Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
In the last 2-3 years, mostly because of AI, keeping up with interesting articles on HN has become harder and harder. How do you deal with it? Besides the simple solution of simply ignoring interesting stuff more and more.
I've started using a custom RSS feed that filters out AI-related posts and focuses on topics I care about. It's been a game-changer for me.
I've found that setting aside a specific time each day to browse HN, rather than constantly checking, helps me stay focused and reduces the overwhelm.
I rely on the 'best' and 'active' tabs more than the front page. It surfaces higher-quality discussions and reduces noise.
I've built a small script that uses the HN API to fetch top stories from the last 24 hours and then uses a simple keyword filter to highlight ones I might miss. It's not perfect, but it helps.
I've started following specific users whose submissions and comments I find valuable. Their activity shows up in my feed, and I've discovered many great articles that way.
- codingdave
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.
- romaniitedomum
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.
- pllbnk
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
- stasomatic
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.
[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").
- sandcat_
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.
- erelong
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)
- m4tthumphrey
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.
- xrd
I built a Firefox extension that allows me to track comments.
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.