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

At any rate, I find AI interesting, but have a similar opinion that most of the HN discourse has become low quality. My solution is to follow individual users I know are high quality with similar interests.

A few weeks ago several HN users presented solutions for filtering out AI results, but I haven't used any of those solutions much.

If I tried to keep up, I'd be run over. It's too much input for the normal individual I am.

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

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

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.

I'm curious to hear why AI made it harder to read HN. Is it because there's lots of it and you don't like it?

or hit "v" to change views

https://hckrnight.com

> ignore all posts about MCP

> ignore all posts containing "agent"

> also ignore everything frontier labs bragged about hacking this week

> ignore AI psychosis posts praised as being the future

> check out everything else

> close HN

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

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

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.

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.

Or is it because of AI-generated posts ? (I have to admit I'm not good yet at "guessing" when a post is slop...)

What I’ve been doing for several years is to use hckrnews.com as my default first level filter. I rarely go to the HN front page directly. I never visit the New or other pages either.

Sometimes I notice, after weeks or months or years, that there was a very interesting topic I missed out on. But such is life. It’s ok not to keep up with anything.

I then miss a few days and get overwhelmed with the backlog.

https://hnrss.org/active

Browsing by time is easier rather than popularity. There's no FOMO if you can't keep up, just scan the latest headlines and if it catches your eye click it.

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.

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();

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.

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

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.

   https://hnrss.org/frontpage

What changed more? I rarely read an article now. Rarely! I don't feel like it and whenever I bother it's just not worth it. That has been the biggest shift for me.

In last year or so (or more), hn has become almost 100% monotonous. So much that it is distasteful.

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.

The discussion was always kind of lame, very much like Reddit but full of people that really enjoy the smell of their own farts.

The upside is that I still find bookmarkable links here and there, both in threads and in comments.

Before and after AI, it nothing changed much in terms of overall quality.

>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").

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.

Tastes obviously differ, but the ill that I'm suffering under is that interesting articles are so much harder to find now. What's there to "keep up" with?

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.

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

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

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. :)

[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.

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.

If there's nothing interesting, I leave.

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

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.

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)

I have also come to believe that knowing is the weakest form of doing.

So I don't try to keep up.

But of course, you should probably do you. Good luck.

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

Try browsing this instead. It's the front page as voted by ancient accounts. It tends to be an excellent way to filter out low quality content, IMO.

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.

("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?

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.

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