Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?

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.

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.

  news.ycombinator.com##.submission:has([href^="https://example.com/"]),.submission:has([href^="https://example.com/"])+tr,.submission:has([href^="https://example.com/"])+tr+.spacer

  .submission:has([href="from?site=example.com"]) {
      &, & + tr, & + tr + .spacer {
          display: none;
      }
  }

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.

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.

Here's the screenshot for inspiration: https://imgur.com/a/TszTHQb

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.

[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").

I built a Firefox extension that allows me to track comments.

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.

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!

Don't worry, you will be fine.

Happy HN'ing!

EDIT: Formatting.

I often use my HackerTrain script.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/589441-hackertrain-best-co...

Then with it installed, I go to https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments which gets reformatted. If I like comments there, I can read the underlying article having already setup some context beforehand. It's like going to a carefully selected film after having read the plot and spoilers - after reading many in a row. This keeps things interesting and allows for more efficient learning.

Because 2 hours is a long time to sit through something that doesn't really interest me. Online, 2 minutes is also a long time. If you're a senior manager, you use your direct reports to bring things to your attention. Introduces perspective, and seeing with 2+ eyes is a lot better than only using 1.

The rest of the time I use my other script: HackerBrain. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/588721-hackerbrain-sidebar...

Most of the time, a headline alone is pretty much useless and that's what vanilla HN overlooks.

For as long as I've visited HN, the majority of submissions have been noise, albeit with clean and simple presentation (not just referring to ads but also forum signatures/avatars and other needless decoration).

This is entirely normal — I have my interests and they need not align with anyone else's. HN tends to have better odds of having submissions relevant to my interests, so it's a regular stop.

All I have ever done really is scan through the top 150 submissions for particular topics and if there's nothing there's nothing, and if there's something there's something.

There are a lot of submissions about AI, but before that it was kubernetes and before that it was React, and so on.

Let's say there's 50 threads about AI, then there's 20 about random applied science stuff, 10 about some political nonsense, 15 random blog posts about how someone does something in their special way, couple of tech demos...

I probably wouldn't check many of these, so I'm not really perturbed by the density of one particular topic in the subset of submissions I don't care about.

I use the bookmarklet below.

It jumps to the newest story on the frontpage. And when I click the bookmarklet again (or press "n") it jumps to the next. So I just click it until I land on a story I have already seen and know I have seen them all.

If you want to use it, you can convert the code into a bookmarklet with my bookmarklet editor:

https://www.gibney.org/bookmarklet_editor

The bookmarklet:

    if (!location.href.match('ycom'))
        location.href='https://news.ycombinator.com';

    doTheMagic = function() {
        if (typeof e!=='undefined')
            e.style.background='#c0c0c0';
        e=Array.from(
            document.querySelectorAll(
                '.age a:not(.seen)')
        ).sort().at(-1);
        e.style.background='#ff0';
        e.classList.add('seen');
        e.scrollIntoView({
            behavior:"smooth",
            block:"center",
            inline:"nearest"
        });
    }

    function addShortcuts() {
        document.addEventListener("keydown", function(evnt) {
            if (evnt.key === "n") doTheMagic();
        });
    }

    function addStyle() {
       let style = document.createElement('style');
        style.type = 'text/css';
        style.textContent = `
            .noshow {
                display: initial;
            }
        `;
        document.head.appendChild(style);
    }

    if (typeof theMagicIsActive=='undefined') {
        addShortcuts();
        addStyle();
        theMagicIsActive = true;
    }

    doTheMagic();

You might like a little RSS proxy I vibed purely to let me browse HN and Lobsters' RSS feeds offline. It reads in the articles and comments and serves them up in a new feed you subscribe to instead of the original.

RSS is amazing and being able to zip through your feed without waiting for pages to load is a game changer on top.

https://github.com/cadamsdotcom/offlinerss

Just focus on what you enjoy and don't worry about the rest.

Super cool if threads would indicate whether an author is participating.

("Author here") https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

The thread takes on an AMA (AskMeAnything) vibe.

I suppose it'd be possible to do that programmatically as a third-party service by checking for socials and then automatically notifying author of a thread - perhaps once it gets popular. Orange username?

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. :)

That's like asking how to keep up with your Instagram feed. Framing it as a goal is strange.

I have a proxy for HN which I redirect all HN links to, across all my browsers. It gives me the ability to block users, domains and keywords (with an exception if a post hits a certain threshold). It also removes karma, allows me to mark a post as “done” (i.e. I don’t need to see this again), that sort of thing. Oh and gives me stats too, just for fun.

It’s both cut down my HN time and made what remains far more valuable. I won’t share it, it’s nothing special and nothing that you can’t build yourselves in 30 minutes of prompting.

On a technical level, it works remarkably well. It simply proxies the HTML direct from HN and fiddles with it. I do wonder if it makes my upvotes worthless but I also don’t really care if it does. A browser extension could probably do much of the same but then I’d have to maintain it across Chrome, Safari, etc.

I don't understand the "ignoring interesting stuff" bit. I read what's interesting, sometimes finding it by titles but more often by noticing a string of interesting comments on my little desktop display:

https://github.com/mlhpdx/hacker-news-cyd

I live out of my RSS reader for everything from YouTube to Reddit, and in this case I leverage this feed for the HN front page:

   https://hnrss.org/frontpage

The front page of HN has always been pretty good at filtering out AI generated articles (and if one makes it it's usually flagged by the time I get to it). Then I just glance through the list of articles that made it to the front page and decide which ones I want to read.

I find HN changed quite a bit in recent months. More kids looking to chit chat, instead of the post-once-no-reply culture I was used to. It's becoming tiresome. HN needs to hide the draining comments from everyone that isn't in the thread.

I also see the dead comments. Often there are good comments.. which I sadly can't upvote, but there's been a big uptick of the abrasive or nauseating kind. That used to be very rare!

So yeah, I worry about the future of HN.

I've made a bot[0] for HN that posts whatever enters the top 10, summarizes it with AI and posts it on textlog[1], and so I get the fresh news like little summary notes and decide if it's worth my time. Bonus is I receive a notification on my phone because I follow it.

[0]: https://github.com/stagas/hn10

[1]: https://textlog.cc/u/hn10

I'm not keeping up well, I open tabs and get to random ones and then either bookmark or close them when too many to read accumulate

Tried getting AI summaries of pages - besides those that seem to demand deeper dives

You could open a few best ones you like or a lot you like and just choose the top ones from them; read summaries of the lesser ones (or skip) or just pick a few to read more deeply

It is a problem that existed way before AI (there's already more books in existence than we could ever read, for example, many lifetimes over, so we are picking amd choosing among priorities of what to read)

It used to feel like that for me even before AI. The trick I use is when glancing through the homepage, I just open all the tabs that interest me and move them to OneTab. Eventually I sift through the threads on a lazy weekend. Many weren't that interesting, so they end up getting closed on the spot, same for those that didn't gain traction. Others are keepers, those get bookmarked.

But be careful, compulsively bookmarking isn't a good idea either. I see my AI bookmarks from 2023, most are irrelevant now. Same for a ton of new releases at that time, whatever homelab config, rumors around silicon architecture, geopolitical events, retrocomputing, etc.

So what actually helped me was realizing that after any ramp up period there's stabilization: you let the world figure out what works, then eventually you will see what sticks mentioned everywhere when going back to that topic.

There are also some evergreen discussions here. Those get more than a thread a year, like the tinnitus stuff, and they tend to stay up for a good part of the week.

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

a quick scan of tech things once or twice daily helps pass the time in boring situations and also catch me up on the latest

I mainly press "past" in the top menu and skim the top posts of the previous days. It doesn't surface every interesting post/discussion, but most of it.

There's also the "hidden" https://news.ycombinator.com/best which is a bit the same, but not per day

There's an infinite amount of interesting stuff out there. The subset of that which appears on the HN front page is small, and not selected in any especially curated way. You really have no choice but to ignore interesting stuff, even if you read the entire HN feed. The only answer that preserves your sanity is to stop worrying.

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.

My HN client has made HN easier to keep up with, even before AI: https://hn.leftium.com

I call it "Seeking Orange" because interesting posts are highlighted. Features include:

- Point/comment counts become increasingly more orange with higher counts (50+, 100+)

- Orange accent bar on left indicates new items since last visit

- Support for several different feeds including: HckrNews (chronological front page appearance time), Classic Stories, Best Stories, Active Stories

- Thresholds to de-emphasize posts from users with low karma/recent creation dates: https://hn.leftium.com/newest?min_karma=500&min_age_years=5

Huge fan of https://serializer.io as a help with this.

It shows you what is new that you haven't seen, then lets you move on so you're not digging through the same stories repeatedly. No account or registration required. Syncs across all your machines if you want to (just use the randomly generate heroku-style link). Defaults to showing you a few sites, which you can edit with a few clicks in the menu. Easy, lightweight, totally changed my life when I found it.

I’ve always used RSS readers for this. It’s just the most efficient way to read. [shameless plug coming] In the last year I have developed an RSS reader optimised for people like me who read MANY feeds, which supports things like auto-expiration of old posts if you can’t keep up. And it’s free. https://feeds.downread.com/signup?i=hn-c-32513232

OT: there was a time when I could open my Usenet reader and go sequentially through each newsgroup I was subscribed to, scan the titles, read the interesting ones, mark the group as read, repeat, and in ~30-60 minutes be “caught up” on “everything.” Or at least that’s what it felt like, because basically anything I cared about had a newsgroup for it.

I had to let go of that feeling of being caught up in maybe 1993.

I run a cron job, an agent sacas HNs and sends me potential interesting links via telegram bot. Using https://shellbox.dev cron, the box is up for a couple of minutes and im not paying for the rest

RSS to only see new links that hit 100 points https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100. And then selective reading of those.

I keep up with HN by reading it daily. My Firefox browser always have 2 pinned tabs at the top most: the front page /news and /ask. I also subscribed to HN Weekly Newsletter (https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/).

The weekly newsletter is a great way to get the most important information: https://hackernewsletter.com/

>Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?

Who cares? There have been a couple of similar questions lately. Why do you care how other people use internet sites?

As time goes by, the volume of “interesting articles” drops significantly anyway. LLMs have little to do with it IMO.

I gave up "keeping up" years ago. I just follow my curiosity mostly.

If something is truly transformational in technology, you'll be reminded of it a lot, and eventually you'll find time to learn about it.

RSS feeds and learning to ignore FOMO.

I maintain a weekly gamedev tech newsletter at Engines Database, and I have to read a lot of stuff to select interesting pieces to talk about in the newsletter. I'm running my own FreshRSS server, where I add a lot of RSS feeds that might have gamedev tech related news, including Hacker News and Lobste.rs aggregators. Then is just a process of creating a habit of selecting links, skim to check if they are telling something interesting, ignore them if not, only checking the comment section if I really want to know people's opinions.

I'm calling it "Information Diet" because I was getting super stressed checking Hackernews everyday, but now I'm just doing the bare minimum to keep up with the news that are interesting to me and I'm much happier now.