I found myself wondering what some of the fields in the profile actually mean, and found the explanations scattered throughout the news page here:

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

In particular:

"showdead" - "Anyone who does want to see the stuff killed by the editors can do it by setting showdead to yes in his profile."

"noprocrast", "maxvisit", "minaway" - "If you turn it on by setting it to "yes", you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between."

"delay" - "...lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them."