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. :)
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.
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.
"We'll see" said the farmer.
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.
That reminds me of a Will Rogers quote:
"Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it."
I guess you could rephrase that for time: "Do the best thing you can with your time. If it wasn't a good idea, don't do it."
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.
http://www.dailycommonsense.com/apples-steve-wozniak-work-al...
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.
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!
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".
[programming] [startups] [drama] [meta]
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.
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.
I predict shutting down HN for a few hours a day would make us even more addicted.
Might not be that bad if you work at night - Aus time.
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 :)
To be fair though I am a bit of a news junkie and a horrible procrastinator in general so even without HN I'm sure I'd find other ways to waste time.
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.
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.
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?
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.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/everythinggood
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'll post the launch tomorrow, but for now you can sign-up if you want at http://www.hackernewsletter.com/
Not that I'd expect you or anyone else to do that. That requires a lot of extra effort. But it was cool that he did it. :)
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.
http://icbl.macs.hw.ac.uk/sux0r206/ (free software)
http://www.feedzero.com/ (free service)
You shouldn't have to start from scratch.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Besides, PG put the "procrastination settings" in here for a reason ;-)
From http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html:
...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.
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.So where's the problem? In HN? No, it's in you. Learn to organize your time. Give HN a limited period of time per day.