New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand

Will this kick you off in the middle of writing a comment? That's my one qualm about it - that I'll start writing a response and then won't be able to submit it because maxvisit has timed out. Maybe exempt the comment-posting URL (it should block you from further reloads afterwards, though)?

I thought that was a pretty fascinating theory.

Why not call it something better than "noprocrast?" If I didn't read that news post, I would be completely confused as to what it does or what the other two values do.

It's a cool idea/feature, just implemented very, very badly.

When I find something is distracting me from work really bad, I overindulge until it wears off, rather than trying to limit it. But even if I was trying to limit my news.yc intake, this wouldn't work for me.

Normally, I open all links I'm interested in in new tabs, and then I proceed to read them, closing them as I go. I sometimes follow links from interesting articles, but links within news.yc are rare.

So given my current habits, maxvisit would be actually limiting the time I get to skim the frontpages opening tabs. A couple minutes of that could spawn hours of time wasting, if I wasn't otherwise careful.

People here to procrastinate have a lower average quality contribution than people here out of genuine interest. The average submission/comment quality will go up as they temporarily leave.

What will happen is that they will find some other way of procrastinating. The problem isn't that news.yc draws them too strongly; it's that what they should be doing doesn't draw them strongly enough.

Of course it's easy to get around. Log in anonymously, or use a proxy, or any number of other things- The point as I understand it isn't to hold you iron-fisted to the whims you had when you set it up, but more to act as a gentle reminder.

"Hey, it's been 2 hours already. Stop wasting time on news.yc, and get back to work"

There have been some similar program that extend the concept, and read the title of the browser window to let you graph your productive time. I can't find any at the moment, though.. There's certainly a lot that could be done in that area. Maybe someone will apply for a Fall 07 YC to track productivity effectively.

On thinking about it, I was reminded of this link from MyDreamApp (A contest to pitch apps for the Mac)

http://mydreamapp.com/contestants/view/danlundmark/

I guess we are going to have to exercise some self-control. That's fine.

PS. It is a great feature though!