b3eck

After reading the comments on today's Disconnecting Distraction essay by PG (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192654), I realized that I wanted to throttle my internet usage, not relegate it to a few times during the day. That way, I could still spend some time online, but the "Unable to connect" page would set off alarms. Is there anyone out there who uses iptables to prevent procrastination?

Not having used iptables before, but knowing that I wasn't blocking anything because I'm behind a router firewall, I read the man page and implemented some rules that throttled my hourly connections to 200:

  iptables -A OUTPUT -p ! tcp -j ACCEPT
  iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport ! 80 -j ACCEPT
  iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -m limit --limit 400/hour --limit-burst 500 -j ACCEPT
  iptables -A OUTPUT -j REJECT

Surprisingly, after implementing these commands, I searched on Google and didn't find any mentions of iptables preventing procrastination. Surely I'm not the only one to have thought of this idea, but it didn't feel right to comment this late on the original article and not help anyone. It's helped me significantly so far, and even made submitting this question a bit tricky. So, hopefully these commands help someone else, and if you have better rules, feel free to share...

"Once again the top story is an embarrassment to News.YC. And unfortunately it is mostly the recently arrived users who voted it up. Maybe it's inevitable that I'll have to turn on some form of vote weighting." -pg

Consider the effects of regulated voting (i.e. removing the voting links after a user's vote for a period of time, e.g. 1 hour for submissions and 5 minutes for comments) and regulated posting (removing the add comment box if the user has commented or voted recently, e.g. in the past 5 minutes) on the pernicious scourges of News.YC: rampant upmodding would become much less rampant, popular lowest-common-denominator banality would subside since banal hilarity is only funny for a moment, newcomer acclimation would improve as newcomers are directed to the discussion of the article, karma gaming would remain unimportant as karma does not confer any additional benefits, and comment deluge would slightly decline as long-winded retort threads would become more difficult. Additionally, it might even prevent the worst cases of News.YC addiction.

The motivations for the above suggestion are twofold: firstly, that it takes time to read articles and comments thoroughly and little time to vote unintelligently or add a troll comment, and secondly, that scarcity of available voting and commenting power causes users to deliberately consider which sites are worth waiting to save and which comments are worth waiting to submit.

A more general solution would allow exponential rating, where a rating of five would be a multiple greater in importance than a rating of four, but the step function of delayed voting and commenting is an approximation. The idea is that intelligent users have very carefully reasoned tastes (c.f. pg and his essays), which act as a long-tail filter a la Chris Anderson. For them, most everything is dross, whereas there are a few gems in the rough that are orders of magnitude (i.e. exponentially) better. Popular lowest-common-denominator banality is popular precisely because of a lack of carefully reasoned tastes, and in aggregating opinions of the best news, News.YC could bias towards the intermittent but intelligent content by regulating votes and comments to only slightly discourage that content while greatly encumbering the introduction of banal content.

So, what say you?