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.