This reminds me of all those subreddits of people asking how to quit reddit :). There's been periods where I don't check HN much at all for a few months, but I notice that when I "stop checking these specific time-sinks" that really just treats a symptom and I still waste a good amount of time, just on other sites. The only real way to quit is to be intentional about what, specifically, you want to fill the regained time with. I don't have any studies handy, so this may just be conjecture rather than actual science (as if anything else exists online), but it's often easier to make a "positive habit" such as reading 20 more minutes per day than a negative habit like "don't check HN".

I do have phases where I add HN to my /etc/hosts file, but randomly I come across useful insights on hacker news, so I haven't quite taken the step of quitting completely. But if I see an interesting article during a period where I should be working, I've taken to using pinboard's "read later" function and then binging articles all at once when I get to the point where I feel as though I'm not going to produce any more good work for the day. I'm sure pocket, papaly, raindrop.io and other bookmarking services probably have similar functions, though I haven't used them myself.

If the cold turkey route would be better for your use case, you can try the blocking techniques from this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15309393

>This is the wrong place to ask but what the heck, anyone care to share their experience quitting HN?

HN is the vaping to the cigarette smoking that is burning time on Reddit, for me anyway. "It's still got a lot of smart people posting thought-provoking content, and content relevant to my career, it's ok to spend time here", I console myself with.

Unfortunately I'm doing the equivalent of taking a drag from a cigarette followed by a puff of a vape now, having had a severe relapse on Reddit usage, despite internally despising the site and most of everything on it.