On: Track HN: Downtime visualized

I find it handy when HN goes down. Lets me get some work done. :)

It's like a global noprocrast. Let's take the next leap and add support for a 'global noprocrast vote'. If more people vote 'yes' than vote 'no', the site goes down for an hour.

I on the other hand become further unproductive. I keep coming back every 30 seconds to see if it’s up again and end up doing nothing at all.

Or you could just knuckle down and work. I cant think of many times a site justified more than a few visits a day

I'd say that's a sign you probably should block yourself from HN for a while. Any time that I notice that I'm getting too compulsive about a particular site I add it to a blocked list and leave it there for a week or two. I'm also a huge fan of Freedom.app for disconnecting my internet for blocks of time where I notice that I'm too easily distracted.

the freedom app seems interesting, does it have windows/linux equivalents?

Not that I know of, but it's a pretty trivial app. It just removes all of the default routing. Sure, I could probably add them back, but I've intentionally never learned how to use the BSD route that comes with Mac OS for that reason. :-)

With Linux, actually, you could probably go one level lower by writing a small kernel driver that you could signal from user space to disable networking for a given period and then do some goofiness so that it couldn't be unloaded effectively and still get networking back.

That's what hnstatus.net is for. Put it in a tab and the title will tell you within a minute when HN comes back.