Hacker News Reader

Comment by b3b0p | Hacker News Reader

I have the same problem. I found editing my hosts files helps.

  127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com

When or if I try to go to HN I get an error in my browser and instantly reminded. Then I get back to work. One time I went 6 months without visiting HN.

View on HN

HN offers this functionality itself. Go to your profile, enable 'noprocrast' and customize the intervals.

Didn't know this. Thanks a ton for this. Awesome I just enabled it.

Oh funny thing I found I was wrong about showdead setting there... I had assumed if I wanted myself to be declared dead/offline I could set my profile to show dead.. lol

> Oh funny thing I found I was wrong about showdead setting there... I had assumed if I wanted myself to be declared dead/offline I could set my profile to show dead.. lol

What's its functionality?

When showdead is on, you see killed comments. Mostly spam and trolls. Only recommended for moderators.

Everyone's a moderator after gaining a bit of karma, since you can update and vouch for comments. It seems to be getting better, but there's still a few people getting hellbanned by what I can only consider a mistake.

Is it useful to report these potential mistakes? I have showdead on, and quite often I'll see decent comments. When I look at the user's history, sometimes there will be over 1000 karma for that user, decent posting record, and then at some point you see all their comments as dead (with no obvious troll comments that could have triggered it).

I wouldn't mind reporting on these, or vouching for the good ones, but it would be nice to have a channel where I could get feedback -- such as "this use was banned for reason xyz on these 10 comments".

> Is it useful to report these potential mistakes?

The "vouch" feature was recently added exactly for the purpose of correcting those mistakes as we spot them - so I'd say it is useful. Moderators are just people and have finite time too.

For individual submissions/comments there is always the "vouch" button. And the mods have been extremely friendly when I've mailed them about what looked to me like a new user which got caught in a spam filter by accident (which was then fixed, and the user asked to resubmit their "lost" submission)

showdead can also be be useful if you're new to participating so you can see what types of comments get banned and determine what the community generally finds unacceptable.

It shows posts from dead users, those who have been silently banned and still post.

Thanks!

This only works if I am logged in though. Thanks for pointing it out though as I completely forgot about it.

Just set it to 20min visit, 8640min break. My goal is to just read /beat and /bestcomments. Won't be able to comment myself very well this way though. Wish me luck :)

You mean /best instead of /beat?

I had a little cron job that swapped in a hosts file with entries like that at 8 am and then swapped it back out at 5 pm. Helped me break the habit of going on reddit during downtime during work hours.

I wish, I could do that with reddit, but I reddit isn't just for news and trending shit. For many things I am trying to find a reddit discussion first.

I can only block the whole domain, right?

I imagine there is some software where you can block the entire domain but whitelist certain subreddits - I do not think the hosts file affords that level of granularity however.

I imagine a proxy with a whitelist/blacklist setup should be easy to throw together in quick fashion, then set your browser to use that. TLS sites become a little more problematic, unless you feel like MITM'ing your traffic there as well.

Avoiding HN entirely doesn't really solve the problem though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com