Ask YC: Quality time on the web

CiteSeer. Or join an open-source project and learn enough about their codebase that you can start helping out people who ask questions.<p>Almost everything that's relaxing in the sense of "feels like TV" isn't go to be a good education. That doesn't mean learning can't be fun, but it means you have to set aside a block of time and let yourself sink into the material instead of glossing over it in 30 minute chunks.<p>I've also found time spent socially interacting with folks over the web - in an "involving yourself in their life" sense, not in a "post on the same message board" sense - to be very rewarding. Several online friends have since become RL friends after a couple years of commenting on their LiveJournal and talking to them on AIM. LiveJournal is great for this, FaceBook not so much, since the culture on FaceBook is very much about taking pre-existing RL friends and interacting with them online.

If you're looking to kill time, but don't know how, help someone else out, go to the forums for things that you're good at and answer a few questions.

I try to go read a book whenever I catch myself wasting too much time on the web. My book queue is way too long and too interesting to be wasting my time looking at cat macros.<p>I also have reddit, slashdot, cnn, kuro5hin, and fark pointing to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file. The only sites I allow myself to check now are news.yc and nytimes.com

Thanks, those educational recommendations are nice.<p>Joining an open source project, or helping people out in a technical forum is honorable, but not what I'm looking for, since coding is what I usually do. Love citeseer and damninteresting.<p>I guess I'll go pick up some old books of mine too.<p> Thanks, keep stuff coming.

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