Focus.py | Hacker News Reader

Focus.py

amoffat.github.com

112 points_ikke_57 comments

I'm not sure if everyone noticed, but the primary interesting thing here is NOT that it blocks off domains at certain times (everyone and their dog wrote such scripts for themselves). The nice thing is that each rule is defined as a function, which means that you can put a bit more complex rules inside, or just add some logging and track every name resolution against given domain.

Which actually brings me to question: aren't domain-IP pairings cached by the browser?

Yes, but it modifies the response to have a very low TTL so that it's cached only for a show while (in as far as browser actually get the query response).

Potential replaceement for bind behind a firewall?

Question may be kind of silly - I admit, I am not a DNS expert.

How is this at the top of HN? Apparently people that need this stuff sit on HN and vote it up. If you don't want to go to these sites I have some advice: Don't go to them.

Some of us need a helping hand to keep our discipline.

If it were as easy as just saying "Don't go to them", do you think anyone would vote for this?

Commenting online becomes addictive. It becomes a horrible time sink and a useless waste of time. Either arguing with people who don't understand anything, or endlessly circle-jerking with people who have the same viewpoint as you. Some even fall into the trap of believing their "karma" score somehow means something. All it means is how much time you waste online commenting.

Once you start commenting online, you can't easily stop. So it's not as simple as "Don't go to them".

</recovering addicts view>

Karma is a score.

That means it's a game.

"winning" games is fun.

Thus increasing your karma score is, well, fun.

Not to mention all the fringe benefits a decent karma score can bring you ... well not really the karma score itself, but the activities you do to get said score. It's really just putting "How useful you are to the community" into a cold hard integer.

Being useful/known/etc. in the right communities has been a pretty damn important thing since forever.

As always, what matters is what you do with all of this. Just having it by itself doesn't mean a thing.

Cannot agree with you more on this. Exactly my feeling.

It's strange how often comments like these crop up on various topics, because they're difficult to understand. The core of your argument is "I don't have this problem, so therefore no-one does". I mean, you are aware at at some base level that people are different right? They have different thoughts, weaknesses and so on.

If tools like this can help, then that can be nothing but a good thing, I don't think there is any need to be derisive about it.

And I suppose then that you are one of those people who believe that advertising does not work on them because they have made up their mind not to be affected by it?

Nice effort. Having tried RescueTime and more crazy tools last year, I realized it's in the doing. If you enjoy it nothing can distract you. If you really don't enjoy it from inside (i.e. if your ends are not aligned with the going), nothing can help you. It's better to alter your mindset about your work. Spending 3 days on that = lesser distractions for long time.

Your statement is a bit unclear, in particular, this part "I realized it's in the doing." What's in the doing?

> It's better to alter your mindset about your work.

Elaboration on this would be interesting.

When I'm really enjoying what I'm doing, I can go for hours wihtout getting distracted by the internet. If what you are doing is more interesting than browsing the web, you will not interrupt it, how many times when you are reading, playing, or just talking you get distracted by the internet?

According to temporal motivation theory (TMT), perceived utility of a task diminishes with growing temporal distance to the reward. [0]

The reward of working is usually distant and sometimes low in expectancy, as is the punishment for not working. At the same time, rewards of socializing (as one example) are almost immediately available anytime. The value of working is originally higher—you get paid for that, after all—but its utility after expectancy and time discounts may well be lower. It would rise as potential reward or punishment gets closer, but we will procrastinate until it beats the utility of posting comments on HN.

So, in order to fix that, we would like to reverse the ratio of utilities.

One solution is to artificially restrict access to distracting activities. In terms of TMT, their utility would be lowered because of some effort necessary to overcome the restrictions. However, over time we need less and less effort, and the utility is up again.

Conversely, ideamonk's suggestion—enjoying the process of doing—effectively raises the utility of the task so that distractions can't compete. It might take effort to learn that, but the effects are arguably more pleasant and permanent.

[0] Utility = (Reward Expectancy × Value) ÷ Delay. See Integrating theories of motivation by Steel & König and The Nature of Procrastination by Steel.

Fat-finger downvoted you, meant to upvote, sorry. Hope someone can undo.

This, like other github themes, has bad CSS that makes the monospaced text come out as serif on Linux. I know the github crew uses Macs but it makes me a little sad to see they don't test on the system that spawned their namesake. :(

Looks ok on Ubuntu: http://cl.ly/Ge6g

The hash links for headings aren't working either. The page doesn't budge.

That seems to be because the headers don't have their attached anchor links. Not a linux only issue.

The font-family for the monospaced text is "monospace, serif". Any decent Linux system and/or browser would define "monospace" appropriately. Sounds like the problem's on your end.

Using Linux Mint here and it looks fine. Maybe you should install some fonts.

The problem comes from this:

    code {
        font-family: "Lucida Sans", Monaco, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Lucida Console, Terminal;
    }

Which is simply a poorly made rule, regardless of browser and OS. If you don’t have any of the specified fonts, your browser will use its general default font, which is usually either “serif” or “sans-serif”.

I always try to have a simple "..., mono" suffix to my CODE and PRE rules for this reason alone.

For BODY or HTML (whichever contains my global font-family rule) I finish off the list with "..., sans-serif".

I've never had amazing luck w/typography outside of Mac/Win, but like you point out, its poor style to leave everyone else without even a base style to work with.

You are correct. I sent them a pull request for one of the other themes that has this problem but got no response.

https://github.com/mattgraham/Midnight/pull/1

Personally I use Chrome Nanny[1] for this sort of thing, but it's a pretty interesting idea.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cljcgchbnolheggdga...

How do you keep yourself from just popping open the settings page and disabling the plugin?

It's not that you are unable to control yourself from visiting these sites. You just do it subconsciously. When you see some sort of warning you are reminded that you really don't want to go there.

It's amazing that we, who like to think of ourselves as do-ers, need tricks to keep us focused on the goal. Not that I'm criticizing: I use no less than 3 similar tools at the same time, and I still have trouble. What is wrong with us!

It's funny how a distracting website recommends you tools to avoid being distracted. Suppose I'm using this tool to block HN, now I feel like I'm missing out on a new tool! Geez.

I don't find HN distracting in the least, if anything the content here compared to sites like reddit is much more focused and often applicable for my startup.

emacs /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 reddit.com facebook.com

That has been in my host file for some time now on my work machine.

I once spent a couple of hours writing a bash script that edited my /etc/hosts file (e.g. resolve facebook.com to 127.0.0.1), and then ran that using crontab to allow some breaks during the day.

It was fun, but then I had to go back to work. ;-)

On a similar note, can anyone suggest tools like rescuetime for firefox? The few apps that the Firefox Addons website suggests are all outdated (not compatible with ff4+).

Wouldn't a time tracker app with built-in pomodoro timer and website blocker be the ultimate tool? :) Maybe we could toss in functionality to take screenshots every few seconds and show it back to us at the end of the day.

"After you identify the process listening on port 53, run sudo kill -9 with the process id."

-9 as in KILL? I don't do Python, so I cannot comment on the quality of the project. But this FAQ should be changed. People that know how to stop a process don't need a FAQ entry. People that don't know how to do that shouldn't be trained to think that this is a sensible way to stop a program.

> People that know how to stop a process don't need a FAQ entry

Yes we do. Just because I know kill doesn't mean I want to run through the source code looking for the way to exit. Specially when there isn't one.

I wrote myself a similar thing a couple of years ago but just leveraging the /etc/hosts file with some scripting.

https://github.com/rennhak/ProcrastinatorsHelp

But believe me, if you want to doodle there is nothing going to stop you.

This is a great idea, BUT it'll slow your system so no thanks.

My tip to you guys is to turn off Internet access until you need it, close the browser. When you open Reddit, HN, Facebook or whatever - close it deliberately. Practice that. Move the cursor to the X, push it and MEAN IT.

Couldn't this use /etc/hosts instead and be instant to change without the need for a DNS server?

'cept if it crashed you'd be left with an /etc/hosts in a bad state or possibly corrupted.

File writes can be atomic. If it's left in a bad state, open vim and fix it.

/etc/hosts doesn't handle subdomains, for example. Sure, you could list all of them, but if I just want techcrunch blocked, its not the way to go.

Great idea. Would like to have it precompiled, I don't have Python.

Am not sure where to approach this question from. How come you don't have python? Surely the effort of installing python is less than the effort to precompile this package?

> How come you don't have python?

It's just not installed on OSX and I have no use for Python and I am not familiar with Python.

I could just install it with 'brew install python' but I still prefer a clean and slim command line interface for this application.

EDIT: I understood from reading the thread that for better customizability it's better to have some scripting environment

OSX comes with (an old version of) python installed already.

Just a heads up for Mac users: changing the /etc/resolv.conf didn't work for me. Changing it in System Preferences -> Network did work.

This could work great in conjunction with Tomatoes[1]

[1] http://tomatoes.heroku.com

I use Freedom. (Costs money.)

Works really well: http://macfreedom.com/purchase.

Hard to read the page. A third of my netbook screen is covered by the style="position:fixed;" header.

I really like the part where the author made it really hard to stop it! If you know what I mean.

for fun I did this https://github.com/khakimov/freodom (yea, simple 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts), you can add this feature in your project:

- Automatically changes status to DND (skype/adium)

How can I make this work on Windows? My office laptop runs win7.

It certainly doesn't work "out of the box" - looking at the error messages and source code there a are file references to /etc/resolv.conf etc. - which aren't there in Windows.

Might work with a bit hacking about though.

technical countermeasure to a human behavior issue?

Nsnsnsns

That's some pretty Python code...

seems like there are easy ways of finding the pid.

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