Yep. Same. It says a lot about the quality of HN, I think. Also, I can't remember the last time it was down. For a while, I thought there must be something wrong with my internet connection or DNS config or something.

Habitual usage doesn't necessarily correlate to quality, I'd say. People who use Facebook/Twitter also have this sort of muscle reflex developed over time.

That said, HN does have quality content and the signal/noise is way better than sites designed specifically to keep you addicted.

It might not correlate to quality, but if the information found at a website wasn't valued we wouldn't be constantly pulling the site up, just like facebook users do.

I'd argue that this site has a good signal/noise ratio by design and specifically to keep you addicted (where "addicted" means using and constantly returning to the site). This site is just designed to attract people who are put off by the kinds of tricks employed elsewhere

> I'd argue that this site has a good signal/noise ratio by design

Or so we tell ourselves.

Internal polling shows that we are all here by merit and merit alone!

I feel the voting process on HN deserves a lot of credit for the quality of front-page content. I wish a knew more about it, other than karma>500 giving the ability to downvote.

I think they meant quality from a hardware and ops perspective.

Indeed. I find that it's so reliable and fast that I use it to check my internet connection. If I can't hit HN, then something's wrong on my end.

I assumed at first there was a problem with my mobile data connection, before I realized it was actually HN :)

Same here. I thought the my internet was down or I was too far from the router. HN being down was my last thought.

I use example.com for that purpose :p

Wow, it works, but it really seems like it shouldn't. I'd expected reserved domain names to not resolve at all let alone be pingable and point at a working webserver. Has it always had a website?

Yes, it’s always existed. It actually belongs to the IANA and if you Whois it you get: RESERVED-Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

If they're running a mail server too I'm guilty of sending them a lot of spam. [email protected] is what I've always used for people unnecessarily requesting an email addresses

Probably drops everything

Might have tried to curl it from a production system just to make sure it wasn't my internet.

I understood this reference.

I didn't wget it

> For a while, I thought there must be something wrong with my internet connection or DNS config or something.

Definitely thought the same. Then I realized that I'm browsing trough work VPN and had a second thought: what if our admins decided to fight procrastination?

Haha. A building of ours in Canada lost internet at the same time.

When I saw hn was down, I double-checked the news to see if a major part of the internet had gone down.

I bet thousands of people checked their network and DNS settings today. hn is what I use to make sure I have a connection

Same here, it used to be google but at some point it still just starting loading with no internet connection.

Easy to make sure you're not seeing some cached version by doing a search for random string from mashing your keyboard. These days literally any string of characters shorter than 10 will find some sort of result and there's very little chance you have it cached somehow.

Me too! I was, shamefully, in the middle of work so had a mini panic thinking my 5 min HN scroll was gonna become an hour long battle with my connection!

> Needless to say I opened a new tab, typed "n", and hit enter countless times today before my brain caught up with my muscle memory.

I do this too, and it's because this site is an addictive slot machine just like every other social networking site. I actually really hate this website, but I'm here almost every day, because I can't seem to break the habit. Neat. It's probably because I have a common impulse control / executive functioning disorder, and the way the front page works exploits some bug in my brain.

Reddit does this to me too. I also hate Reddit.

If it helps, I wouldn't say it's a disorder since it appears that basically everyone has a habit like this. It's probably a byproduct of some kind of adaptive advantage, but I don't have it in me to speculate exactly what at the moment. The only variable is what exactly you do automatically. Nowadays, everyone has their app or web page. Before smartphones and the internet being available everywhere, I remember my mentor talking about quitting cigarettes. This was shortly after the non-smoking section of the restaurant became the whole restaurant. She said that part of why it was so hard to quit was that even when she meant to cut back, she'd still find herself a third of the way through a cigarette before she realized that she'd lit one. I tear at the skin next to my fingernails in addition to opening HN (which was what I switched to when it became painfully obvious that Reddit was both bad for me and run by bad people). I moved my ebook app to the first screen on my phone and moved this app to a spot where I wasn't used to finding it. I figured it might get me to read more. What actually happened is that I started absent-mindedly swiping to the second screen and opening up the app.

It's a pretty universal issue. Companies are just getting better at using it to their advantage.

Try turning on noprocrast in your hn settings

I really love HN but I too feel like it's an addiction/slot machine.

My solution: a 3-hour focus mode browser extension.

1. Install the BlockSite chrome extension [1]. 2. In BlockSite settings, add HN, Twitter, and any other distracting sites to the Focus Mode list and set Focus Mode time to 3 hours. 3. Ensure you uninstall all social media apps from your phone 4. When I find myself opening a new tab and typing "n" to get a dopamine hit, I then turn on my 3-hour focus mode.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blocksite-block-we...

Others have mentioned browser add-ons / DNS providers who can limit/blacklist sites. Maybe try one of those? The thing that's worked best for me though is leaving my phone in another room for a while or taking a walk without it.

i got addiction problems and this is the only website that's healthy for me. there's no endless scroll if you just visit the "news" and don't go to the "newest" page. i like how it's intentional to go to the next page. i usually only click through like ~5 pages at most, and once i've visited ~10-20 times in a day, most all the content is stale. it's also been helpful for me to set the procrastination limits. so many times i'll visit and can't scroll and just move on.

with that said, the comments are the most addictive part of this site.

> I actually really hate this website

Why hate this site? Because it contains interesting/useful content often enough to make you come back? That'd be a weird reason to hate the site. I too have a common impulse control/executive functioning disorder, but I don't hate the things that it makes me vulnerable to. If I were feeling resentful, I'd have to put the blame on my condition.

I don't have to ask why you hate reddit, the valid reasons for hating reddit are myriad

I ended up just DNS blocking it on my work computer. Now I just spend a lot more time on my phone though :/

I was in almost the exact same position all day. What made it worse though was the fact that this happened right in the middle of my attempts at curbing my browsing habits. Once my app timers for Reddit is Fun, Instagram, and Twitter were up, it was time for HN... except there was no HN. What that meant is that I was reaching for a stimulus and then not getting it, the same way that an alcoholic wouldn't feel satisfied by, say, a can of soda. It was weird to experience, but very enlightening. It both made me realize how subconsciously my addiction is reinforced and reaffirmed to me that it is, in fact, an addiction. I'm not going to stop using HN of course, but I'm definitely going to be more aware of how I use it (e.g. passively vs. intentionally) from now on.

As far as addictions go, I find HN actually one that delivers actual knowledge. Literally every day I read something I didn't know before. Unlike on Facebook that just tries to serve me with more of the stuff I have already seen.

I like wasting time on HN because it's time not actually wasted :)

And don't get me started on Twitter... Sure there are some gems on twitter but I have to wade through 1000s of tweets of pure nonsense to see them. No thanks. If it's something really great someone will post a link on HN anyway :)

I find it valuable in moderation but some days I spend way too much time on it; past the point of diminishing returns. There's also an opportunity cost of what I could be doing with a lot of the time, which often would leave me feeling better than mindless HN reading.

I picked a bad day to stop using Twitter.

I realised this today too. I imagine pretty much all of us are the same!

I legitimately thought my internet was down for thirty minutes until I decided to try google.

Same. HN is how I check my internet connection is working. Took me a while to realize the problem wasn't my connection...

I reference back to it for a lot of info too, which I guess I should probably load more of into my own notes database. But still today there were a bunch of saved comments I wanted to re-read as reference multiple times, definitely noticeable to miss it. Or alternatively if I'd grabbed the URLs for everything I'm assuming the wayback machine probably archives this pretty well. Perils of depending on the HNcloud service :).

That used to happen to me with Slashdot too. I'm so happy that today I didn't even realize HN was down, I think I tried once, it didn't load and went do something else, I assumed it was some local DNS or internet issue.

Makes you appreciate the noprocrast mode feature.

Tried it once, never again!

I've been meaning to try that feature. Will probably check it out next week.

I see what you did there! haha

I set the delay to 1 minute: Short enough that I can wait if I really need to read a thread, but long enough to nudge me back to my primary task if I’m just browsing.

Yeah the delirium tremens are rough.

CTRL-SHIFT-n (or -p) -> n -> ENTER

Ah the elusive PorN method

My Firefox on Manjaro defaulted to CTRL-SHIFT-p to open an incognito window, took me a minute to unlearn CTRL-SHIFT-n, but I figured I can't have the only PC with that hotkey.

Doesn't help users who are usually not logged in.

... I might have been more productive than usual today.

This happened last couple of times I switched laptops - my old habit to visit "guardian.co.uk" by typing "guar" and hitting enter no longer works because I've now accidentally searched too many times for "guar" :D

You can make the omnibox forget about URLs and search terms you've used a lot by selecting them with the down key then pressing Shift+Delete (https://superuser.com/a/189334).

Note that that doesn’t seem to work if you have a bookmark with that content (as it seems to find the bookmark, which is reasonable behavior but caught me out when I was trying to change the URL to an internal tool and didn’t realize why it wasn’t working to delete the auto-complete).

Nice, doesn't seem to work on firefox though, guess it's chrome only?

Wow, I've never realized just how often I do this. There's some sort of a reward pathway in my brain connecting my right index finger to seeing that orange bar and lines of text.

Ohh... I thought my phone was just being weird because I use an AdBlock that works through VPN and it sometimes breaks stuff...

HN is where I get the bulk of my news and information about current thinking. I visit maybe several dozen times a day.

Yeah. HN has become an important part of my workflow. Glad to know I'm not the only one!

went out of my way to leave lurk mode and log in just so I could say "100% same experience for me"

Same experience through out the day.

noprocrast exists for a reason :)

Does it work even when you're logged out?

Even if it did. Second browser will help with the urge. But it can help anyway. Some people just need the reminder.

Amen.