Does removing "override" on noprocrast increase HN's market share? | Hacker News Reader

Does removing "override" on noprocrast increase HN's market share?

nielsolson.us

28 pointsniels_olson18 comments

Is this modded up to #1 so we can all feel good about ourselves? "Everyone on HN is so interesting I just can't get enough!!11"? Puh-lease.

Anyway, I used to be really bad about reading social news sites. The good news is that programming Reddit eventually scared me away because people are so willfully ignorant, and don't want to hear anything they don't already like. Think religious fundamentalists, but even worse.

This has given me a lot of free time. Now when I feel like reading Reddit, I instead open up my TODO list (a plain text file), and pick one thing to do. While I'm there, I also add two more things. I'm not missing anything on Reddit (if there's something really cool, it will be here), and I'm getting real work done instead of wasting my life. (And not getting mad at 13 year old kids that think they're programmers.)

Noprocrast is nice, but it's even better if you convince yourself to not even want to waste time.

In short: "I used to open up another browser to bypass my Firefox anti-procrastination software, Leechblock, so that I could override noprocrast and read HN. This usually led to me reading other, less interesting sites like Reddit. Now that I can't override noprocrast, I decided to use it exclusively and removed HN from my Leechblock blocked list. Now I don't end up reading Reddit afterwards. Thanks!"

Moderately interesting, but the linkbait title was unnecessary.

Agreed. I think this post proves that people are voting up stories before reading them.. not that that's a big surprise, but it's more associated with Digg and Reddit :(

I usually upvote stories to save them or mark them to-read. I don't vote up to thank or agree, though I still do it, subconciously. I reply with a thanks instead. I'm probably starting to rely on other users to do the voting now than it's not 100 users any more, so I guess am using this site selfishly. Also, after 2 years here, I don't care about karma and post whatever I feel (that relates to the topic.). I used to spend the entire hour editing a post, but now I just come to read. Then again, I have to do homework and readings for 7 CS/Math classes this semester, so I am not here so much to say something about some random science topic. On the other hand, this site is great for opening up my mind and feeling like I'm part of a bigger and insightful nerd world. There are more submissions but much less startup advice that I haven't heard before, compared to when this was Startup News. On the other hand l, it is that breadth that I like while I'm in college. Any such stories with a high score, interesting title, or high number of comments I make sure to save to read later by upvoting (see /saved?id= feature). (I didn't save or upvote this article because it's neither science nor start up.)

Hey, you started 12 days after me. Anyway, same sort of thing here. Been around for two years now, and I use to participate more. That's when I was sorta at a phase where I was just consuming a lot of information that was new to me. Now, not a lot is real news, so I'm starting to build more.

Nowadays, it's nice to see when you, mechanical_fish, Tichy, chaostheory, and others that have been around for a while comment. And the occasional comments from raganwald, buccheit, etc.

I still think that the front page shouldn't have upvote links, and that the new page should have them only.

People do not read anything online. They come to school yard to say: "Hi! What#s up?" Blablub. "Cool. Upmod." Wooah. Yeah. Popular. Uh. What?

The revised title is better. I wish I had thought of it when I posted. And, yes, the blog post could have been shorter too.

So you don't have the self discipline to just not waste a bunch of time here, but you do have the discipline to not just find a workaround for the noprocrast feature that you yourself set? Might I recommend the services of a good therapist?

It's a subconscious thing. For me, anyway. When I'm stuck on a hard problem, my default behaviour used to be to alt-tab to my browser and see what's new on HN. Now when I do that I'm blocked by noprocrast. Usually, this is enough to get me back to the problem.

It's actually broken my procrastination habit enough that I can leave noprocrast off most of the time and not have to worry about procrastinating. Sort of like training-wheels for self-discipline.

I have the same problem as you, but haven't tried the noprocrast feature. Maybe I'll give it a shot.

Never forget Humans are just a kind of Ape with a whole bunch of particular traits.

yeah whats up with going through all these hoops to get around it. if you are going to cheat it, just disable it.

The point is specifically that he doesn't cheat noprocrast. I use the setting as well, and it works for me. Sure I could easily hit the site not being logged in, but it's a subtle reminder that you set for yourself that you are spending too much time browsing. YMMV, but for me it works. I agree with this article, pg, thanks for the feature.

The amount of kiss-assery in this post is disgusting. No offense, pg. smooch smooch smooch

The logic there seems faulty. Basically, "I can't read Hacker News as much so now I don't waste time reading alternatives." So before when you couldn't access HN you turned to Reddit, but now you do work/other productive activities...seems like a stretch to attribute this change in behavior to an HN tweak. Also seems like this behavior will not last.

Does Paul Buchheit have a secret HN alias I don't know about? Whoah, is Paul Buchheit nickb?!

I'm pretty sure he is http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul.

The account is one of the oldest. Hard to be a fake.

i was utterly confused the first time i read this.

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