Distracting yourself from distractions by building an overly complex system to help you do that, and writing an article about it, is certainly a very HN-ish thing to do.
If you identify a problem behavior then putting extrinsic constraints to manage that behavior seems like a reasonable thing to do. This comment reads like disparaging an ex-smoker for not still walking around with cigarettes in their pocket.
I read the article as if it was written by a smoker, that wanted to quit so badly, he engineered a complex machine that would only dispense him a cigarette on a defined and spaced out schedule. Thereby, not quitting at all.