See http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

"In my profile, what is noprocrast?

It's a way to help you prevent yourself from spending too much time on News.YC. If you turn it on 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."

Presumably there's only so much caching you can do it this case - the points change on articles every second. Not like everyone has to see the most up to date content but it would be a trade off (that many wouldn't like)

It's incomplete though - https://news.ycombinator.com/classic is not listed, for example.

Is there a reason for keeping these hidden?

I've also wondered about downvoting... I never see a button for that, but it seems like some people are still able to. Is it just the 'flag'?

A casual analysis would be that I treat HN the way most of my coworkers treat IRC, which I try to avoid.

Let's say you were a founder at a company that is "always hiring" the kind of person you might find on HN? How much would be enough?

To elaborate, I think they began using Cloudflare just the other day, as a solution to the DDoS. I was able to get through by the time I checked it in the morning from home, but after getting to work I still couldn't access it for hours while the DNS change propagated.