Im not sure i understand your question. If you cant find it, how are you ignoring it?
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.
We are strongly in the AI acceleration phase, so it'll keep getting harder. I use an RSS reader for the top posts only. In the RSS reader, I "star" what I want to read, and read what I can from among what I have starred. Of course I miss a lot, but I get the broad picture of where things are going.
Anecdotally it feels like comment threads are a lot like "megathreads" on forums now, where there might be hundreds of replies. Wonder if there's been a surge of users over the last three or four years.
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.
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.
It just hides that particular entry. What I meant to say is, I see certain domains and always hit hide on them, because that's a place I don't want to see anything from.
> 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.
(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):
(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 far the best solution. I find the curation to be top notch. You get an archive in your mail box. Quite useful to me because there can be moments I consume hn in unhealthy ways and other times where I don’t consult hn for months. So, with the hn newsletter, I can learn what happened during the time I was off the grid.
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.
I typically use hckr news (https://hckrnews.com/) set to show only the top 10 or top 20. It also has the advantage of showing those i missed overnight or earlier.
Depends on what your goals are. If you want to be well-informed for the nerdy water-cooler talk in the office kitchen, then you need to read a lot. Otherwise, just don't worry about it, because important topics get re-posted. If you missed something the first time, then you still have good chances to catch it the second or third time.
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.
It’s just that the overlap between “people who find AI coding fascinating” and the guy you are replying to is zero.
Not everyone finds this means to an end AI treadmill even remotely ‘fun’. Resent studies show that this not even a minor group of people.
Here are some hints for you:
The UC Berkeley Study (2026): Researchers coined the term "The AI Treadmill Effect". They found that because AI fills knowledge gaps, workers began absorbing tasks outside their original scope (e.g., product managers writing code). Instead of saving time, it eliminated natural breaks, blurred work-life boundaries, and sharply increased cognitive fatigue
Harvard Business Review Research (2026): A survey of 1,500 workers highlighted a phenomenon called "AI Brain Fry." Employees forced to constantly juggle, monitor, and fact-check multiple AI tools experienced severe decision fatigue and mental strain
Research shared by the Future of Work forum found that employees gaining the highest productivity from AI experienced 88% higher burnout rates than their peers
Management sentiment vs Employee sentiment disconnect: An analysis of 10,000 corporate earnings calls found that corporate leadership remains overwhelmingly optimistic and enthusiastic about AI. In stark contrast, peer-reviewed data from The Conversation shows widespread employee hostility and resistance. Workers resent AI tools when companies use them as an excuse for downsizing, forcing the remaining staff to work at an unsustainable, machine-like processing speed
If Slashdot’s motto was “news for nerds, stuff that matters”, then at this point in its history HackerNews can adopt “news for unemployed, stuff that drains you” motto [to make things many times more fascinating I used LLM to brainstorm this poor attempt at a sarcastic joke; on a positive note writing this badly makes me feel some shame, which is a human emotion, rare sight these days].
But it does not answer my question. Your answer broadly is: we can be sad, I was hoping for a directive response from my parent commenter, specially towards AI at work coding.
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.
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.
When you say "mostly because of AI", do you mean because there are so many posts about AI (and it's hard to keep up with the latest coding harness or version of a model, which seems to pop up at a rate close to js frameworks back in the days ?)
Or is it because of AI-generated posts ? (I have to admit I'm not good yet at "guessing" when a post is slop...)
This has been the case even before AI. One can never keep up with everything and catch every interesting or useful story.
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.
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.
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.
I browse the HN titles daily. Even comment quite a bit. But I still don't click on 95% of the stories and if the "AI" spam makes me miss something interesting it's okay, life goes on.
Incidentally that's what I've been saying since ChatGPT was new and laughable. GenAI is best at spam.
I wrote a browser extension to automatically click the Hide link for stories containing AI keywords. It helps keep the boring stuff off the front page. https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn
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.
https://hckrnews.com/ most days, has a good line which tracks what you saw last. Sometimes filter by top 10/20 when I've been more busy and to catch things I may have glossed over as being more popular.
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:
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.
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 ...).
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.
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!
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.
Very quick scans - as it always has been. Very flippant and cynical and carefree/less about anything others post here or I post than I used to (and that wasn't a lot to begin with). So this has changed.
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.
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.
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.
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
It would be nice if you could put some screenshots, a demo video, or even an actual demo on the page. There's a lot of news readers out there so I'd like to see what I'd potentially be getting if I do actually use Downread.
You can do what the wishful thinking and eternal dreamer like me does - use Karakeep or similar selfhosted app and bookmark it with the hopes of someday reading it. Yes I am probably deluding myself. I may use Hermes to randomly pull articles to review as a sort of compromise.
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?
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/).
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
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.
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. :)
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.
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 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:
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 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
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)
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.
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.
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.
s1artibartfast | a day ago
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.
dvh | a day ago
aquir | a day ago
OutOfHere | a day ago
x______________ | a day ago
ochrist | a day ago
A few weeks ago several HN users presented solutions for filtering out AI results, but I haven't used any of those solutions much.
sifex | a day ago
ivanmontillam | a day ago
If I tried to keep up, I'd be run over. It's too much input for the normal individual I am.
Apocryphon | a day ago
stagas | a day ago
[0]: https://github.com/stagas/hn10
[1]: https://textlog.cc/u/hn10
tclancy | a day ago
stagas | a day ago
dibbsonline | a day ago
romaniitedomum | a day ago
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.
aryehof | a day ago
I thought hide just hid that particular entry. Have I been wrong all this time?
romaniitedomum | a day ago
mschild | a day ago
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.
dgellow | a day ago
nreece | a day ago
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%...
m4tthumphrey | a day ago
romaniitedomum | a day ago
dgellow | a day ago
ryandrake | a day ago
leephillips | a day ago
It at least filters out some of the slop articles, making it easier to find the potentially interesting stories.
csymes | a day ago
That said, I like it, and have bookmarked.
leephillips | a day ago
dandrew5 | 22 hours ago
jjav | a day ago
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.
chrismorgan | a day ago
You could convert this into content blocker filters for the likes of uBlock Origin:
(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):
(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.)nubinetwork | a day ago
chrismorgan | a day ago
jjp | a day ago
jochem9 | a day ago
tarinedier | a day ago
firemelt | a day ago
ekjhgkejhgk | a day ago
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?
l5870uoo9y | a day ago
LeBit | a day ago
NordStreamYacht | a day ago
socalgal2 | a day ago
qsera | a day ago
supriyo-biswas | a day ago
omer_k | a day ago
or hit "v" to change views
https://hckrnight.com
pmdr | a day ago
> 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
nitros | a day ago
gitaarik | 15 hours ago
0x696C6961 | a day ago
matsemann | a day ago
There's also the "hidden" https://news.ycombinator.com/best which is a bit the same, but not per day
aryehof | a day ago
Leftium | a day ago
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
gerardnico | a day ago
nreece | a day ago
vaylian | a day ago
whateveracct | a day ago
lain98 | a day ago
kubb | a day ago
m4tthumphrey | a day ago
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.
unified101 | a day ago
(or are you saying you fond the category itself is boring?)
grebc | a day ago
unified101 | a day ago
smugglerFlynn | a day ago
Not everyone finds this means to an end AI treadmill even remotely ‘fun’. Resent studies show that this not even a minor group of people.
Here are some hints for you:
If Slashdot’s motto was “news for nerds, stuff that matters”, then at this point in its history HackerNews can adopt “news for unemployed, stuff that drains you” motto [to make things many times more fascinating I used LLM to brainstorm this poor attempt at a sarcastic joke; on a positive note writing this badly makes me feel some shame, which is a human emotion, rare sight these days].unified101 | a day ago
But it does not answer my question. Your answer broadly is: we can be sad, I was hoping for a directive response from my parent commenter, specially towards AI at work coding.
Or are they recommending revolution?
dgellow | a day ago
unified101 | a day ago
My question: So what should we do at work?
grebc | a day ago
smugglerFlynn | a day ago
codingdave | a day ago
AI is a tool. You can use it regardless of how much or how little people talk about it.
gnfargbl | a day ago
atmosx | a day ago
mickelsen | a day ago
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.
phtrivier | a day ago
Or is it because of AI-generated posts ? (I have to admit I'm not good yet at "guessing" when a post is slop...)
AnonC | a day ago
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.
stranded22 | a day ago
I then miss a few days and get overwhelmed with the backlog.
gerikson | a day ago
haunter | a day ago
https://hnrss.org/active
de_dave | a day ago
DavideNL | a day ago
grebc | a day ago
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.
dvrp | a day ago
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.
marvinblum | a day ago
nottorp | a day ago
I browse the HN titles daily. Even comment quite a bit. But I still don't click on 95% of the stories and if the "AI" spam makes me miss something interesting it's okay, life goes on.
Incidentally that's what I've been saying since ChatGPT was new and laughable. GenAI is best at spam.
coldpie | a day ago
throw0101a | a day ago
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.
Retr0id | a day ago
ochrist | a day ago
joshka | a day ago
mg | a day ago
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:
codingdave | a day ago
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.
ofrzeta | a day ago
kyriakos | 14 hours ago
PorterBHall | a day ago
conorcleary | 23 hours ago
tclover | 23 hours ago
conorcleary | 10 hours ago
pluc | a day ago
owaislone | a day ago
HSO | a day ago
pllbnk | a day ago
Here's the screenshot for inspiration: https://imgur.com/a/TszTHQb
dgellow | a day ago
rancidcrab | a day ago
childintime | a day ago
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.
ajdude | a day ago
crossroadsguy | a day ago
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.
nokya | a day ago
xrd | a day ago
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.
surgical_fire | a day ago
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.
stasomatic | a day ago
>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").
yodon | a day ago
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.
Dragon_0 | a day ago
tjansen | a day ago
Karrot_Kream | 22 hours ago
tjansen | 19 hours ago
Vaslo | a day ago
classified | a day ago
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?
ChiperSoft | a day ago
vinhnx | a day ago
softwaredoug | a day ago
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.
RaftPeople | a day ago
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
mehmetkose | a day ago
ninjalanternshk | a day ago
I had to let go of that feeling of being caught up in maybe 1993.
sxzygz | a day ago
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. :)
mmphosis | a day ago
andyjohnson0 | a day ago
[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.
wanda | a day ago
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.
pavel_lishin | a day ago
If there's nothing interesting, I leave.
mlhpdx | a day ago
https://github.com/mlhpdx/hacker-news-cyd
gumby | a day ago
sandcat_ | 21 hours ago
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.
messh | 21 hours ago
erelong | 21 hours ago
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)
brudgers | 21 hours ago
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.
Suppafly | 17 hours ago
Who cares? There have been a couple of similar questions lately. Why do you care how other people use internet sites?
IAmGraydon | 16 hours ago
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.
adrianwaj | 15 hours ago
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.
adrianwaj | 14 hours ago
("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?
henriquelalves | 13 hours ago
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.
cadamsdotcom | 10 hours ago
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
taf2 | 5 hours ago