Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Hacker News Habit

hackernewslater.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 111 posts

Re: The Hacker News Habit

#41

Post by abtinf »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #7

There's no doubt that I spent a lot of time on HN, but there have been at least a few times that I've learned of things that directly impact my work first here. Off the top of my head, I knew that Sentry had rolled out hosted instance that were HIPAA-compliant when my team was about to install it and host it internally. That knowledge let us outsource it to them and ultimately save a good deal of time and money. More…

Agreed, the things I've learned on HN have helped me professionally in numerous ways.

One thing I find concerning about HN is I think there is an increasing prevalence of political and social commentary on the front-page. Those kinds of posts are worse than useless, because they displace potentially really good content.

Re: The Hacker News Habit

#43

Post by m_ke »

superasn wrote: post #37

I kicked my habit by installing a host block script in my Tomato router. Just added reddit and HN to blacklisted hosts (I know I can undo it but it's too much work and it disables ad blocking too). Now anytime I want to visit HN i have to switch to slow 4G and it makes me concious of my decision and slow internet also makes it less fun. I haven't visited reddit in almost 6 months now (used to refresh it every hour).…

I also keep them blocked on my computer and only check them on my phone. I keep my phone in grayscale mode so it's much less engaging.

Another thing that worked for me was writing a custom js script to filter out posts I hid without loading other content to replace it. That way I could filter things down so that there's only 1 or 2 threads left that I'm interested in and there's no need to keep scanning the same headlines over and over.

Re: The Hacker News Habit

#44

Post by keithnz »

janee wrote: post #26
antoineMoPa wrote: post #8

I scrolled some paragraphs without reading and read "Unfocused Reading is a Terrible Thing to Do". Oops.

Hahaha, how meta. Scrolled through the comments and read this. Ok I'll read more than the article title now

quite often I read the comments before reading the article. Often in the comments there are insightful things on parts of the article and then when you read the article you can pay attention to the right spots.

Re: The Hacker News Habit

#45

Post by nloomans »

mobilehnuser wrote: post #42

I've been working on an Addiction Blocker for this site and many others. It's not ready for primetime yet but I offer it as a preview to the addicted participants of this thread https://github.com/a13o/disengaged

Sounds interesting!

I would recommend you to add some examples of what your extention actually does. The code of ethics only gives me a vague idea.

Re: The Hacker News Habit

#46

Post by throwaway413 »

breck wrote: post #29
LyndsySimon wrote: post #7

There's no doubt that I spent a lot of time on HN, but there have been at least a few times that I've learned of things that directly impact my work first here. Off the top of my head, I knew that Sentry had rolled out hosted instance that were HIPAA-compliant when my team was about to install it and host it internally. That knowledge let us outsource it to them and ultimately save a good deal of time and money. More…

Agreed. I haven't quantified it but I would ballpark I come across 25+ things per year that directly save me significant hours of work, lead me to much better solutions to a problem, provide a lead that would help me with investing/employment/helping a friend/etc. That in addition to the intellectual stimulation and enjoyment from the other articles is why I don't feel bad about spending ~30 minutes a day here everyd…

I’m glad I’m not the only one who tests internet connectivity via HN!

Re: The Hacker News Habit

#47

Post by skybrian »

abtinf wrote: post #41
LyndsySimon wrote: post #7

There's no doubt that I spent a lot of time on HN, but there have been at least a few times that I've learned of things that directly impact my work first here. Off the top of my head, I knew that Sentry had rolled out hosted instance that were HIPAA-compliant when my team was about to install it and host it internally. That knowledge let us outsource it to them and ultimately save a good deal of time and money. More…

Agreed, the things I've learned on HN have helped me professionally in numerous ways. One thing I find concerning about HN is I think there is an increasing prevalence of political and social commentary on the front-page. Those kinds of posts are worse than useless, because they displace potentially really good content.

A workaround is to hide the posts you don't care about and reload.

Re: The Hacker News Habit

#48

Post by habosa »

Anyone else here use the noprocrast setting built in to HN? Surprise not to see it mentioned

I have my HN set up so that I need 3 hours between each 20m visit.

Re: The Hacker News Habit

#50

Post by vinc »

It's a good idea, being more mindful of the content we consume is the key.

Last year I made a little website to control how much time I want to spend on HN. For instance I have one page where the 10 most upvoted items for the week are listed, and I hide them as I read them. When the list is empty it means I'm done for now.

https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=hn+sort:top+time:week+limit:10

(open sourced here: https://github.com/vinc/news.vinc.cc)

Also work for Reddit.

Post reply on HN