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Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

#41

Post by kaolinite »

I've drastically cut my HN time in the past few months by following this one weird trick:

Add "news.ycombinator.com##td.subtext" following to your Adblock/uBlock custom filters.

You still get to read the articles and keep up with tech news, but you don't end up in comment threads (unless it's an Ask HN/etc, hence why I'm commenting now). Occasionally I load up HN in a different browser if I want to take a break and read some comments but my idle browsing has been drastically reduced.

There's lots of great content in the comments, but it's also a fantastic way to waste time.

Re: Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

#42

Post by tajen »

gabalese wrote: post #17

For me, reading HN is like reading the paper or reading books about subjects that matter to me: it's not time strictly spent on the job I have to do, but it's part of a healthy information diet. Crunching code without taking a look at what's currently happening and being discussed in your professional community is hardly a recipe for self improvement. (It's a thin red line between healthy consumption and abuse, I kno…

To me, HN has been the MBA which led me to (successfully) start my product. But it has also become way too addictive (probably an effect of loneliness). It's kind of ironic, given HN had no employee for growth hacking and no "we miss you" notifications.

Re: Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

#43

Post by mariusandra »

gabalese wrote: post #17

For me, reading HN is like reading the paper or reading books about subjects that matter to me: it's not time strictly spent on the job I have to do, but it's part of a healthy information diet. Crunching code without taking a look at what's currently happening and being discussed in your professional community is hardly a recipe for self improvement. (It's a thin red line between healthy consumption and abuse, I kno…

Hacker News is the place where I come to learn about new technologies and to see where the industry itself is moving. There is something here for everyone, from CEOs to C++ programmers. Over the years, it has been a very valuable source of news.

If you ignore the first 9 links about any new JS framework, it shouldn't take more than than 10min/day just to keep up with what is happening.

Or is this just not true in your experience?

How long do you spend on HN on average per day?

Re: Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

#44

Post by simoncion »

nazri1 wrote: post #38
im2w1l wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone have any tips for a productive way to deal with long compile times?

ccache[1] works for me. http://ccache.samba.org

Like all things, it's not a panacea: https://blog.flameeyes.eu/2010/07/debunking-ccache-myths-red...

Of course, if you're rebuilding the same code over and over it can be a net win, but -in the comments- it is mentioned that the obvious things -that one might end up doing somewhat frequently in C/C++ development- invalidate the cache.

Re: Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

#45

Post by tankenmate »

im2w1l wrote: post #34
guelo wrote: post #6

I'm just here because my compile times are slow. 3 hours later… after 12 tweets, reading 6 articles, filing a GitHub issue, and watching a show on Netflix… what was I building?

Anyone have any tips for a productive way to deal with long compile times?

golang

Re: Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

#46

Post by y04nn »

guelo wrote: post #6

I'm just here because my compile times are slow. 3 hours later… after 12 tweets, reading 6 articles, filing a GitHub issue, and watching a show on Netflix… what was I building?

If your compiling time is slow, you should work at improving it while it's compiling.

Re: Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

#47

Post by sharemywin »

mariusandra wrote: post #43
gabalese wrote: post #17

For me, reading HN is like reading the paper or reading books about subjects that matter to me: it's not time strictly spent on the job I have to do, but it's part of a healthy information diet. Crunching code without taking a look at what's currently happening and being discussed in your professional community is hardly a recipe for self improvement. (It's a thin red line between healthy consumption and abuse, I kno…

Hacker News is the place where I come to learn about new technologies and to see where the industry itself is moving. There is something here for everyone, from CEOs to C++ programmers. Over the years, it has been a very valuable source of news. If you ignore the first 9 links about any new JS framework, it shouldn't take more than than 10min/day just to keep up with what is happening. Or is this just not true in you…

I spend way too much time on it.

Re: Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

#48

Post by daveguy »

toyg wrote: post #2

New Year Resolution: turn noprocrast on, with maxvisit 5 and minaway 240.

And for those of you just tuning in (like me) -- noprocrast is a setting in your hackernews profile (upper right corner). Turn it on and it will only allow you on the site for a maximum amount of time (maxvisit) before preventing you from using it for a minimum amount of time (minaway). It has to be turned on manually. The maxvisit 5 and minaway 240 would let you visit for 5 minutes every 4 hours. I just turned mine on and set it to maxvisit 10 minaway 240.

Re: Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

#49

Post by sharemywin »

isolate wrote: post #31

Do you mean... "Looking at HN" or do you mean "Reading and commenting on HN and getting into arguments with people and checking your karma and replies and upvoting / downvoting / flagging posts and making observations about the correlation between username and karma and generally not even bothering to read TFA or the front page and just trolling the comments section for interesting things to respond to like this" It…

I wanted to get some code down so I wrote this out to make a statement to the world for me to focus on code.

Re: Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on

#50

Post by tehwebguy »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #39

12 years ago, I have decided that I would forever change the way people communicate. Today, nothing has been done. I'm struggling to get people to relate to this need for a better communication system and language. I am convinced that this is very important, but I fail to get the positive feedback I've always expected. Should I ignore people and blindly trust my guts? Taking on such a massive task is very difficult f…

All you have to do first is start
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