I'm quitting Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

I'm quitting Hacker News

blog.steveklabnik.com

19 pointsphiggy11 comments

This sounds like a good idea. HN can be addictive. I often wish I could take a break myself.

It seems HN has lost a lot of very valuable contributors lately due to the impact HN has on general productivity.

Have you given any thought to measures to stem this tide of dissent?

The most productive people would probably tend to have the best insights, and if the trend keeps up it almost feels like I'm getting advice/comments from those with generally lower productivity.

I'd rather lose people because the site is too good than because it's too bad. And I don't think we've lost a lot recently. I can only remember 2. If we got two smart new users in the same time, which is quite possible, we're ok.

This could be a super-no-procrast feature where you disable login for an account for N days.

One thing I've found works well (though you won't see this ;-) is to alias things like HN & Drudgereport & NYT to localhost, and only view them on an iPad. The fact that I have to physically shift my attention to another screen, one that isn't as large & easy to manipulate (for this old emacs hacker), makes it more of a chore and a choice one makes, rather than falling into bad habits.

Also, on the Mac, SelfControl works pretty well. I can turn off all the interesting sites for 8 hours at a time and not worry about them.

Steve actually wrote a pomodoro gem that aliases sites like that for 25 minutes at a time: https://github.com/steveklabnik/pomodoro

I make a rule to only visit when I'm doing what I call "brain dead" tasks. Waiting on hold, the time before meetings where I show up on time and everyone else is fashionably late, and so on.

It doesn't work when I get in a really intense debate but 95% of the time it's effective.

The game mechanic of social sites like HN is not helping general productivity. The usage of HN should be an award of real work being done.

Here's an idea. (someone implements it quick :)

- Block all distracting sites. Can be done as simply as remapping the hostnames to localhost.

- Monitor user activities. Hook into the OS to monitor keystrokes and mouse movement (I know how to do it on Windows, not sure about other OS).

- Accumulate reward points for work activities. Factor both intensity of typing and duration into the reward. Display reward points to visually encourage work.

- Once reward points reach a certain level, a half-hour or hourly pass is granted to access the blocked sites.

- Once the time on the pass is used up, the sites are blocked again.

Bonus: block all games or other distracting programs.

Quitting to spend more time doing constructive things is good.

Quitting, but spending the whole day on #startups IRC channel wasting time, is just, well, a waste of time (like others who "quit" just to hang on IRC).

Good riddance! (This place really is a time suck if you let it).

Congrats on grad school. I still owe you a coffee/beer if I run into you around town.

And don't let the placeholder kittens rub you on the way out. ;)

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