Block positive reinforcement from HN with uBlock
Inspired by the nytimes post "Luddites don't want your upvotes", and presumably being a Luddite myself, I have used uBlock to block my Karma score at the top of the page. I found myself (on old account) reflexively checking my Karma score and found myself responding emotionally to it. I do not like this. Positive reinforcement can be a dangerous thing! And negative reinforcement make me feel a bit crap. I'm going to post what I think is the right thing, votes be damned! However I do see the use of downvotes for getting rid of stupid comments and spam as a good thing. I see the use of…
Block positive reinforcement from HN with uBlock launched on January 2, 2023 with 9 votes, #1,438 of 3,901 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Inspired by the nytimes post "Luddites don't want your upvotes", and presumably being a Luddite myself, I have used uBlock to block my Karma score at the top of the page. I found myself (on old account) reflexively checking my Karma score and found myself responding emotionally to it. I do not like this. Positive…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- AWA Way To Hack HN's Karma2012 · ▲472
I submitted a link, when someone clicks on it I get an up-vote for this article. I don't want people to misuse this I just want to bring attention to this problem. This is the link I used that up-votes this: http://news.ycombinator.com/vote?for=3742742&dir=up&...
I built an app to block Shorts and Reels2025 · scrollguard.app · ▲690I wanted to find a way to use Instagram without ending up scrolling for two hours every time I open the app to see a friend's story. Most screen time apps I found focus on blocking the app itself instead of the addictive feed, so I created this app to allow me to keep using the "healthy" and "social" features and block the infinite scrolling (Reels) After implementing the block on Instagram Reels, I got addicted to YouTube Shorts and Reddit feed. So, I extended the app to cover these as well. To avoid replacing the scrolling for regular feeds, I also added a feature that shows a pop-up when…
CommentblocksFeb 2026 · commentblocks.com · ▲101Hey HN, I'm a freelance web developer and got tired of the endless email chains during website QA. Clients would send screenshots with red circles, or worse, Word docs with "the button on the page with the thing." I'd spend more time decoding feedback than actually fixing stuff. So I built Commentblocks. You add a script to your staging site, send clients a link, and they click anywhere on the page to leave a comment. That's it. No signup for them, no explaining how to use it. Each comment captures the exact element, viewport size, browser, and URL. Comments show up in a dashboard or can go…
I built a smart blocker after destroying my dopamine baselineNov 2025 · chromewebstore.google.com · ▲20I'm a solo dev. A few years ago, I got addicted to Reddit. Spent months in that loop. Being a programmer, I thought I'd be clever. Redirected Reddit's domain to nowhere in my DNS file. Worked great until I'd just... open the file and undo it 20 minutes later. So I made it irreversible. Locked the DNS file so it can't be edited unless I boot my Mac in safe mode. And if I do that, there's a script that instantly locks it again. Haven't used Reddit since last year. Problem solved, right? Wrong. I just replaced Reddit with Twitch and YouTube. Started keeping streams running in the background…
A blocklist to remove spam and bad websites from search results2025 · github.com · ▲225Hi HN! I've been fed up with search results so much that I decided to make a giant blocklist to remove garbage links by using uBlacklist. I browsed other blocklists and wasn't very satisfied from what exists now; the goal of this one is to be super organized and transparent, explaining why each site was blocked via issues. Contributions welcome! Even though around 100 domains are blocked so far, I already noticed a big improvement in casual searches. You'd be surprised how some AI generated websites can dominate the #1 page on DuckDuckGo.
Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward Quality Comments2023 · zsync.xyz · ▲207I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
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The project is called QueryStorm. It uses Roslyn to offer C# (and VB.NET) support in Excel, as an alternative to VBA. I've posted about it before, but a lot has changed since then so figured I'd share an update. The current version includes a host of new features, namely a C# debugger, support for NuGet packages, and the ability to publish Excel extensions to an "AppStore" (which is essentially a NuGet repository). The AppStore can be used by anyone with the (free) runtime component. Another great addition is the community license, which is a free license for individuals and small companies…
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Hey HN! Some more info: I’m an NHS doctor and the founder of Pi-A (https://www.pi-a.io) which developed Lungy (https://www.lungy.app). Lungy is an app (iOS only for now) that responds to breathing in real-time and was designed to make breathing exercises more engaging and beneficial to do. It hopefully has many aspects of interest to the HN community – real-time fluid, cloth and soft body sims running on the phone’s GPU. My background is as a junior surgical trainee and I started building Lungy in 2020 during the first COVID lockdown in London. During COVID, there were…
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