171–180 of 572 posts
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I use https://freedom.to/ to block HN on my phone and laptop when I need to.
Thanks for the recommendation, but why is it a subscription service? Does it work like a vpn or something where they host servers to support this kind of traffic blocking?
I found this hard truth by myself. I noticed how my attention spans were decreasing. I've always been a really distracted person, but social media made it worst. I ended up adding Facebook, Twitter,9gag, Reddit and other sites to my /etc/hosts (0.0.0.0). Was the only way to fix it. While I work I leave my phone at a distant table, with notifications turned down. The only thing that I get are phone calls. I remember S…
I'm not a big fan of social media, but the argument here seems specious. Here's another way to put it - "If the first thing a person does when they get up is eat, you'd say they're a glutton". True? (Or indeed "if the first thing a person does when they get up is go to the toilet, you'd say they're incontinent.")
You're right that this one thing alone doesn't spell addiction, but if someone talked about how they should use the bathroom less, felt bad about how many times a day they went, and annoyed everyone by the bathroom constantly being occupied and the person being absent/late due to their use, in addition to using it first thing in the morning, then... maybe they're addicted to social media and using the bathroom as a way to get their fix ;)
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> fire people, based on their opinions. Lest we forget: - Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, fired for a donation, - Douglas Crockford, uninvited from NodeVember, the general opinion is that he said something that a woman didn't like, - Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, upon an unproven accusation, - And all people and the 2 colleagues who have been fired in smaller companies, in smaller even…
- Curtis Yarvin, creator of Urbit, disinvited from presenting at the Strange Loop conference on programming languages after Steve Klabnik and perhaps other participants threatened to withdraw over Yarvin's political blog posts.
You online presence affords recruiters and hiring managers the opportunity to identify who you are before they make a determination to formally invite you to an interview (phone or in person). Even if you opt out of self identify, they can still figure it out if you have FB, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.
Thus, are you qualified, but didn't get a call back or request to interview email? It may be because of your race, gender, sexuality, etc.
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It's just a thought experiment - not sure why you need to be talking about trolling. So, if this person is professional at work, then you come home, and watching the news, you see a report about a neo-nazi parade, and there this person is, literally on-screen, shouting "burn the niggers*. Is that also ok? Of course, this is an extreme example, I'm just interested in understanding where the line is, or indeed if there…
I'm talking about trolling because you're using a throwaway account. That's a bright red-flag if I've ever seen one. That said, is he professional at work? If he does his job and doesn't discuss shit at work, that's his business. I'm not going to fire someone because of personal beliefs. Yes, that's an extreme example but I'm not going to play arbiter of beliefs because we are quickly going to get into a slippery slo…
If it's my personal belief that I am duty bound to try and get this person fired and find legal ways to ruin their life would you be supportive of that? None of this activity would be carried out at work.
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I had a girlfriend at one point who used her mandatory volunteer time at her Christian company to make calls for Planned Parenthood. So proud she stuck to her beliefs despite pressure to do otherwise.
> mandatory volunteer time Why work at a Christian company if you find their beliefs oppressive? I say this as someone who thinks there is a thin line (a birth canal) between infanticide and a legal abortion. And there's always the option of working at common ground. Instead of picking a point of contention, serve at a food bank. Nobody objects to those.
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Interested to know how long your twice a week sessions are and how far you go back in the pages? I come twice a day for 10 mins and then once a week going back to article 90. Total time for the week is just under 3 hours, but I feel I've learned something.
It's dangerous to go alone. Take this: https://news.ycombinator.com/best
So even at HN, the most addictive content is considered to have the highest value. Seems…topical.
This part really resonated with me: > Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it’s designed to be used — persistently throughout your waking hours — the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit…
> I've recently been finding it really hard to concentrate on my work I've overcome my Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter problems, but I can't seem to shake Hacker News.
HN is the one where I find myself checking several times/day and I constantly have 20+ HN tabs. The pattern is something like this:
1) "Oh, interesting topic!"
2) Open in a tab
3) Read existing comments & the link (I don't always do the latter, admittedly)
4) Come back N hours later, read new comments
5) Repeat #4 over a day or two
6) Close tab unless I haven't read the link yet. If I haven't, then they tend to stick around until I do or send it off into OneTab for ultimate procrastination.
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Interested to know how long your twice a week sessions are and how far you go back in the pages? I come twice a day for 10 mins and then once a week going back to article 90. Total time for the week is just under 3 hours, but I feel I've learned something.
It may also be a question of how you use sites like HN. I've found that this site is useful for learning when I simply click on the headlines and ignore the comments. Yes, the comments are informative. On the other hand, I have found that reading comments is a behaviour that I have adopted to procratinate (rather than to gain deeper insight).
1. Scan headlines for a topic I'm interested in, say, geometric algebra.
2. Rapidly scan the comments for people linking to other media (books, blog posts, libraries, etc.) that are related to geometric algebra.
I get vastly superior pointers to useful material this way than any other approach I've tried, and I'm extremely good at research anyway.
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..and movies, books and TV?
No: all of those are "single use" items, i.e. you typically only consume them once. Games and social media, OTOH, are designed for continuous consumption without end. Here, "being addictive" is basically the only thing that matters (and in fact, is the only variable companies actually measure).