TabBoo – add random jumpscares to websites you're trying to avoid | Hacker News Reader

TabBoo – add random jumpscares to websites you're trying to avoid

tabboo.xyz

I just had a look at the creators's other project and this one his hilarious! https://www.unoptimal.com/push-off

Two friends receive a notification and the first one to tap it wins!

ChatGPT Youtube Player is also hilarious: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chatgpt-youtube-pla...

It plays a youtube video while you wait for chatGPT to finish responding to your prompt lmao!

I was a tester for this game! Testing it with a small group was hilarious; I was super motivated to try to win (although I rarely won) since I knew everyone else playing and the notifications came all the time because Justin was doing lots of testing. It absolutely ruined me (which is the point!)

Only shows a link for iOS and it also says "concluded" so it sounds like even if I had an Apple device, it has been shut down?

If so, I'm very tempted to make a variant that uses email since I'll run an email server with cronjobs forever anyway (for my other million projects). Will shoot the author a (you guessed it) email to check if they're okay with that when due credits are given!

The app is still available on iOS but if you open it the screen only shows "THE END" and a winner is announced. It also says, "Stay tuned for hte next game.". So, maybe it is dead now.

as if my life isn't gameified for entertainment already lol

This is a gold mine, too:

https://www.unoptimal.com/automated-ragequit

Love it! Now needed more than ever.

As much as this is the complete opposite of what I consider to be a healthy way to use computers, this is really neat.

I unintentionally made something that had a similar effect once.

I wrote an application (back when android phones still had notification leds) that allowed us employees to notify each other whether our boss was in the building or not. A state change could be triggered by anyone from their phone (there was some "debouncing" server side), which then popped up a silent notification on everyone's phone telling them who updated the status, as well as switched the color of the notification LED (green meant the boss had left the office, red meant that he was in).

It got pretty funny watching everyone scramble for their phones as soon as our boss closed the door, each time he had to leave. And of course, they competed to see whose name would show up in the notification.

This is a very unexpected way to try combatting addiction. I don't know how well it will work, but I will consider it.

Negative reinforcement. There's a strategy for smoking where you put a wad of hair in your cigarettes. I used nicotine patches myself, so I can't speak to the efficacy.

As someone who has smelled burning hair, it at least sounds plausible. On the other hand, cigarette smoke already doesn't smell good.

people who smoke on the daily have already tuned out cigarette smoke mentally, the burning hair however is rancid to anyone.

Definitely not always true. I smoke, I hate it, I've tried to quit several times. The smoke smell has never repulsed me but I find it to smell terrible. Many people I know who smoke are the same.

It's a constant reminder that you're killing yourself for miniscule amounts of Feel Good chemicals at a time.

I've always enjoyed the smell of tobacco smoke. It's nowhere near as astringent and repulsive as woodsmoke and good tobacco often has a nice nearly floral scent or a sweet smell. The taste and the tearing up my throat and making my breath bad and the expense are all things I can do without though.

Does anyone else get seasonal nicotine cravings? In the warmer months, I don't even think about smoking unless I drink, but in winter I often can't sleep for craving a cigarette, even when it's been literally years since the last one.

Definitely. I'm usually quite successful at quitting during the summer. Then the winter months come and for some reason the urges come back.

[flagged]

This isn't true at all, though. Nicotine is strongly dopaminergic, it directly produces euphoria.

You can describe the trap which is addiction without saying things which are obviously not true. Or, to return your uncharitable rhetoric back upon you, lying.

Ah yes, I lied to myself. Thank you for fixing things for me.

Use nicotine pouches or vape, there is no reason to smoke and nicotine isn't carcinogenic

Thanks but I'm not really looking for advice. Where I live vape juice is exorbitantly priced. Plus there are other habitual issues with vaping, such as vaping indoors which overall increases my intake. Pouches aren't always a solution either and don't solve the "habitual" part of the habit, which is the hardest part to kick for me.

Pay the higher cost for the vape or you pay with your life. If intake is increase because you will do it indoors it won't really matter, it isn't nearly as bad.

I'm aware, thanks.

That's why the pouches are good. They reduce your craving, therefore making the act of smoking seem less necessary. Of course, the act itself is still appealing, but then you can work on reducing that habit independently and perhaps saving it for special occasions. I find cigars quite good for this. Too expensive and fancy to smoke every day but you can really treat yourself on your birthday or on holiday with something like a cigar.

vapes aren't as cool as smoked tobacco :)

Nicotine pouches are okay, I would advise against vape though. Vape is honestly more addictive than cigarettes and I find, in large volumes, the vapour still affects my lung function. Nicotine pouches or gum are the way to go to get the benefits with minimal side effects.

I had the same experience. I vaped way more than I smoke, and it really is the nicotine that affects me the worst in the mid term. Pouches are expensive here after the tax hike and they make me feel dizzy and the gum makes me sick. I also scarred from a patch (my fault, I was dumb and left it on over a transatlantic and it chemical burned me) and they don't always work for me for some reason. Though they're my go to for when I try to quit.

I think the habit of actually smoking is the hardest for me to kick. The small break is what keeps me going and clears my head, especially during work, and it's hard to replicate that.

Cigarette smoke is vile, but burned hair is another level.

To that I raise: crude oil

Unbelievable how its products separately don't smell nearly as bad.

I’ve never experienced crude oil firsthand, but I assume you are talking about “sour crude” which has a high sulfur content, including hydrogen sulfide, resembling rotten eggs or raw sewerage. So-called “sweet crude”, with a low sulfur content, has a less offensive smell, smelling more like the petroleum products derived from it.

Nit: that's not what negative reinforcement means. Negative reinforcement is about removing a negative stimulus, like inducing someone to go to a desirable website by improving their initially bad text contrast whenever they go there.

In this case, jumpscaring yourself would just be considered punishment (or "positive punishment").

To re-frame it as a list of combinations:

* Positive reinforcement: [Adding] something so that entity does the action [more]

* Negative reinforcement: [Removing] something so that entity does the action [more]

* Positive punishment: [Adding] something so that entity does the action [less]

* Negative punishment: [Removing] something so that entity does the action [less]

P.S.: Note that this intentionally avoids diving into exactly how the Entity judges the Something. It's not always clear, even if in many cases you can guess.

P.S.: Sharing a book-quote that seems apropos, particularly the final two lines.

> People came, and tormented a nameless thing without boundaries, and went away again. He met them variously. His emerging aspects became personas, and eventually, he named them, as well as he could identify them. There was Gorge, and Grunt, and Howl, and another, quiet one that lurked on the fringes, waiting.

> [...] Howl handled the rest. He began to suspect Howl had been obscurely responsible for delivering them all to [the torturer] in the first place. Finally, he'd come to a place where he could be punished enough. Never give aversion therapy to a masochist. The results are unpredictable.

-- Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold

There's also Allen Carr's books about treating addiction, and they don't use negative reinforcement, at least the ones I've read

Rather it helps you learn to recognize the fallacies behind the addictive cravings themselves, and to thus resolve the core of why you turn to that in the first place

Still have to make the decision to recall those in the moment, but when you do you do neutralize the cravings

His first book was Easy Way to Stop Smoking

For digital addiction there's Smart Phone, Dumb Phone

For internet porn there's easypeasymethod.org (based on EasyWay to Stop Smoking)

I know two people that quit with that book, both more than 20 years ago. One restarted few years ago, the other one never smoked again.

I put wads of toenail clippings like ))))) in my Lisp code.

Didn't work; still at it, 25 years and counting.

I genuinely hope you find a way to quit. you made me do an audible gag sound.

Yeah, counting parens! Dohohoho!

Go Parinfer, never look back!

> toenail clippings like ))))) in my Lisp code

I smell a custom font opportunity.

I'll admit that I went quite far in your comment history to figure out if maybe those 5 closing parentheses were matching some long-lost post of yours, and as a Lisp addict you couldn't resist the temptation.

Alas, I am disappointed to inform you that your comment history will no longer compile :(

> where you put a wad of hair in your cigarettes

Oh god I almost gagged just thinking about it. If negative reinforcement works, that'd do it haha

SNRIs like Wellbutrin do this. They make cigarettes taste gross.

It is hilarious that page shows how one replaces FB with HN... which is precisely what I did in 2019, and now I'm a total HN addict, spending more than a few minutes on it at least 5 times a day.

In case you don't already know - set noprocrast in your HN profile to limit the time you spend on this site.

in case you don't know this only has limited effect, cause you can open it again in a private browser. besides the search works with the procast setting, and we're not talking external constraints, people, us, me,... lack at this point internal mental defenses against the negative impact of social media.

See, this is the problem with all these mindfulness tools. I, the human, can simply defeat every challenge the computer attempts. And i require the ability to do so in case i have a need that's only satisfied by searching reddit for textbook recommendations while I'm in half price books, or a youtube video to fix my broken zipper pocket before i head to the gym soon. The fact that they time wasting sites are also the "goldmine of knowledge" sites make me include a back door in any time minder tool. A backdoor which is only used when needed... until it slowly becomes muscle memory and the tool is defeated by my capacity to learn to fuck myself over again and again.

Instead you ought to pay someone $15/hr to sit next to you. Anytime you're distracted by a website for more than five minutes, they punch you in the arm.

They also have to know they don't get paid if you manage to convince them to go away and leave you alone for a while.

Someone should to invent an AI powered one that is utterly unpredictable and installs in the boot sector. You're browsing Hacker News one day and suddenly your smoke alarms goes off. You do it the next day and your Echo device starts playing death metal at highest volume. You do it the next day and your car alarm goes off.

I really hope that the demo video on the frontpage uses the referrer (referer?) HTTP header to select the URL!

I bet you can do that with Chrome’s puppeteer and cache the domain to optimize it. You won’t get the personalized pages of Facebook et al but it would be really fun.

The name is genius.

Any chance this gets open sourced? I understand that you can just look at the code of your installed extensions in chrome's directory on your computer, but it would be cool to look at the code, if you're willing to share.

CRX Viewer is handy for peeking without installing:

https://robwu.nl/crxviewer/?crx=https%3A%2F%2Fchromewebstore...

Oh wow, I expected it to be minimized, obfuscated JS, but it's completely readable! I wish more extensions were like this...

I regret clicking on that first image lol. Super scary!

A fun idea, but I am so hesitant to install extensions that have access to any URL. I don't know who this developer is, so how can I know they won't accept $10k to sell their extension to some malware group that will try to exfil all of my banking credentials after updating this extension?

This is a good point and I haven’t read the manifest as I’m in a bit of a rush. Chrome did do a lot of work improving the manifest for conditions like this in v3. I know with webRequest you have to specify urls but not sure if there is a separation of duties here in terms of

1. Permission to operate on any url page loaded locally and being able to modify the html/insert html like the clown image

2. Being able to webRequest http outbound to <any_url> where you could exfiltrate data.

I thought there was a way to insert html into any loaded page without having access to send outbound network requests.

If that is the case that it’s separate if the chrome extension were to be sold and the manifest were changed to allow nefarious behavior you would know.

This is quite the problem with the chrome extension ecosystem. It is rife with malware. How does someone build an extension that can promise better behaviour. There doesn’t seem to be a way to restrict oneself.

Even manifest changes aren’t “scary enough”.

It's worse. Even if you DO know and trust the developer, in a year or two, they're probably going to get an email from a nice man who will want to buy their extension for $10,000, and they've long gotten bored of it, so why not?

I would hope that these days the popular extension devs would know about this type of attack and would guard against it by perhaps selling the extension code but shutting down the original extension page under their control so users have to choose to install the new company's extension. As a matter of fact, why won't Google/Mozilla prevent this by making an extension and a person's account inseparable, and have legal language in the ToS that says they can't sell the extension as-is with the install base to a new company? It would prevent so much.

I remember reading somewhere that, in times long past, if a company name was of the form “Johnson and Sons” (for example), it would be considered fraud to sell that company outside of the named family.

I personally think you’re on to something with tying companies to the reputation of specific natural persons, but I don’t think that is where we are going anytime soon.

That'd be interesting, but imagine how poorly it'd work given how often medium/large companies change hands. Heck, when Google itself became a subsidiary of Alphabet, it didn't require everyone to create new "Alphabet" accounts and replace Google Chrome with Alphabet Chrome.

Although...I'm not necessarily opposed to that. Companies can change names and ownership a little too easily. Making it painful might help some things.

That would be the right thing but browsers are not interested in adding friction to an ecosystem that already has its own rules. Extensions offer a lot of value to users witjout any effort from the browser companies

>why won't Google/Mozilla prevent this by making an extension and a person's account inseparable

This can be gotten around easily by making a separate Google account for the extension. It would require using gmail rather GSuite (without transferring over the entire GSuite domain.)

The offer would be $10k for the extension page, or $10 for just the code.

Google/mozilla don't add legal language because legal language doesn't make something illegal. They can say "we'll remove your extension if we find out you've sold it", but they way they'd find out would be that the extension now serves malware anyway.

Could turn off automatic updates so it won't matter who buys it

Can't you pin the extension version so it doesn't auto-update?

Easy solution. Don't install it.

An extension like this should be relatively small. Download the source code, read it to make sure nothing bad is happening, then install it from source so it doesn't get automatically updated.

Why would this extension ever need to be updated?

I really wonder how well averse conditioning works... maybe I'll try it if it works on firefox and is open source.

Something I've done on some periods I was fighting my procrastination was to use pomodoro timers and mantras: "Just for today" and "one day at a time". Interestingly, these simple tools worked very very well.

> "Just for today"

This is great at getting me to justify procrastination.

Combat addiction with PTSD

I know this is a joke, but iirc there used to be certain procedures that would surgically implant something physically harmful into an addicts arm to scare them into soberness. Like a capsule maybe?.. Can't remember the details. And if the person were to start drinking alcohol again, the capsule would break down and release a chemical into their bloodstream.

i looked it up. disulfiram subdermal implants. just proves i need this extension for firefox %(

Suspect you may be thinking of this…

> Disulfiram (Antabuse) changes the way your body breaks down alcohol. If you drink while taking it, you get sick.

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/features/fight...

Not really, MeatSpin is missing

Oh warning please! I got a demo jumpscare and almost had a household of very upset kids from the scream and my almost-heart attack reaction. Well done!

For those with stronger stomachs this is a fantastic idea.

I'd say the tagline of "add random jumpscares to sites you're trying to avoid" is a fair warning of what the demo entails.

But what does it do?

I love that the example video shows someone adding HN to the jump-scare list. I should probably do that…

You might be interested in the noprocrast settings!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=814695

I have absolutely no use for this, but the name oh my god!

Also works great for low blood pressure issues

What if it just makes me addicted to jump scares? :-P

This is a hilarious idea! :D

No idea how well it might actually play out, but you made my day by putting this bit of whimsy out on the Internet.

Thank You For Making And Sharing!!

Five Nights at Freddie's - browser extension mode

I remember when I was 5, and I got a jumpscare when playing a flash game...

I was so scared that I cannot move but trembling on my chair. Luckily my mom was near and she heard my scream and turned off the computer.

If you didn’t move then it wasn’t technically a jump scare. ;)

LOL you make a good point

A while back I tried to apply this same principle to an iphone case that tazes you at random when you hold it for longer than 5 minutes.

I gave up on the idea for a number of reasons, primarily driving safety

Why would you hold your phone while driving?

Nice idea, but I fear that my mind will quickly get stimulated by the expectation of getting a new and exciting jumpscare, thus reinforcing addiction instead of reducing it.

some notes:

icon doesn't look great with my colour scheme: https://imgur.com/a/D0UcBaY

> Jumpscare Probability (%) what does this mean? % chance of it showing up per minute? per click? what?

i set it to 100% to test and there seems to be no way to cancel it once they show up. bug? it interrupts important user actions like typing and on refresh they're gone.

The animation on the home page does a great job giving you all you want to know.

Granted it's a simple app but I wish other apps were as easy to understand.

I just add the websites I try to avoid to my hosts file (e.g. /etc/hosts):

  127.0.0.1 facebook.com www.facebook.com

oh my god is there a firefox version?

Anyone else wondering what was the full query starting with "Human beings who are al[most?ways?]..."?

Babe wake up, new hacker prank just dropped.

The only difference between an anti-addiction tool and a prank is whose computer you install it on.

My mind instantly went to pranking others. Similar extension can be found in this list at #11. https://www.maketecheasier.com/practical-jokes-extension-for...

I love the idea ! Is there also a way to make sure you cannot remove these types of extensions ? Something open source and not sketchy that makes it possible to either set a password (that you'll not save) or be removed only if you reinstall the browser. Something to this liking ?

I don't think any browser vendor would expose an API to allow this.

I think the best you could manage is a system administrative profile that forces the browser to install the extension

Or, depending on how serious you are, you could modify the browser source to make it unremovable, at least for Chromium or Firefox

You could write your own OS software that polls your browser for installed extensions and then nukes your internet connection through the host file if you disable the extension. Cold Turkey kinda does this by automatically closing your browser during a blocked session if you disable their extension.

The challenge is that there's always a workaround. The added friction might be enough to fulfil your need though.

This is so goofy, I assume the clever name was the genesis of the idea. Old school, off-the-wall.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/jumpscare-tab/lgffj...

Same idea

This is getting ridiculous.

I have created something similar, which you can find here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blocked-websi....

The extension redirects blocked pages to a humorous page featuring GIFs: https://giphy.com/explore/this-is-bullshit.

I've never thought about this – but it's quite the brilliant idea provided the user isn't someone prone to getting a heart attack from a jumpscare.

I suspected something would happen, but I still jumped when I pressed"What is a jumpscare?". Well played.

I love the name and idea. Bravo!

Is it possible to distribute this extension outside the Chrome Web Store? I am met with a sign-in wall.

I haven't laughed so hard at a story headline in a long time. Kudos and thanks for that!

Nowadays visiting any news website will surely give one a new jumpscare every day.

I wonder if a kitty or puppy of diabetes inducing cuteness would have the same effect.

I use LeechBlock. Has site passwords, delays, outright blocks etc. Not scary though.

I can't close the jumpscare after getting it. Can you add a cross button?

God damn that name is absolutely perfect. I'm upvoting it for that alone.

Great name, with two accurate meanings. TabBoo -> taboo, tab boo

Just installed this on my co-worker laptop who plays Cut The Rope... Let's see her reaction! I like the idea, pretty creative, you can use it as a way to combat addiction, prank people or both!

Great, can we please have it for Firefox, too?

Love this.

The example wasn't scary enough but it's pretty fun

We need more hilarious chrome extensions like this!

Will absolutely have the reverse effect

Same here lol. I'm also immune to jumpscares and find them funny.

haha brilliant, but make it VERY scary, there needs to be sound too

I clicked the "what's a jumpscare?" link and now my bpm are through the roof I'm so dumb

Only for Chrome?

The link on the TabBoo logo is invalid FYI.

love it

this is so stupid and impractical and I love it so hard

lol, genius :D

lol genius

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