hn is a resource where the stories of the kind listed in this article are available at all. for me this is important because i want to read those stories, i want to learn from the mistakes of others and see what other people /think/ worked well for them. sure it hurts my productivity, but so does the beer i would drink, the movie i would watch or whatever else that i would do in my down time because that is when i read HN for the most part.
what is bad for my well being here is all the 'self-entitled prick with first world problem' stories. i have no respect for them and it saddens me that the community as a whole seems naive enough on average that this stuff is considered news and not just 'smart' people embarrassing themselves with an utter lack of common sense or life experience. it makes me genuinely angry. the worst part of it all is that these stories and promoting them feed the very cause you fight against... see just thinking about draws me into wanting to collectively slap the majority of the community around the face and tell them how it is, you know the good ol' sciency way by pointing at data and examples littered throughout history instead of jumping on some crazy emotional bandwagon.
enough.