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Comment by jesperlang | Hacker News Reader

It came to a point (for HN and RSS readers) where I would check articles every hour. It culminated with me mindlessly clicking article links, reading the title, scrolling through it (not reading), just familiarizing myself with single words passing through my hyper short attention-span, and getting a "feel" for what the article looked like. It was quite a scary when I did this one time for 30 minutes not remembering anything I have "read" whatsoever.

I am still struggling with this a bit but I am more aware now and try to be mindful of what I read. A neat trick I have found is to try to just check once a week using the search tool (popular past week):

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=&query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...

I fail at this quite often, but a weekly mindful check is what I am aiming for

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>It came to a point (for HN and RSS readers) where I would check articles every hour. It culminated with me mindlessly clicking article links, reading the title, scrolling through it (not reading), just familiarizing myself with single words passing through my hyper short attention-span, and getting a "feel" for what the article looked like. It was quite a scary when I did this one time for 30 minutes not remembering anything I have "read" whatsoever.

Not specifically about phones, but I have my router only allow access to sites like that for certain hours in the day. I can always log into the router to turn it off, but adding that extra bit of friction is usually enough to get me to check it later during the designated times.

Oooh this is amazing. Have any writeups on how you've accomplished this? Thanks

You could use a hosts file and a cron job, perhaps, for something similar.

Or do what I do, and just edit the hosts file manually. That means I often go for days without changing it, because it forces me to make a decision, rather than act on impulse.

> but I have my router only allow access to sites like that for certain hours in the day

My router can do this, but not for sites using SSL (that is, just about every respectable site out there, these days). Do you filter IPs and not by domain?

>My router can do this, but not for sites using SSL (that is, just about every respectable site out there, these days). Do you filter IPs and not by domain?

Yeah it's a pain to do it right. I'm just doing it with a local DNS server for the moment.

I've considered setting up a local Raspberry Pi for both PiHole to block ads, and running Squid or whatever on it to provide better SSL filtering. If there a nice writeup for how to do this I would also be interested.

When I am working on a single computer away from home I sometimes just manually edit my hosts file. Crude but it still catches me a bunch of times over the day where I almost unconsciously pop up a distracting site.

My Draytek Vigor router can filter SSL sites by keywords in domain.

It results in an ugly SSL error (bad certificate) when the filter is active, but it fits the job.

Leech Block for Firefox or Chrome Nanny on Chrome do a great job of keeping me from veering too far off my intended path without too much configuration...

Just setup domains and the times or limits you want to restrict them.

> It culminated with me mindlessly clicking article links, reading the title, scrolling through it (not reading), just familiarizing myself with single words passing through my hyper short attention-span, and getting a "feel" for what the article looked like. It was quite a scary when I did this one time for 30 minutes not remembering anything I have "read" whatsoever.

Why does this sound so familiar?

Sounds almost meditative to me...

I've been looking for more applications of this little python interface to the HN search API: https://github.com/nicolashahn/py-search-hn

I like the idea of creating a "mindful-hn" web (or mobile or cli) app with it. If I were to do this, what other features would you or others want, besides just aggregating the highest rated posts for the last week?

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