How do you keep up with HN these days?

42 pointsby simonebrunozzi69 comments

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Hacker News
Just focus on what you enjoy and don't worry about the rest.
by x______________

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();

by mg

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.
by ajdude
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.
by xrd
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.
by dvrp
Came here to say the same thing. I'd like to add that keeping up has also become very boring. It's always the same news - AI this AI that, I would like to see something new.
by marvinblum
> I don't. Most things don't matter.
I use RSS and I skip most articles. But even then there is a backlog of unread stuff I want to get to "eventually" (just like my to-read list on my library account, which is way long).
But if my news aggregator (NNN) gets restarted, and I loose some of the unread stuff, I don't sweat it.
by throw0101a
I don't keep up with it anymore. It used to be a 3+ times daily habit, now it's mainly just when I think about it (which could be several days, or more), and I barely check more than a couple of threads now and then move on, usually.
I don't feel like I'm getting as much from coming here as I used to, so it's mostly just idle curiosity now.
Part of that might be just because of me, too, as I shift more to letting Claude do more of the heavy lifting, reading a bunch of technical articles seems less useful to me. But if something seems interesting enough I'll still click it, I just don't feel like I need to 'keep up' as much anymore.
by cableshaft
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").
by stasomatic
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.
by wanda
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
by pllbnk
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.
by m4tthumphrey
How is it boring? There's such a wider variety of things!
(or are you saying you fond the category itself is boring?)
by unified101
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.
by romaniitedomum
> hit hide on the domains that I never want to see anything from
Ive been on hn with one account or another for close to a decade now. I have never used that feature nor did I think it would permanently hide the domains entirely. Super good to know though.
by mschild
> hit hide on the domains that I never want to see anything from
I thought hide just hid that particular entry. Have I been wrong all this time?
by aryehof
> hit hide on the domains that I never want to see anything from
I don't thing 'hide' applies to the domain of the post, but only the post itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=What%20do%...
by nreece
> Same way as always.
For me same as always also.
My "same way" is the HN RSS feed. RSS is the best.
Goes straight to my email and I skim the headlines, click on the ones that seem interesting.
by jjav
> hit hide on the domains that I never want to see anything from
You could convert this into content blocker filters for the likes of uBlock Origin:
```
  news.ycombinator.com##.submission:has([href^="https://example.com/"]),.submission:has([href^="https://example.com/"])+tr,.submission:has([href^="https://example.com/"])+tr+.spacer
```
(You can append `:style(color:orange)` or such to apply a different style instead of hiding, if you want to be able to hit the hide link in order to get a new thirtieth item—though you could automate that by writing a user script instead.)
Or user stylesheets (I use Stylus in Firefox to manage such things):
```
  .submission:has([href="from?site=example.com"]) {
      &, & + tr, & + tr + .spacer {
          display: none;
      }
  }
```
(I showed two different selectors: [href^="https://example.com/"] will match the complete origin, [href="from?site=example.com"] will match the domain as presented by HN, including any subdomains.)
by chrismorgan
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.
by codingdave
HN notifies us of more problems :(
by conorcleary
This is the kind of level-headed advice I wish I got from my older brothers.
by PorterBHall
In addition to things that "come to this industry" HN has a lot of fringe and hacky stuff that is interesting. At some point I was afraid to miss out until I learned that the really interesting stuff will come up again (and again ...).
by ofrzeta