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

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.

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 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.

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

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'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 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

A quick occasional glance through https://serializer.io/ has been serving me well for a few years now!

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

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

RSS

https://hnrss.org/active

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

Skip everything AI and it moves at a leisurely pace.

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

I've started following other websites/media more - like Slashdot, Reddit and others.

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

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.

I just open the page and scroll through the first couple of pages…

Inoreader rss.

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

Use hckrnews.com

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.

? the front page moves at the same pace

I don't. I fact I wish I wasn't checking now. I need to curb my addiction. this place is getting more toxic by the week.

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

I am in ##hntop on Libera.

> open HN

> 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

easy with my keyboard, change themes with 1, 2, 3 on keyboard

or hit "v" to change views

https://hckrnight.com

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...)

Fyi, https://hcker.news/ has an "AI" filter... and RSS feeds too.

Well, don't. I follow the HN Telegram channel (not official), and if anything interesting appears, I read it.

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

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.

I occasionally use https://hckrnews.com to catchup on the top 20 daily posts.

brutalist.report these days

RSS

Octal (iOS)

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.

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.

What?! Your RSS/Atom reader does not support filtering?

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.

I use https://hckrnews.com

u are not missing out of anything bro

> In the last 2-3 years, mostly because of AI, keeping up with interesting articles on HN has become harder and harder.

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?