This past month or so, my work has shifted to have long periods of being on standby during WFH.  However, I can’t get into reading a book, working on personal programming, or applying to other jobs during the downtime because there is too much likelihood that I’ll be summoned to fill the gaps with activities that require sustained concentration.Enter HN.  Somehow my phone remembered that I created an account a few years back and then never used.  HN became a way to fill time because there was no value lost if I had to step away to do work for a while and totally lost my place.  Unlike Reddit, the discussions here are readable and (occasionally) informative.  The problem arrives when I’ve read the font page for the day and then keep coming back to refresh the page or browse the new queue.I’ve tried deleting the HN icon from Safari’s top sites list (I’m a strict iPhone-only poster here).  That worked for a few days until I started to type in “news.y…” in the address bar manually (and then another HN page ended up in my frequently-visited list).What got me off Reddit was boredom or exhaustion from the repetitive discussions.  The addictive points about HN right now for me are the novelty (I’m still finding interesting discussions and not yet mentally autofilling the expected comments on every post I read) and the civility culture (which means that the arguments aren’t Twitter-tier name-calling, so long as there isn’t someone to show up to rant about the evils of socialism on a tangentially-related thread).If I had better Wi-Fi in my office, I could just blackhole HN from my PiHole.  However, my phone reverts to cellular data most of the workday.Fortunately, this should have a natural conclusion in a couple weeks when my team starts a new project and I can expect to be busy with real work all day instead of staying on standby.