We used to do this in the firewall at my first job. Every weekend the founder of the company would get drunk and login to servers and mess things up. So every weekend it was my job as the junior to go into our FreeBSD firewall and uncomment or update an ipfw line that blocked his IP-address.
Sure it wasn't a weird grazing ritual? A cron script would've replaced you doing that, more efficiently and reliably.
When I did military service abroad, the new chefs rotating down was put on "sandwich alert" in which anyone on camp signal centers could call in the middle of the night, requesting a nice sandwich delivered. It was all fun and games, they were shortly let in on the thing and we all laughed at it afterwards. No-one abused it.
Naw, I used to party with the founder. It got wild.
The problem back then in 2004-2005 was that his DSL could give him a new IP lease anytime so it couldn't really be automated away without having a dyndns script running on his computer, which would never work.
Well I can't really, just hearsay. We were just a battalion and most were out on diverse smaller camps or manning checkpoints and the like, so we weren't that many that even could abuse it. And, it's a kind of abuse in essence really, so we can probably reverse my statement.
> I don't think so, considering how Twitter is somehow running better with 80 percent of personnel removed
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I believe you are getting downvoted (and now flagged and removed from the thread) for not substantiating your comment. HN does not seem to like single-line comments that do not provide info.
But I have to ask. Do you have any info or stats that shows that Twitter is really running better? By what metrics is it running better? Honest question.
You could be right, but it's not like a large software project instantly falls apart if people leave. It'll keep running for a while but cracks will start to develop and nobody will be around to patch them up.
Something like this might actually be useful for the all-too-common productive procrastination breaks. Stuck on a hard problem? Better clean my desk. Waiting for a build? Better clean my files. Lacking momentum? Better check LinkedIn (it’s professional so it’s okay). I wonder which type of “break” kills more productivity, “fun” distraction or “productive” distraction. Anyone else?
Probably "productive" distractions, since you can do them a lot more before feeling bad and going back to work. Especially if you can silently get into the "fun" territory.
I've actually had this with HN in the last days; I've ditched Reddit for HN because it 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.
Yeah, HN is such a double edged sword. Great technical discussions as well as time sucking passive aggressive discussions about "divisive social issues", which I cannot help but click.
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.
> I've ditched Reddit for HN because it contained a lot more worthwile content
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.
It varies... I'll often see mention of interesting/useful tools/sites/applications mentioned in more technical discussion. I don't always find these things immediately useful, but often even a year later if I can remember enough to search and find what I was looking for. Sometimes just knowing something exists in extremely useful.
For me the benefit is honestly just less content. There is only so much that makes it to the front page here and the lack of infinite scroll means I rarely see beyond it. It helps me waste a lot less time. But reddit was also a real problem for me. Way too many hours each day and I had to quit it.
there's been a few times where I read something that I was really glad I found out about through here, and probably wouldn't have found out otherwise. But yeah, easily >99% of it is just passing time
HN was my MBA back in 2010-2013, that’s where I learnt how to create a working startup. There were blogs like Kalzumeus or Joel On Software, people were still debating technical or business issues about startups.
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.
> Probably "productive" distractions, since you can do them a lot more before feeling bad and going back to work. Especially if you can silently get into the "fun" territory.
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.
Have to admit, the change to Twitter in terms of personality the past few months has been as fun as Twitter around a decade ago... I mean, a lot more snark, memes and generally fun. Not perfect, but definitely more entertaining than when people were getting banned for parody accounts.
There's probably an argument to be made that at least those tasks might help push you out of a rut if you've spent hours banging your head against a wall. God knows cleaning my desk is probably a better use of my time right now than commenting yet again on HN.
Yeah I’ve certainly heard that doing something small can help get the engine going, but anecdotally, it totally goes both ways. I’ve had afternoons where I clean something or what have you and get right back to it and others where I clean something and end up changing the capitalization of symbols for no reason.
When I'm working on a hard problem and I identify that I actually do need to stop and just think about it more indirectly I find going for a walk to be pretty useful.
> Better check LinkedIn (it’s professional so it’s okay)
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.
Yeah I moved the LinkedIn app to the front page of my home screen when I went to a conference a couple months ago. I check it much more when it's right there. Thanks to your comment, I'm going to move it back to where it was before, buried in a folder on the fourth page.
Whenever I feel too tired to focus on something "productive" is when I clean the house, because most of my productive work involves thinking and most of the tidying/cleaning is a set of repetitive tasks that I can do on "autopilot" and so ironically I find it easier to carry them out when I'm too tired to get caught up thinking about software projects.
But the tricky part is remembering to nudge myself into starting tidying etc..
I'm somewhat disappointed that there is no Firefox version. However, given that the author most likely uses his extension, I can see what might have happened.
I use leechblock. It's pretty great. It's extremely feature rich. The UI is a little ugly but "ugly" in the style that a hackernewser would likely appreciate.
My only complaint is the way it does this thing when you're out of time and it redirects you (either to their block page or a custom page you set up). Not sure how it does it but the original url you tried to reach doesn't get saved in your history. If I try to manually disable the extension it'll also automatically close the page with the leechblock message so it's gone forever. Kind of annoying if it's a link I'd like to revisit after work
Good news! Your computer is ready for Windows 11! And how about a nice game of Solitude Candy Smackers (TM)? Have you tried the new Microsoft Edge web browser? It's not a browser, it's a WOWser!
Actually, it's real. I started getting spam emails from some new browser vendor, a contact of mine apparently had shared their contacts with them. They used that line, "it's a WOWser".
Because of those legit reviews, that you ignore at first because who even reads these picked out reviews and then start to realize what is written there?
Totally agree with this. I have been advocating this since 2014 and points to my article whenever someone asks me. It needs an update but the general idea is still valid. I do have notifications for some key specific events such as Health, timed events in the calendar, and selected people who can call, etc but otherwise it is pretty quite almost all the time.
In a bout of blasphemy, I’d like to be slightly productive and learn something:
The page header renders the “Y” in “Productivity” on a new line because mobile. Is there a reliable CSS method to say, “pick whatever font size fills the parent width without wrapping”?
If HN is a productivity block it should be promoted when using this, not blocked. The point of this extension is to block everything making you productive, so that you can procrastinate and slack off more.
I've found just using ScreenTime on macOS during the time where I need to get stuff done is very useful. It is a bit hidden, because you have to enable "Limit Adult Websites", but then you can configure sites you want to block. My list is:
ycombinator.com
guardian.co.uk
theguardian.com
nytimes.com
spiegel.de
Works wonders! It really helps for these little breaks where you automatically go to a site subconsciously. And none of these sites are useful for what I do, except HN sometimes to look up information and pointers about technical topics.
> The greatest trick that javascript ever pulled was to convince the latest generation of programmers that it was fast...
By the way, JavaScript IS quite fast. I ported some code from Swift to Typescript recently, and its runtime went down from 15 seconds to 2 seconds. It wasn't a 1-1 port because I improved things, so it is not a fair comparison, but I was very positively surprised.
I don't think you did! Doing the same improvements in Swift I wouldn't expect an over seven time speedup. I suspect that the time difference has to do with data structures like hashmaps, which in Swift are defacto immutable, and in JavaScript are not.
I've been using Freedom for this for some time. I would recommend using these tools.
When you site down and want to get something done you just block out a few hours where you can't access the sites that distract you. It is really good for focus. I thought I could do this with will power alone but these sorts of tools really do help.
Does freedom allow you to block apps? I have it and it works nicely for safari and my Mac. I haven't been successful in trying to have it block apps. Maybe because I have an ancient iPhone.
It allows you to install a vpn on iOS that blocks traffic to domains on your blocklist, effectively blocking apps (unless you download things offline like YouTube videos or Podcasts).
Worst offender as in making you the most productive? I'm pretty sure that's not the case. I'm not even sure it qualifies to be on the list. If anything it's a distraction making you less productive.
Wanted to share this with the team, but I noticed the social cards aren't loading (at least not on slack). It's probably due to the fact that your social images are not on HTTPS:
Unfortunately, my dopamine seeking monkey brain would just open another browser and successfully procrastinate if the only thing stopping me were a chrome extension. That's why I use selfcontrol: https://selfcontrolapp.com/
Rather than blocking things, I've found it more efficient to use the pomodoro technique and commit to no interruptions during working sessions. A 25-minute session is short enough, so that's a realistic commitment.
I try to do at least one session in the morning, no matter how bad I feel. Usually it's sufficient to put me back into the zone, after which I don't need any tools or frameworks to keep me going.
There seems to be an error in the first paragraph.
Introducing productivity blocker, The first Chrome extension for blocking any website that make you productive.
should the word "productive" be unproductive?
Neither did I. I stopped at the fake star ratings. Looks to me that they kinda failed.
Edit: Oh wait. It looks like i read the whole page. But didn't pay attention because I skimmed through the text and I never even looked at the icons. Not that I can recognize most of them.
I'm really not the target audience for this kind of product page...
![http://static1.squarespace.com/static/61e76afa9e2d33114d3da2...](http://static1.squarespace.com/static/61e76afa9e2d33114d3da29d/t/621a45c6107e855cd4c57109/1645888966833/banner-m-2.jpeg?format=1500w"/>){kind=link}
