Hacker News addiction and taking simple mundane breaks in life | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News addiction and taking simple mundane breaks in life

smileplease.mataroa.blog

I have had some pet projects in my notebooks for years. I made the mistake of moving to the boondocks, where people seem to extend their fear of "over the river and through the woods" even to electronic communication, which is the best way NOT to collaborate on new ideas.

I joined HN, besides lurking, to build "cred" and to improve my communication skills.

I honestly use an auto-pager to save each day's entire HN in a SeaMonkey composer page. As I rapidly page through, some items stand out, and I read them on the spot and save as pdf's.

Any big ones I miss show up on "best" [0]

I am an infovore, and this limits my HN time. Like an addict treating themself. I am still mostly sane.

New developments I find WILL make their way into those ideas, or I'll just hand them to my son in law.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/best

Information addiction is information addiction. No matter if it is instagram, YouTube or hacker news. Generally better for your mental health to just consume less information and be more mindful of what you give your attention

If you have a good time then it's not wasted, and if it helps you get useful info or inspiration for new projects then it's even better.

Honestly I go here for drama in the comments. And for the feeling that I know something before all my friends do. But the main thing is sometimes you can find a great article that pushes you forward as a developer (or even better as a person) and I don't want to miss it.

This site is filled with jaded millionaire nerds who believe the world can't ever get better. I'm the exact opposite of that but I stay here because sometimes you can find people who really know what they're talking about, and that makes it worth every minute.

Seeing experts in the field or oftentimes the literal developer / author themselves come into the comments is always so interesting, as somebody who has nothing to do with development and just likes to keep up on tech news.

The piece also mentions this, but Hacker News has a "No Procrastination" feature you can enable in your profile.

You can set the maximum number of minutes you're allowed to visit Hacker News for, and the minimum number of minutes you need to be away before the site will let you return.

There's other software that can help too, to block you from websites for a period of time. Years ago my favourite was Concentrate on the Mac, but that is discontinued. It seems Focus is another replacement - I haven't tried it, but link as an example of what is available:

https://heyfocus.com/

OP here, I wished to write about this in the blog post but I also use a block-site[0] thing (ironically it still is open and I just press one minute or 5 minute etc.)

I think that the issue with that is that atleast with the block extenstion that I currently use, its really easy to just open it up for 1 minute or 5 minute etc. and this then goes into the issue that I have tried to talk about in the article.

To give you a meta example of this issue, I still wanted to see how my blog post is doing and uh, I opened it up for 1 minute but then saw your comment and have started commenting.

> You can set the maximum number of minutes you're allowed to visit Hacker News for, and the minimum number of minutes you need to be away before the site will let you return.

The min. no of minutes part is a lot more interesting part for me as with that extension, there isn't really that concept.

> There's other software that can help too, to block you from websites for a period of time. Years ago my favourite was Concentrate on the Mac, but that is discontinued. It seems Focus is another replacement.

I will try that out! Basically what I want is where if I am studying, I can decide for how long my studying is and then when opening up hackernews (as I just press n, press enter and its so subconscious), instead of having a button which can make me unblock it, It will just literally have no option (period) to unblock in that time. I think this is what you are suggesting with this app, so I will try that out!

Also thanks for commenting, Time to go back to studying for me, please wish me luck and have a nice day :-D

[0]: https://webextension.org/listing/block-site.html

Good blog post and I can tell it's from the heart.

At the other end of the spectrum though, stopping to take in other peoples' articles and comments can amount to taking a simple mundane break.

Depends on what you need a break from ;)

That is true and maybe this is one layer below of the nuance that I was talking at, I wanted a break from the constant news cycle or trying to find or constantly think about new projects and ideas and this constant cycle in many ways and hackernews is that sometimes for me.

Yet at the same time, its a cozy place and these articles and comments do amount to taking a simple mundane break at the same time. Sometimes though I used to believe that I have to write the perfect comment and so I will write extremely detailed comments (I do think that I have learnt a few things from them and actually got to some thoughts while writing that I couldn't have previously gotten), and* aside from that, there are times when Hackernews is cozy as well [where I don't worry about the perfectionism within the comment where I just talk to people because I am so impressed by them or just this sense of coziness and warmth in general at the same time too perhaps]* so yeah I would say that I agree with you on many levels. This blog has just been my humble attempt at trying to describe the former rather than latter though.

Also thanks for appreciating that its from the heart. I do consider it to be a very good praise and I think that although I worried that my writing would be unable to get the point across, I think that I was able to explain the emotions within the blog and maybe I am being semi competent at writing. These compliments help my confidence so thank you and have a nice day :-D

The high volume of posts (and corresponding lower signal quality) cured me. Now I visit see a handful of stories that I didn't need to read. Occasionally worthwhile so still visit but not frequently like I used to.

I didn't know about the no procrastination feature. Thanks for letting me know :)

> I think that, many of us are addicted to HN and believe that this form of addiction is better than other forms of addictions towards say instagram reels/shorts etc.

Maybe until the breakthrough of LLMs this year. But since then, the discussions here took a nose-dive and I feel like losing my sanity.

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