I don't try to keep up with HN. I check the home page (and Ask) when I'm bored or need distraction. If there are things that look interesting then I'll open the comments in separate tabs. If the comments are interesting then I'll maybe even [1] look at the article. If I miss stuff then whatever. HN is a firehose not a book.
[1] The main exception to this is Ken Shirriff's posts on righto.com (and maybe others) where I go straight to the post because they're so good.
andyjohnson0
Think about what problem HN solves in your life. To achieve that solution, is it required that you "keep up"? Or does HN serve its purpose in your life when you casually browse some stories once in a while?
I suspect that when you think about those questions, you'll realize that it really doesn't matter if you keep up or not. If something comes to this industry that is big enough to impact your actual life, you'll hear about it regardless of how often you read HN.
Odds are, there is no problem you need to deal with. HN is here when you have time for it, but your life is there all the time. Focus on the right one.
codingdave
For me, the primary issue is as follows. As the audience on HN has grown the rate of submissions has vastly increased. It used to be possible to follow new submissions which meant you could catch those gems of thoughtful submissions that didn’t gain enough traction to appear on the main list. This is totally impossible now.
I now simply follow the main list and hit “hide” on submissions I believe I don’t have interest in. Of those that remain, I read the submitted link and far more often than not they are not submission worthy so I hit “hide” again. Of those that remain, I hope comments arrive and an interesting discussion ensues.
In the past if felt like there was always something worth sifting through the dregs for. I’m unsure of how much longer I can sustain the effort. The technical implementation of the site could make things easier, where you use techniques from sybil-resistance to counter noise, but then if the compute cost on the backend goes up by an order of magnitude and I’m not sure Y Combinator is interested in financing the upkeep of that.
Difficult choices await me in terms of whether I ought to continue investing time in sifting though. It’d save me a lot of time, but then I’d have to find some way of making interesting friends. And if I knew that, I wouldn’t be here to begin with. :)
sxzygz
Same way as always. Open the page, glance down it to see if there's anything that interests me, hit hide on the domains that I never want to see anything from. Lather, rinse, repeat.
But I'm guessing you have more of a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) kind of problem, which admittedly I don't have. However, you could look at something using RSS, maybe in combination with an agent told to find and show articles based on some heuristics.
Personally, I'm OK with missing something. If it's good, I figure it'll surface somewhere else and impinge on my notice sooner or later.
romaniitedomum
I have vibe-coded a HN RSS feed reader and plugged an LLM into it to learn my preferences. So far it's been in the training mode over the past week and half but it's been getting better at predicting and I hope eventually to have it filter news according to my interests. It's been tracking all the news I have opened and trying to build my taste profile. If my experiment doesn't work out, given that it's a naive training without any special methods, I will try to come up with more advanced approaches for the next iterations. Took about an evening to build it to my liking, so not going to share it unless I am happy with the result.
When I see an interesting topic, I will read through the comments. If I see a good comment, I add it to plzat.me (it adds a little @ symbol next to the comment actions).
That "subscribes" to that comment, so I get an email update if anyone replies to it.
And, then I have a little dashboard which collects all the comments I've subscribed to by the topic. I review those topics and can cycle through the comments to remind myself about interesting things.
plzat.me is basically a bookmarking tool, but with email updates of the threads, and a customized dashboard which makes it easier to review recent bookmarks.
Firefox extensions work on mobile so I use this from my phone and desktop and the subscriptions are synced.
It uses pocketbase as the backend.
xrd
I built a little front end that allows me to group stuff easily so I can visit the site for short durations during the day without having to repeat sorting through items.
I have some checkboxes on articles and a couple manual buttons to trigger movement between groups when I'm ready.
Groups:
New - Not seen by my utility yet
Like Group A - Definitely want to come back to it later (maybe didn't complete, or has interesting comments still active)
Like Group B - Maybe want to come back to it later (maybe it's done, or maybe I'm only partially interested)
Old Group A - Most recent group of links pushed from New - separate from Old Group B to reduce volume of stuff to wade through if I change my mind about something
Old Group B - Older/definitely no longer interested stuff
RaftPeople
I come for the comments, not for the news. Signal to noise is lower these days (AI stuff), but I aggressively filter out subjects I have zero interest in.
>simple solution of simply ignoring
If you mean ignoring manually, that's not sustainable.
On the desktop side, I skim through HN through a self-hosted install of NewsBlur RSS, all my RSS feeds live there, including HN, Reddit, etc., that has a nice training/filtering facility [0]. NewsBlur has accompanying apps that can be pointed at your own install. If you don't want to bother with that, you can pay for it. I run it on cheap OVH instance.
On mobile, I use the Hack app [1]. The iOS version works on the Mac as well.
This is a very apt right now. The amount of AI posts is... boring to say the least.
I've always used the comments to upvotes ratio to workout if an article is worth reading. If the comments are higher than the upvotes, it's poor. Vice versa it's worth looking into. I skip all AI posts.
m4tthumphrey
I don't. Most things don't matter.
Like the news, you'll find out; except it'll be through Slack channels or co-workers or maybe even IRC channels, as opposed to HN.
> Oh, X company got hacked and you are in the cybersecurity circle?
> You'll find out.
> Oh, AI is the new thing?
> You'd be better without that.
> B-but what if I want to understand topic T?
> Then I'd tell you that HN offers free fast search and you can just type topic T and do your own research and hey you may just learn something!
comments (10)
[1] The main exception to this is Ken Shirriff's posts on righto.com (and maybe others) where I go straight to the post because they're so good.
andyjohnson0
I suspect that when you think about those questions, you'll realize that it really doesn't matter if you keep up or not. If something comes to this industry that is big enough to impact your actual life, you'll hear about it regardless of how often you read HN.
Odds are, there is no problem you need to deal with. HN is here when you have time for it, but your life is there all the time. Focus on the right one.
codingdave
I now simply follow the main list and hit “hide” on submissions I believe I don’t have interest in. Of those that remain, I read the submitted link and far more often than not they are not submission worthy so I hit “hide” again. Of those that remain, I hope comments arrive and an interesting discussion ensues.
In the past if felt like there was always something worth sifting through the dregs for. I’m unsure of how much longer I can sustain the effort. The technical implementation of the site could make things easier, where you use techniques from sybil-resistance to counter noise, but then if the compute cost on the backend goes up by an order of magnitude and I’m not sure Y Combinator is interested in financing the upkeep of that.
Difficult choices await me in terms of whether I ought to continue investing time in sifting though. It’d save me a lot of time, but then I’d have to find some way of making interesting friends. And if I knew that, I wouldn’t be here to begin with. :)
sxzygz
But I'm guessing you have more of a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) kind of problem, which admittedly I don't have. However, you could look at something using RSS, maybe in combination with an agent told to find and show articles based on some heuristics.
Personally, I'm OK with missing something. If it's good, I figure it'll surface somewhere else and impinge on my notice sooner or later.
romaniitedomum
Here's the screenshot for inspiration: https://imgur.com/a/TszTHQb
pllbnk
https://plzat.me
When I see an interesting topic, I will read through the comments. If I see a good comment, I add it to plzat.me (it adds a little @ symbol next to the comment actions).
That "subscribes" to that comment, so I get an email update if anyone replies to it.
And, then I have a little dashboard which collects all the comments I've subscribed to by the topic. I review those topics and can cycle through the comments to remind myself about interesting things.
plzat.me is basically a bookmarking tool, but with email updates of the threads, and a customized dashboard which makes it easier to review recent bookmarks.
Firefox extensions work on mobile so I use this from my phone and desktop and the subscriptions are synced.
It uses pocketbase as the backend.
xrd
I have some checkboxes on articles and a couple manual buttons to trigger movement between groups when I'm ready.
Groups:
New - Not seen by my utility yet
Like Group A - Definitely want to come back to it later (maybe didn't complete, or has interesting comments still active)
Like Group B - Maybe want to come back to it later (maybe it's done, or maybe I'm only partially interested)
Old Group A - Most recent group of links pushed from New - separate from Old Group B to reduce volume of stuff to wade through if I change my mind about something
Old Group B - Older/definitely no longer interested stuff
RaftPeople
>simple solution of simply ignoring
If you mean ignoring manually, that's not sustainable.
On the desktop side, I skim through HN through a self-hosted install of NewsBlur RSS, all my RSS feeds live there, including HN, Reddit, etc., that has a nice training/filtering facility [0]. NewsBlur has accompanying apps that can be pointed at your own install. If you don't want to bother with that, you can pay for it. I run it on cheap OVH instance.
On mobile, I use the Hack app [1]. The iOS version works on the Mac as well.
[0] https://www.newsblur.com [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-yc-reader... (iOS, but it's also on the Play Store, look for "HACK for Hacker News YC Reader").
stasomatic
I've always used the comments to upvotes ratio to workout if an article is worth reading. If the comments are higher than the upvotes, it's poor. Vice versa it's worth looking into. I skip all AI posts.
m4tthumphrey
Like the news, you'll find out; except it'll be through Slack channels or co-workers or maybe even IRC channels, as opposed to HN.
> Oh, X company got hacked and you are in the cybersecurity circle?
> You'll find out.
> Oh, AI is the new thing?
> You'd be better without that.
> B-but what if I want to understand topic T?
> Then I'd tell you that HN offers free fast search and you can just type topic T and do your own research and hey you may just learn something!
Don't worry, you will be fine.
Happy HN'ing!
EDIT: Formatting.
dvrp