarely really think about, but is so ridiculously true.
We'll See...
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit.
"Such bad luck," they said sympathetically.
"We'll see," the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses.
"How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed.
"We'll see," replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
"We'll see," answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
Exactly. The oddest things can lead in the oddest places. I got my current awesome job because I dabbled in Erlang a bit, a language I would only have heard of via various Internet sites. That one hit alone is worth a lot of misses. (And I got that job because of other things I found on the Internet, and, well, actually all the way back to my very first real job.)
With no offense intended to pg, it's not really anybody's place to decide what is good or not good for me when I can't even tell until years later.
While we were developing Reddit, we always used to run into people who’d recognize us and come up to say hi. “Oh, wow,” they’d say to us. “I can’t tell you how much your site has killed my productivity. I check it a hundred times every day.” At first, we just laughed these comments off. But after a while, I begun to find them increasingly disturbing. We’d set out to make something people want — but what if they didn’t want to want it?
Last year I actually dumped HN and reddit and instead read a weekly digest someone from the coding subreddit created[1]. It was very well curated. Unfortunately, he abandoned it after several weeks.
I am planning on writing up a "Tell HN" post tomorrow, but with the topic so close I figure I would mention it here. I'm working on a weekly newsletter that will allow users to quickly get the best articles on HN each week. I've been wanting to do something newsletter related and thought this would be a great chance plus after seeing Lim's Hacker Monthly I was sold that alternative formats work for the great content on HN.
Thanks for sharing that site. I was checking out the ten issues he published and they looked promising. I won't be relying 100% on just votes, as I think a lot of articles get skewed (which, by social nature, makes sense for HN), but maybe a happy middle ground compared to foldl.org so that I can keep it going.
I'm the guy from foldl. Thanks for your kind words. I do still want something like foldl, but I don't have time to create it - I got started because I wanted to read less, not more!
I don't think that you can produce a good newsletter/digest just relying on total up/downvotes. I hoped to find time to apply machine learning to the problem, but never have.
I think it is dangerously engaging for me, unfortunately. The danger lies in the fact that its so easy to rationalize my time here as being good (for my career, for my brain, etc).
It's an extreme idea, and I don't know of any other website that does it, but I think HN might be addictive enough that the only surefire way you could keep me off it is by actually switching it off at certain times of day!
Well then, the solution is to make it look less like work, so your brain isn't fooled.
Get rid of the tasteful orange-and-grey colour scheme, and go for a purple-and-black design inspired by videogame forums. Set the font to Comic Sans. Add user avatars, dancing hamsters, a "funny sound effect of the day" button, and rename the site from Hacker News to "Chat About Random Crap With Strangers From The Internet".
I think user generated tags go a long way in filtering out which stories I'd like to read/explore. (I used to read Slashdot until I found HN a few weeks ago). For now I just use the number of comments as good first approximation.
I've considered doing that. What if we just shut down HN e.g. from 11 am to 1 pm Pacific = 2 to 4 pm Eastern? This feature wouldn't be much use for people Australia, but at least it would be helpful for some users.
I'd like a 'timeslot' feature that I could set myself eg. block my account all day except between 10pm and 11pm. This actually occurred to me previously when I activated the noprocrast feature, which was good also
Another idea that would make this work even better might be to have any changes in your blocking settings only take effect a week after you make the changes. It's hard to have discipline about settings for right now, but it's easy to have discipline about settings next week.
I like this idea a lot, except knowing me, I'd clear my cookies and cache and just read HN not logged in until I could login.
Maybe a way to get around this is to remove the links (not the text of the links, but the link functionality itself) unless you have an account and are logged in.
I guess in the end, if you don't have the self-control needed not to throw away your time reading about things (instead of doing things), you probably aren't going to benefit from being blocked from HN. You'll find something else equally unproductive to fill that hole.
Well usually good ol' fashion self-discipline comes with physical barriers between you and time-wasting opportunities. For instance going to the library every day to study - does that show self-discipline, or a chronic lack of self-control (that would allow one to study at home)? When you do your work on a computer, or worse, on the internet, infinite distractions are only a mouse-click away. Even the thought of this can be distracting.
This would be like a drug dealer not dealing for certain part of his regularly scheduled day. I can only imagine that this would make it worse because your cutting off supply and thus increasing demand.
You'll probably increase traffic :).
Seriously, this is a nice gesture, but like most other forms of social welfare, I don't think you can save people from themselves through things like this.
Perhaps some tweaks could be made to encourage more valuable content on Hacker News. For example, a link to a new Ruby gem that may solve a problem I have makes me more productive. Links about Facebook, Google, Apple, TechCrunch, etc. drama is junk food.
Maybe an inline comment targeted at the user - in red or otherwise highlighted - saying: "you've been reading HN for X hours today, maybe it's time to enjoy some sunlight?" or similar text :)
That's a scary thought. I think the HN community is very aware of time wasting. There appears to be a constant stream of don't-waste-time encouragement.
HN is a good personal investment if you don't take the "fake work" bait[1]. Any non-fiction book is the same - you can spend hours reading every word/sentence/paragraph/page, or scan and focus with a purpose. It's easy to fall into passivity.
[1] Perhaps there is a better system to bring "good investment posts" to the top.
I think a slightly customizable version of this would be useful, though too much customization can lead to people developing instinctive defenses against the scheduled shutdown (like I sometimes do with maxvisit/minaway by opening enough tabs all at once to occupy me for the minaway duration).
If you were to shut off HN during a set time period everyday, don't do it during lunch time. Eating lunch and reading HN is something I do that is _actually_ productive, or at least more productive than eating lunch and not reading.
Pseudo work is the lottery of productivity. And yet, because people spend so much time doing it, the odds eventually come up that they'll reap some sort of reward. That said, I have found a rule of thumb for myself: the more that pseudo work is done in isolation, the less likely it is to yield results. So, my alarm revolves around how long it's been since I've interacted with somebody.
I think that's a very good point. I got more done when living in a dorm room than any other time in my life. Even if it's just screwing around with a project idea at a dev house meetup, I get tons more work done (and have a lot more fun) than if I was at home.
Maybe there's some way to harvest the chaotic energy of HN so that people aren't just wasting time, but rather contributing to something. Maybe if there were some way to do massive collaborative projects that could be embedded into HN, where users could each contribute to building part of a larger system or structure. I don't think this is a new idea, but it's really only ever worked when started organically via sites like reddit or 4chan; maybe it can be done in a structured form.
I dunno...I think it may be more that doing it alone increases the risk that a project may fail, but also increases its innovativeness if it succeeds. I'm reminded of Steve Wozniak's "Work alone" quote:
It seems that basically all truly innovative projects either came out of a single mind or of a small team that worked so closely together that they might as well have been one mind. There seems to be a regression-to-the-mean effect as you add more people to a project: you eliminate truly bad ideas, but you also eliminate some truly good ones too. Many ideas that look bad are really just different.
In some ways, I think this unfortunate, because working on a team is a lot more fun, IMHO, than working solo. But that seems to be the tradeoff.
I think you would get the same effect. It's not because of direct interference: I've seen it happen even when the extra "cooks" do everything they can to encourage innovation. It's because there's a natural tendency to self-censor your more "out there" ideas when you know there are people watching. In order to let them bloom, you usually need a safe, private environment where you can try out lots of things that don't work before you condense on one that does.
I really like the "watercooler" idea floated a while back: switching HN off for most of the day, and only have it on for (say) half an hour every four hours (around the clock, for all-night hacking and overseas users).
It would increase simultaneity of use, and hopefully therefore interaction, giving better chances for ideas to bounce and gel, teams to form and so on.
This crazy idea of underusing technology to solve a problem is probably something that only the earliest of early adopters/innovators would consider (reminds me of rms's server that emails webpages to him - psuedo-neo-luddite). But whether a good idea or not, you have to admit it would make HN less engaging.
EDIT it could be trialled with a copy of HN, linked to from the front-page (with "open in $n minutes"), and populated with the same new stories. This would keep votes and comments separate. note: I don't it's going to happen, but I'm curious about whether it would work or not. Has anything like this been tried before?
HN is like alcohol in that it serves some social purpose, but can also be abused. Since it's a lot more novel, I think we're still evolving, as a community, to find the balance for "socializing responsibly" on the web.
I think it's a mistake to worry about how other people use their time. HN is a valuable resource; so is time. One of the most valuable skills that entrepreneurs/would be entrepreneurs need is time management. They can't delegate that to someone else!
I know that I suffer from the "I should really get off HN and back to work" guilt. And when it hits, that's exactly what I do.
I'm sure HN is a huge time sink for you, but I don't believe that, taken as a whole, moderating and interacting here is a low value activity for you. I suspect HN is a very important marketing tool for YC.
That said, I wish you'd spend a bit more time refining Arc. We could use better debugging tools. I'd love to be able to look at the stack when I get an error, for example.
Part of the problem is that HN is extremely time sensitive. You see different stories an hour or two later. Adding a comment behaves differently depending when it's added. Anything that would make participating a day later just like participating immediately would make it much easier not to refresh.
Except HN is valuable. You've obviously created something people want here, even if you're not charging for it. Now, there's certainly a way to spend too much time here, but you creating this forum pays off in a way that responding to emails doesn't. At least, I assume it does.
There's an interesting duality where it's "useful" to spend your time creating a site like this, but less useful to spend your time reading a site like this. Although the same argument could probably be made for writing/reading a book.
It's often a poor investement, but otherwise everyone would be on slashdot, reddit, stackoverflow, some random forum, usenet, a mailing list ... there's possibly millions of bad investments on the web.
The only real solution is to make real work easier - by having a better (more lean) workflow, so starting work is as almost as easy as hitting a HN link.
Honestly Paul, I wouldn't worry about how others spend their time too much. It's true that social media encourages "consumption" instead of "production" but people learn to moderate themselves over time. Or they get fired, go into poverty and can't afford an internet connection anymore - one or the other.
However, if it's a fun problem to solve, then by all means try to. What would work for me is seeing how much time I spend on HN. Having the hours stare me in the face would have the same effect as having the calories I consume stare me in the face (while I'm standing in line to get a buttery, ginger scone for mid-morning snack).
Things that are useful sometimes displace those that are useful right now. news.yc definitely falls in that category for me sometimes. Its also easy to be blindsided when what you are reading seems to have a high payoff at some arbitrary point in the future (with low odds) , and what you are working on is something with a low immediate payoff (with high odds). In short enticing articles about haskell and llvm sometimes keep me from doing the routine things that matter on a daily basis. I would like to believe that this self corrects after a while but I havent collected any data to support this notion.
Add a 8 hour delay before a poster can see his karma points from a post. Let other users see how many karma posts have but do not let the poster see the points. It takes away the instant gratification aspect to karma.
Like that famous quote about advertising expense...
I think about half of the time I spend here is wasted and half extremely valuable. The problem is that it's usually not clear which is which until after I've sunk the time.
When I first discovered HN it was very low-traffic and I could check it once a week and not miss anything. Now I can check it twice daily and still miss a lot. But it seems this is the way of all social networks. The only solution I can think of is to continuously find smaller niches and avoid the large social gathering places.
One could make HN less of a time sink my making HN 'slower'. If only 5 articles appeared in a day, it would hopefully consume far less time and one way of reducing the number of articles would be to impose a 'karma' cost on each submission. If it costed 10 points to make each submission, folks might be a tad more prudent.
Ah, but we come to Hacker News because there's a higher signal to noise ratio. Otherwise, many of us would be wasting time trying to parse the internet for something worth reading.
Hacker News is actually helpful to me. I've limited a lot of my reading to here, which has saved me loads of time, to be sure.
I would have to say that on the whole the time I spend on HN is worth it. I've been able to improve my design, programming, and business knowledge due to the focused content here in a way that I don't think is possible on any other forum.
I think /best and /bestcomments go a long way. It would be really nice to have RSS feeds for them and a way to change the time horizon (per month perhaps)!
Haha - quite true. Though it must be said that, after a streak of productivity, a break is prudent. HN is some of the most productive downtime I get to enjoy.
Besides, PG put the "procrastination settings" in here for a reason ;-)
noprocrast is the switch that turns it on and off, maxvisit minites is the longest you're allowed to look before you get kicked off for minaway minutes. I forget what delay does.
Delay is the amount of time (in minutes) between when you hit submit and when the comment is posted, its for people (like me) who post something than immediately decide to edit it.
...There's a new "delay" field in your profile that lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them.
Also
7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
Like anything, it depends on how you use it. I spend quite a bit of time here, but it's worthwhile and enjoyable investment (I hate using that term in this case). I learn a lot and have met some awesome people through here. I would not trade a single minute of it back.
Playing devil's advocate: the guy who started HN did it to increase productivity in seed applications screening. That's us who took it onto the dark side :)
