I've actually had this with HN in the last days; I've ditched Reddit for HN because it actually contained a lot more worthwile content and valuable discussions [0], but with the Twitter shitshow I've come to enjoy a lot of snarky, unproductive discussions again. Maybe it's time to enable noprocast.

[0] Actually, it was mostly ideological reasons, but having HN as a "drop-in" replacement/upgrade helped a lot.

Wrote this script today, that just stops me seeing submissions from sites I know won't have good technical discussions. Might be useful for others.

    const boringDomains = ["twitter.com", "newyorker.com", "nytimes.com"]

    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".titleline > a"))
        .filter(elem => boringDomains.some(domain => elem.href.includes(domain)))
        .map(elem => elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement)
        .flatMap(elem => [
            elem,
            elem.nextElementSibling,
            elem.nextElementSibling.nextElementSibling]
        )
        .forEach(elem => elem.remove())

I found that at least for myself, this was just a lie I kept telling myself. HN contains almost zero actionable content, and I've not been an epsilon better off for reading it. I've come to see it as infotainment.

I found that at least for myself, this was just a lie I kept telling myself. HN contains almost zero actionable content, and I've not been an epsilon better off for reading it. I come to see it as infotainment.

Now it’s more a news aggregator. It’s my fault too, I don’t blog about the company I’ve created, and people can learn how to create proper startups in many places.

I feel like this is the case for a lot of productivity tools; every once in a while I find myself browsing the status-quo of the next generation of todo apps that have had far too much design work spent on their website for what it does. 9 times out of 10 it's a grift to sell a $15 / month subscription for syncing across devices and its added value is tiny compared to just using a text editor, lol.

30 minutes later... well got to keep my regex skills up to date else i'll lose them

I don’t have social media on my work computer except LinkedIn. I can’t tell you how many times a day I quickly open a new tab and head to LinkedIn (where I’m not even that personally active, mind you) to just get a quick hit of a distraction.

I feel sorry for my kidneys.

But the tricky part is remembering to nudge myself into starting tidying etc..