So Long and Thanks for all the Bits | Hacker News Reader

So Long and Thanks for all the Bits

jacquesmattheij.com

404 pointsjacquesm103 comments

The downside for me is that I'm a person that is of an addictive nature and I can't do things half...

Me too.

I have always struggled with how to allocate my limited time. Every time I have wanted to do something in the past few years, the first question that came to me was, "How much time will this take away from my work?" At first, if the answer was nonzero, I didn't do it. But I have slowly learned that nonzero answers were OK, and in many cases, quite welcome.

About a year ago I vowed that I'd quit HN on the day that I'd pass 50,000 karma...

Funny, some time ago, I vowed that I'd never quit HN, no matter how high (or low) my ROI. I was one of the first ones here and plan to be here to help turn out the lights (perish the thought).

Jacques, please understand that you are part of my addiction to HN. Your contributions have been priceless. I suspect you have reached the point in your life where you have a responsibility to "pass on" the gifts you have received. You probably have many other ways to do this, but none, I imagine, as effective as Hacker News.

Your contributions here have changed lives. I hope you haven't pulled a Matt Maroon and obfuscated your password. I urge you to reconsider. It is possible for an addictive overachiever to get most of his work done and still be part of HN. I am living proof.

Part of being a successful achiever is not giving up. I hope I'm not alone in not giving up on you. There must be a workable solution to your problem. Consider us resources to find it.

What do we have to do to help you continue to be part of this community without sacrificing too much else?

Terribly addictive things: drinking, video games, social networking, and online forms.

Is it ethical to prod your alcoholic drinking buddy because he's fun to be around? Maybe the one not wanting to be alone has a problem too and just can't see it.

When somebody admits they found a negative influence in their life, congratulate them, acknowledge you'll miss them, then let them move on.

While I agree with the sentiment, I think that the results of an HN addiction can be more productive than the results of alcoholism. Contributing to reasoned debate on HN probably helps to educate a lot of people even if they don't participate themselves.

I love HN, but I think you may be over-estimating its importance.

Getting work done is one thing. Taking your work another level (for whatever reason) is another thing.

There are many "interesting" stories floating around HN about startups, companies, success stories, and probably technical superiority. Sometime, people want to be in the storyline and not on the bench having long-winded arguments (not discussion, but arguments as if there should be one true answer).

I joined HN more than 3.5 years ago. A few months ago, I began to disengage from HN. My life turned around for the better. I lost weight, got more things done (not just work, but other things in life), met new people, learned a lot more, understand myself better, and overall, happier. I know some of you become friends here but you know that awkward feeling when you actually meet your online friend in real life? ... yeah... I got that feeling so I know it's not working for me.

Not all people have the same feeling/outcome like I do. Maybe it's just my personality that I tend to be more outgoing in real-life than spending time online arguing about Python vs Ruby, VCs vs Angels, Apple vs Google, the future (those discussions were fun had I read them less frequent).

Being part of HN feels akin to the starbuck-laptop-user lifestyle, Godin/Tim Ferriss/GTD readers, MBA grads. People want to be a part of a community that they think special (or can improve themselves). Maybe they would, who knows.

At the end of the day, I felt that it's time for me to move on. It's like part of growing up. I learned what I needed to learn from HN "otaku" (to certain extend...).

Wow... it's been a while since the last time I left comment here. Back to dormant.

Y'all have a good day and do whatever you guys enjoy (be it being a part of HN or an outsider).

So first thing this morning I scanned HN.

Then I scanned the rest of my 30 startup tabs in my browser.

Coming back to HN, and wanting to get some work done, I finally forced myself to close the tab.

Two hours later I succumb to my inner demons and open HN back up, and there's JacquesM saying he's bailing.

Yay Jacques! Boo Jacques! I respect the hell out of you and I'm going to miss you. I even at one point thought about coming by and visiting, and then it occurred to me: what would we do? Sit in a coffee shop and post comments back and forth on HN? Something wrong with this picture.

So I think you are doing the right thing. My current strategy is to use stopwatches and such to limit my participation -- so far with very mixed results. I am able to use HN as sort of a reverse productivity indicator: the longer I stay on HN any one day the less likely I am to feel like the day was well spent. That's not HN's fault by any means: I think there's just something naturally addictive about interacting with lots of other people who have the same skills and interests as you do. HN is my watercooler. And that's a good thing and a bad thing.

Remember that if you come back we will all forget the fact that you left. Kind of like your friends at the bar forgetting that you went to rehab. :)

This may come out as selfish, but what about the rest of us? What if all the high-karma uber-commenters leave? I think you guys have a responsibility to the community to at least dedicate a little time to HN. Please, please don't stop contributing altogether.

I upvoted you, because it's an interesting, if misguided, point.

Nobody gets paid for posting on HN or having a high karma. We sure as hell don't have a responsibility to keep donating our time to post interesting stuff... any more than an avid networker has a responsibility to turn up at all the networking events!

That you're not paid for commenting on HN is certain; that people sometimes do things out of charity is equally obvious :-) I wasn't intending to imply an obligation, so perhaps "responsibility" is the wrong word. A crude analogy (since it's the first one that pops to mind) is how sad the Ruby community way when _why left.

I understand what you are worried about, but we can do something about it. How about we non-uber-high-karma-types strive to be better contributors.

HN attracts some of the most insightful and eloquent commentary around, but there are enough resources here and enough trial-and-error opportunities for aspiring contributors to thrive.

My point, whichb probably didn't come across clearly, was not that HN will go haywire if jacquesm leaves, you're right there are many more good commentors. And the thing about karma is, lacking any other measure, I take karma ~ knowleagability.

My points were (1) the good commenters have a big influence on us noobs, who learn a lot from them; 2) each society has ratios of different members, which when they hit a certain level, can bring about nonlinear changes in the society; I thought that if jacquesm's leave becomes an exodus, that can have a substantial effect on HN.

Interesting. I've been working on a blog post entitled "My slow disengagement from HN" about why I had been slowly walking away. But people might as well read yours.

I've been consuming HN through the newsyc50 Twitter account which only shows me news items that have > 50 points. I started out with newsyc20 (> 20) and have been weaning myself off.

I've found that stopping reading the conversations has been the easiest part, but that HN's filter of interesting stories is hard to beat.

"I've found that stopping reading the conversations has been the easiest part, but that HN's filter of interesting stories is hard to beat."

(imo) the conversations/comments make HN more than the stories. When I read the comments before the stories, I get a different perspective(than reading stories before comments).

I'm completely selfish, for I only read stories that are >80

i just started reading conversations, before that i even didn't know they exist under @newsycombinator links. i thought some kind samaritan collects the really interesting stuff along the web.

For those who didn't know about the newsyc Twitter bots, they were created by Jeff Miller: http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-ne...

I personally prefer his RSS feeds (http://feeds.feedburner.com/newsyc50 in my case), which lets me follow HN inside Google Reader, keeping track of what I've read / liked. It's useful, because I don't miss interesting stories, and I don't feel like I have to constantly monitor the home page in search of interesting posts.

Of course, it's also good to go vote up new stories sometimes. Especially if you want to be part of the emerging HN discussion (I often comment once everybody is gone :/ ).

I hope you (and everybody else in the community) have peace, prosperity, and happiness, whether on HN or wherever your journey leads you.

Sorry to see you go! I hope you're not leaving the IRC channel though :-)

For what it's worth, for those who feel HN is a bit too engaging but still want to read the best, most useful startup articles every day (according to who? according to me!) do follow http://swombat.com as a low-engagement substitute. Swombat.com will never take over your life - you can't even comment there! :-)

(Email subscriptions are coming soon, for those who don't even want to open up the browser)

I wish I could double-upvote that, swombat. It was a heartfelt message of sadness, and also a plug for your website.

I can't imagine a better way to send off Jacques. True HN spirit.

(And for those of you who think I'm being snarky, I am not. HN is about trying things out to help people. It is fitting that, when presented with a problem, we should share the things we have been working on to help folks with that problem. Outstanding job. I only wish I had something to offer along these lines.)

I use all addictive web services primarily on my iPhone:

* Facebook

* Quora

* Twitter

* Hacker News

The interface is slightly more awkward - but not annoying - and I generally check my iPhone when doing something that is inefficient (eg: making tea) so I don't feel bad about using web services there.

I find its made a big difference to my productivity.

Excellent idea. I'll have to try that.

Same here (on an android). It makes me less inclined to comment, which can be a real timewaster as then you are committed to the thread. Normally I touch type so I don't have the patience for the SW keyboard.

Jacques, you are one of my favorite commenters. I'm sad to see you go, but I definitely understand your reasons, this place is way too addictive. I've added your blog to my Google Reader list [1], I hope you'll write there often. I especially love the monthly idea dump.

Het ga je goed.

[1] For those interested, the RSS feed url is: http://jacquesmattheij.com/blog/1/feed

Thanks, needed that. Autodiscovery didn't seem to work on his blog.

Two words: Evaporative Cooling.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665

http://searchyc.com/submissions/%2522evaporative+cooling%252...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367

An alternate name for the result is the Dead Sea effect: http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d....

However I think that it is too early to get too concerned about hn.

Well, I certainly didn't see that coming.

I'm a bit speechless, but thank you for your participation, and all that you've given the community over the years.

I just freakin' told you. Just told you.

Edit: this is why I'm always irritated

http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2161059

My personal solution to the HN addictiveness problem is to use the noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway that are built into your user settings.

Mentioning here as it was probably 6 months before I realized these existed - from the original thread:

"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."

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

Unfortunately Incognito mode on the browser gets me right back in.

What, noo! OK, here's the deal, nobody upvotes this submission so he doesn't go over 50K karma :-)

I never corresponded with jacquesm personally but in my relatively brief time in HN came to enormously appreciate his thoughtful and knowledgeable comments, his calm, anti-flame tone, but most importantly his generosity with ideas.

I am perplexed by this decision, though. I spend one to two hours per day on HN on average, assuming he does more, it's a good chunk of time. Yet, isn't stopping contributing altogether somewhat drastic?

I think HN needs all the mentoring it can get and hope that this does not become a trend. As they say: "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!"

There is a little known bug in the HN code, but karma tops out at 65534 and then rolls back to 1. So, upvote this story ~15000 more times and he'll come back.

> About a year ago I vowed that I'd quit HN on the day that I'd pass 50,000 karma, that should be enough for anybody and that point in time has come.

Downvoted. ;-)

I joined reddit when I was supposed to be writing my MSc thesis; my karma soared to a few thousand pretty quickly.

Karma is an odometer, counting up how much time you could have been spending doing something else.

It does pay to take a step back from time to time. Fare well, and I wish you all the best.

When I want to get work done, I just set my hosts file to block all of the time-wasting sites.

127.0.0.1 localhost

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com

127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com

Etc,

Then if I want to check those sites I have to go through the hassle of opening the hosts file and commenting the lines.

This definitely of keeps me from checking 'reflexively' throughout the day.

Its a solution that even works on Windows and Mac!

There is also noprocrast in your profile.

Jacquesm, I never written to you before...I have always procrastinated emailing you. Just wanted to say thank you!.

You have been among the articulate members in here. There are so many 'high' posts from you that not even a * top jacquesm 100 posts * would do justice to your contribution. Thank you for sharing your experiences.

Would it be private to disclose what you would be doing in your "HN time"? Any thing new on your mind? I was wondering how you would hold it back without letting us know :) Please do write about your 30 day de-addiction experience

Good luck to you (and hope you (don't) have a relapse!) :)

I look forward to reading the follow up memoir about your time on HN, 'Mostly Harmless (Assuming Time has no Value)'.

It is tempting to downvote some of your old comments to keep you below the 50,000 limit. But as others have pointed out, there will be plenty of other opportunities to connect and learn from you. I'm sure the productivity boost that awaits you will be a boon to us all.

For specifics, I found your sharing the experience with ww.com and video in the early days of the web were incredibly interesting and edifying. Thank you for that.

I'm pretty sure I'd prefer to be remembered for most insightful contributions, rather than just as "Best Nick". Still, I'll take what I can.

No doubt we'll still be in touch. I have some follow-ups that I've promised, and are still on the way.

Best.

Would you care to fill in a noob on the meaning of your nick?

He literally rides giraffes.

Yup. I have a giraffe, and I ride it. In suitable circumstances I also ride giraffes that belong to other people.

Email me if you really, really need to know more.

"I also ride giraffes that belong to other people."

Naturally. Otherwise your nic would be RiderOfGiraffe.

Unless I had more than one. Which I don't.

I'm even more confused.

As I said earlier: Email me if you really, really need to know more.

Jacques, I'm sad to see you go. I myself remember telling my girlfriend that I was going to quit after 2k karma, and then I was going to quit once I made it to /leaders... and here I am, posting a comment.

Maybe someday I'll have the same degree of self-control you do.

The one person who most strongly encouraged me to come back after I initially had decided to bow out of HN participation was none other than jacquesm (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779116). I am glad I came back but now, sadly, there can't help be but be some material diminution in quality and sociableness with the departure of one so intelligent, encouraging, and stimulating. Jacques, I can only say what you said to me: "You'll be missed . . . I learned from [you] . . . I hope to see you back here some day!" I wish you well.

Well, if jaquesm convinced you to come back, that's just one more great thing he's done that he won't be around to do anymore...

It's a bit early for April Fools, Jacques. Nice try. I give it about a week.

If you are in fact serious and able to break the engagement I'm sure I won't be alone in wishing for the speedy return of your contributions.

Congratulations Jacques! That's a very good decision. We will stay in touch privately, but I agree, it's best to get hooked on more useful things.

Cheers!

This is the kind of message that reminds me that HN is not eternal.

That one day, it will be remembered as a precious community, surprising in the quality of its members and the stability of its standards. A sort of modest, modern day digital Athens if you wish.

So let's enjoy it to the fullest while it lasts, and thank you Jacques, for all the invaluable contributions you brought to the community.

Classy exit. Should you find cold turkey not working for you, let me suggest this might be an opportunity to hack yourself and figure out how to participate in a non-addictive manner, which could be a profound positive change in how you operate generally (since you indicate you have "an addictive personality").

Peace and good journey.

Jacquesm- You were the first person I ever "noticed" on HN, and whenever I'd scan through comments I'd always stop to read yours. While it's sad to see you go, I understand all your reasons. I've been involved with other communities and had to do the same thing.

Good luck, and like swombat said - I hope you stick around the chat. :)

> the first person I ever "noticed" on HN

Same for me. Is there any statistics like average number of posts of the user per day? I'd be really curious to see that number for "high karma" users.

As I've noticed him, I actually had an impression that JacquesM really does only sit in front of HN pages, refreshes, reads and responds.

Afterwards I also found out myself why and how HN is so addictive.

Well, by "noticed" I just mean that I noticed that I kept upvoting posts by this "Jacquesm" guy. I had noticed other people existed. :)

Wow, 50K karma in just 785 days? That's almost 64/day, quite a feat.

For me, the discussions in the threads are the best part of HN. The submissions are great; but what brings it all together is the discussion.

That's certainly some serious evidence in support of his addictive nature. How much time each day would you have to spend on HN to get 50K in karma, even allowing for a person who has a high level of quality submissions and comments? Seems like it would take up a significant chunk of one's life and I could see why he might want to quit cold turkey.

While this is true, there's a reason that the mean isn't always used in descriptive statistics: outliers can easily skew this. I've had a few multi-hundred-point submissions, for example, and while 64karma/day is nothing to sneeze at, you'd just need one or two really solid comments or a good submission per day.

Then again, considering the way I'm phrasing this, maybe it's more of a sign of my own addiction rather than something a reasonable person would say...

If I had known you'd be quitting after 50,000 karma, I'd have downvoted more of your comments!

I'm rather new to HN, so I was wondering, can I buy some of that Karma on E-bay?

Mi falta. No offense intended by the tongue in cheek comment. Perhaps not the place....

Jacques, I can understand and respect your decision. Thank you for your years of engagement and contributions. Hopefully, we'll stay in touch.

Sucks to see you go, you've been one of the better posters on here(if not the best). But I know exactly where you are coming from...HN is just a huge time sink and really hurts your productivity...something new and interesting shows up every hour, so you don't have time to actually get things done.

The best way I found was to eliminate HN from any bookmarks and navigation bars. When you have to type stuff in to get here, you really cut down on your visits.

I think HN itself is a net positive overall since you get to learn a lot of what's happening out there without checking 30 websites for news. The problem are the comments. You check to see what people are saying, then come back and see if there were any new ones or if someone responded to a comment you found interesting.

What pg should do is add a productivity option that doesn't show the comments link. That way you still get the stories, but aren't distracted by the discussion.

A quick and dirty version of this would be to set .subtext { display: none;}

So one of the superstars of HN is leaving?

Jacques, it was wonderful to know you and read your thoughts here on HN. HN will miss you dearly. While I respect your decision to leave, I'd urge you to reconsider the decision to leave completely. And if you decide to come back, we will be as welcoming as we always were...

Till then, so long my friend.

Well, that's too bad. I don't know if what works for me will work for you, but I find it very hard to check the news sites (or the web) when I'm working on something very interesting.

I'm guessing you wouldn't have to go if that did work for you, so thanks for your help and support over the months I've been here.

Quick! Everyone downvote comments from jacquesm and let's see if we can get his karma back below 50,000.

In all honesty, like many others here I completely understand and wish you the best.

The other day I saw the "lists" on HN and wondered what those karma leaders get done in addition to gaining karma on HN.

I actually found your blog via HN and have since too become a regular user of the network.

It was a pleasure Jacques.

Well gentlemen, this how you make a graceful exit. Round of applause.

(HN Roast anyone?)

Jacques, thank you for all the wonderful posts. Really enjoy your insights and the sharing of your life stories. I'm impressed with your desire to continue to learn new stuff and asked questions.

I completely understand your motivation to quit HN. It takes a lot of time and effort to write well thought out posts. Taking a break is good. I hope you do come back for reading. HN is a nice source for news. I found that not logging in helps to stop the urge to post. May be, just may be, after a while we'll see your posts, however sparsely.

Good luck and wish you success on all your endeavors.

I'm actually really happy to hear this. While we'll all miss you terribly, every minute you're on HN you're not putting your brilliant mind to much more important things.

Hmm, maybe. How relatively important is his direct and indirect mentoring that took place here?

His life, his priorities, and I salute him. But if we're talking about impact, what happens here is significant.

I'm sorry I didn't say it better. I'm not saying his mentoring was inconsequential; I'm saying he has even more important work ahead of him.

Jacques, I remember you telling me once that karma here at HN was as gameable as it is anywhere. I remain convinced that you've gamed it by making consistently high-quality, thoughtful, well-supported comments and posts helpful to the people likely to vote here. You've certainly earned your HN retirement, if it's that time; but the community will be poorer for it.

A little off-topic, but I wonder if it would be easy/hard to write some sort of proxy rule that strips all cookies sent to the news.ycombinator.com domain. That would prevent you from ever being able to login, but would still allow you to maybe browse the frontpage. (Or even better strips all cookies, and only allows access to the frontpage or just the RSS feed)

Finally, I can rise to prominence as The Other Jacques!

edit: I can't read this thread, I feel like everyone is addressing me personally :/

Have you found a new similar community to join? In the sense a new community with fresh "ideals" you are thinking of joining or already did. It's been more then 6 months I've been trying to find a good place (I need a way to keep track of trends).

I think I've assimilated all HN could give me. And good luck!

I feel a lot like how I felt when _why "died". Someone who made great contributions to a community I love is leaving said community.

Best of luck, Jacques. We'll miss you, and we'll always love to have you back, whether to return full force or just ask for feedback on a startup and then leave again.

Would HN participation be more manageably casual if the home page kept popular stories around for more than a day? Then you wouldn't feel like you had to visit every day just because you might miss something.

Thanks for the kind words about my nic ;), and good luck to you.

Perhaps one of these days someone will succeed in inventing the optimally addictive HN experience, and we'll look forward to seeing you then...

Heh, going cold turkey to kick the "addiction", probably the only way. Wishing you luck with it. The place will be weird without you :)

Thanks for all your contributions Jacques, drop me an email any time :)

Au revoir, not good bye. I'm sure you'll be back, for old times sake.

I am really, really bad with names -- even more so on Hacker News where the names are grayed out...

But jacquesm is definitely one of the few that stuck with me. You will be missed!

Sorry to see you go and thanks for all the great insights over the years. Hopefully you stop by a few more times to read all of these appreciative comments.

Jacques, thanks for what you've contributed here. You are a voice of reason and capture the spirit of why I lurk and occasionally participate on HN.

You have helped me both indirectly through your contributions on HN and personally one on one via #startups on freenode, and for that, I thank you.

Jacques, succes met je volgende avontuur ;)

Thanks for your great contributions Jacques ... it'll be strange not seeing you around here anymore. Best of luck!

I will miss your contributions, which I always find thoughtful and often find enlightening. Best of luck to you!

Awww - but, all the best to you, sir. Less traffic and faster pageviews does sound good though.. :-)

A very sincere thank you, yours were the comments that would be on the top of my list. Good luck!

Cheers, Jacques. We never knew each other but I always appreciated your insights. All the best!

i just (almost) quit smoking the http://www.sql.ru, a #1 russian database guru community where i have 30k posts, and now you say that hackernews is as addictive?

oh, no...

I hope now you can concentrate better on your other endeavours. Good luck!

Happy trails, Jacques... enjoyed your commentary and perspective.

i totally understand the sentiment. i just set my maxvisit/minaway to 20/1300. one visit per day is healthier. perhaps no visits per day is healthiest for me as well...

Thank you, Jacques! We'll miss you :)

Your contributions will be missed.

You're a good guy. Good luck. :)

Will miss you. Farewell.

All the best, Sir.

Bye!

Jacques has been a tremendously valuable member of this community and a true friend to me. Asking nothing in return he has always been there to help.

I remember one day a couple months ago everything that could have possibly gone wrong with my business/life... did. It was one of those moments they always warn you about in the startup literature, and I was not expecting it at all. I didn't even realize what was happening - that this was one of "those" moments - I really, really was ready to quit.

Jacques talked me through it. I was ready to throw in the towel and he was there talking to me on IRC and email and cheering me on.

It was one of those things that you just don't forget. I never forget people who are there for me when I really need them.

Jacques is a friend and the entire community is for the worse from his departure. The plus side is that since Hacker News is now slightly worse, hopefully the downward trend will continue and he will come back again, restoring equilibrium.

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