Hacker News Reader

Comment by glotchimo | Hacker News Reader

Something like this might actually be useful for the all-too-common productive procrastination breaks. Stuck on a hard problem? Better clean my desk. Waiting for a build? Better clean my files. Lacking momentum? Better check LinkedIn (it’s professional so it’s okay). I wonder which type of “break” kills more productivity, “fun” distraction or “productive” distraction. Anyone else?

View on HN

Probably "productive" distractions, since you can do them a lot more before feeling bad and going back to work. Especially if you can silently get into the "fun" territory.

I've actually had this with HN in the last days; I've ditched Reddit for HN because it contained a lot more worthwile content and valuable discussions [0], but with the Twitter shitshow I've come to enjoy a lot of snarky, unproductive discussions again. Maybe it's time to enable noprocast.

[0] Actually, it was mostly ideological reasons, but having HN as a "drop-in" replacement/upgrade helped a lot.

Yeah, HN is such a double edged sword. Great technical discussions as well as time sucking passive aggressive discussions about "divisive social issues", which I cannot help but click.

Wrote this script today, that just stops me seeing submissions from sites I know won't have good technical discussions. Might be useful for others.

    const boringDomains = ["twitter.com", "newyorker.com", "nytimes.com"]

    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".titleline > a"))
        .filter(elem => boringDomains.some(domain => elem.href.includes(domain)))
        .map(elem => elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement)
        .flatMap(elem => [
            elem,
            elem.nextElementSibling,
            elem.nextElementSibling.nextElementSibling]
        )
        .forEach(elem => elem.remove())

> I've ditched Reddit for HN because it contained a lot more worthwile content

I found that at least for myself, this was just a lie I kept telling myself. HN contains almost zero actionable content, and I've not been an epsilon better off for reading it. I come to see it as infotainment.

Some HNers believe the site is superior to Reddit, if you compare it to the smaller and high quality subs, there isn't any difference.

there's been a few times where I read something that I was really glad I found out about through here, and probably wouldn't have found out otherwise. But yeah, easily >99% of it is just passing time

HN is great for discovery but 90%+ of the comments have declined to ChatGPT levels.

For me the benefit is honestly just less content. There is only so much that makes it to the front page here and the lack of infinite scroll means I rarely see beyond it. It helps me waste a lot less time. But reddit was also a real problem for me. Way too many hours each day and I had to quit it.

I’ve discovered a bunch of neat libraries and projects through it.

HN comments are less sarcastic, cynical, info-free than Reddit comments.

They can be, but not always. For example, any subject even tangentially related to Twitter or Musk summons a spate of low-brow, boilerplate comments.

HN was my MBA back in 2010-2013, that’s where I learnt how to create a working startup. There were blogs like Kalzumeus or Joel On Software, people were still debating technical or business issues about startups.

Now it’s more a news aggregator. It’s my fault too, I don’t blog about the company I’ve created, and people can learn how to create proper startups in many places.

It varies... I'll often see mention of interesting/useful tools/sites/applications mentioned in more technical discussion. I don't always find these things immediately useful, but often even a year later if I can remember enough to search and find what I was looking for. Sometimes just knowing something exists in extremely useful.

I made a resolution to just close my eyes instead of going on Reddit/HN. Went well for about 20 mins...

> Probably "productive" distractions, since you can do them a lot more before feeling bad and going back to work. Especially if you can silently get into the "fun" territory.

I feel like this is the case for a lot of productivity tools; every once in a while I find myself browsing the status-quo of the next generation of todo apps that have had far too much design work spent on their website for what it does. 9 times out of 10 it's a grift to sell a $15 / month subscription for syncing across devices and its added value is tiny compared to just using a text editor, lol.

"oh I need to structurally modify these 20 lines, might as well craft a regex to do it"

30 minutes later... well got to keep my regex skills up to date else i'll lose them

Have to admit, the change to Twitter in terms of personality the past few months has been as fun as Twitter around a decade ago... I mean, a lot more snark, memes and generally fun. Not perfect, but definitely more entertaining than when people were getting banned for parody accounts.

There's probably an argument to be made that at least those tasks might help push you out of a rut if you've spent hours banging your head against a wall. God knows cleaning my desk is probably a better use of my time right now than commenting yet again on HN.

Yeah I’ve certainly heard that doing something small can help get the engine going, but anecdotally, it totally goes both ways. I’ve had afternoons where I clean something or what have you and get right back to it and others where I clean something and end up changing the capitalization of symbols for no reason.

When I'm working on a hard problem and I identify that I actually do need to stop and just think about it more indirectly I find going for a walk to be pretty useful.

> Better check LinkedIn (it’s professional so it’s okay)

I don’t have social media on my work computer except LinkedIn. I can’t tell you how many times a day I quickly open a new tab and head to LinkedIn (where I’m not even that personally active, mind you) to just get a quick hit of a distraction.

Yeah I moved the LinkedIn app to the front page of my home screen when I went to a conference a couple months ago. I check it much more when it's right there. Thanks to your comment, I'm going to move it back to where it was before, buried in a folder on the fourth page.

LinkedIn and other medias are not at all distracting, if your job is on those platforms. Or you get your traffic through those platforms.

Whenever I feel too tired to focus on something "productive" is when I clean the house, because most of my productive work involves thinking and most of the tidying/cleaning is a set of repetitive tasks that I can do on "autopilot" and so ironically I find it easier to carry them out when I'm too tired to get caught up thinking about software projects.

But the tricky part is remembering to nudge myself into starting tidying etc..

I'm similar, but replace the answer to all of those questions with "make a coffee".

I feel sorry for my kidneys.

The kind where you start reading code you wrote more than 3 years ago and obsessively changing it...

Yes ofcourse, that side project I haven't touched for 3 years now obviously needs a full rewrite in the new language/framework I've been learning.

Reddit may be the all time king in productivity blockers...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com