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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

I notice this is the second submission by mattyb from everything2.com tonight.

As cool as everything2.com is, if anyone reading this has remotely any work to do within the next two days, don't start traversing the tree of links from interesting everything2 nodes. I say this because I learned, from experience, that if you have tabbed browsing and open on average >1 new tab per page while traversing a site like everything2, your backload of reading material will grow exponentially and your procrastination problem, if you have one, will similarly grow to epic proportions.

I fear mattyb has been sucked into this trap.

Apologies if this comment is not productive enough.

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About five years ago, I managed to read all of Everything2 (or at least managed to circumnavigate an entire subgraph until I no longer found any of the remaining outbound links interesting.) It took two weeks. It would probably take even longer now.

I did the same thing with the TV Tropes[1] wiki, even further back; it actually caused me to "queue" so many open tabs at a time that the browser would crash on restore (I think it was about 800, spread out across several windows, that did the trick.) I finally started queueing using bookmarks instead of opened tabs; it was much more annoying to do, but I managed to conquer that site as well.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage — only click if you're a competitor to a YC venture. ;)

My hat is off to you, sir. After spending a greater part of my past week's evenings playing Diablo II, I can't help but appreciate level grinding of a decidedly more cerebral nature.

I have to say, though: I don't remember any of it off-hand. At some point in a "mind grind," your brain stops absorbing information from short-term into long-term memory, although you still retain the ability to make new short-term memories, so you still feel like you're "learning," even though it will all disappear sooner rather than later.

I spent an entire weekend on TVTropes in exactly the manner you described.

By now, I've probably now read over half the site. Doesn't help that my favorite TV and game series are some of the most trope overdosed ever created.

> About five years ago, I managed to read all of Everything2

It would probably take you a few years to read all of e2. There are currently 442,874 writeups. 5 years ago there were much more. Place has changed a lot. Doesn't have the same sense of community and freedom as before. Shame really, as it was a great place to hang out. I've made some lifelong friends thought e2.

Unless you're posting from beyond the grave, how do you know they will be (were?) lifelong friends?

Who says I'm not posting from beyond the grave?

I was careful to allow for that very possibility ...

If you restore a browser session with 800 tabs mostly on the same server, wouldn't that be 800 simultaneous requests which would look like a DOS attempt by a security system?

Browsers usually limit themselves to 4 simultaneous requests at a time to the same server.

I have a bookmarking problem...~17000 "To be read later" bookmarks in Instapaper. Mostly from this @#%! site.

I had already bookmarked the >50 tabs I had open for a lazy Sunday. Thanks.

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