Hacker News addiction and taking simple mundane breaks in life

k310

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

SyneRyder

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/

gorgabal

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

tancop

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.

theinfamousmobb

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

plastic-enjoyer

> 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.

karmakaze

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.