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
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 ...).
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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 ...).
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.
> 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:
(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.)I miss the greasemonkey days, but copying scripts between machines became annoying, and I don't think it ever worked on mobile.
Works on Firefox for Android.
> 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.
> 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%...
I imagine OP knows but uses the domain to hide the article based on his own instinct/history with said domain.
It would actually be nice to be able to hide based on domains
Or even title keyword. Block [AI, Claude, Anthropic, OpenAI, Codex, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen] and enjoy a clean, pleasant HN.
I’ve implemented something like that at https://hn-ai.org/.
It at least filters out some of the slop articles, making it easier to find the potentially interesting stories.
2 of the top 3 posts are currently AI-topical. Might need to expand the heuristic
That said, I like it, and have bookmarked.
You’re right, I need to do that. It would create a glitch in the historical graph, but still, there’s too much slop getting through.
Exactly so.
> 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?
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.
It doesn’t, it only hide the post itself
I gave up "keeping up" years ago. I just follow my curiosity mostly.
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 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
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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 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
Yep, why keep up?
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.
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.
How is it boring? There's such a wider variety of things!
(or are you saying you fond the category itself is boring?)
No one wants to read stuff produced by AI or for people using AI.
But then what would mean AI integrating into coding would be impossible? How do you resolve that with your view? We should ban AI coding?
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:
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].I agree, and empathize.
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?
Could you reformulate your actual question? It’s not too clear what type of answer you’re looking for
> No one wants to read stuff produced by AI or for people using AI.
My question: So what should we do at work?
Not the guy you are asking the queation, but: be honest to the extent we can. Market and “visionaries” will catch up on reality sooner or later.
Is this a serious question in response to me stating not everyone is interested in AI?
wat.
AI is a tool. You can use it regardless of how much or how little people talk about 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
Huge fan of https://serializer.io as a help with this.
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 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").
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:
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:
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.I follow a fedi bot that posts any thread that shows up on the front page.
Just focus on what you enjoy and don't worry about the rest.
That's like asking how to keep up with your Instagram feed. Framing it as a goal is strange.
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
Have you tried building a bot to filter out just the best of the best from that bot? Or just recursion?
Well, that would be a bot to show only what becomes no.1 but that would be too quiet of a feed.
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!
So yeah, I worry about the future of HN.
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.
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 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
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
Nice
The weekly newsletter is a great way to get the most important information: https://hackernewsletter.com/
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.
As time goes by, the volume of “interesting articles” drops significantly anyway. LLMs have little to do with it IMO.
> keeping up with interesting articles
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 check HN a few times a day. Anything I miss is probably not worth it anyway. Never felt I need to "keep up" with it.
Harmonic has a keyword filter. I just put all the AI buzzwords in there, plus some political ones.
A quick occasional glance through https://serializer.io/ has been serving me well for a few years now!
RSS to only see new links that hit 100 points https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100. And then selective reading of those.
I do this as well. I scan the titles (not just HN, but all my rss feeds combined) and only read what grabs my interest.
thanks that will help cut things down. yesterdays stats comparing the feeds was 117 posts vs 29
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.
I don’t. HN is a fine place where to waste time when I have nothing better to do
I just open the page and scroll through the first couple of pages…
Fyi, https://hcker.news/ has an "AI" filter... and RSS feeds too.
easy with my keyboard, change themes with 1, 2, 3 on keyboard
or hit "v" to change views
https://hckrnight.com
Wondering why it's not renamed AI news, yet.
Skip everything AI and it moves at a leisurely pace.
I find the amount of things interesting to me is about the same, or reduced.
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.
Set noprocrast=99999 on your settings page.
It can be done. I have done it many times!
file it (eg in obsidian). tag it. next time you are interested in topic x, there are all the stuff you at least once thought might be relevant to it.
RSS
https://hnrss.org/active
? the front page moves at the same pace
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.
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.
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.
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.
Inoreader rss.
I then miss a few days and get overwhelmed with the backlog.
I don't and it's great
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.
HN is good toilet time. I lurked here for a long time before I created this account.
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.
I am in ##hntop on Libera.
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.
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...)
brutalist.report these days
Some comments mentioned hcker.news, and apparently you can just use this URL: https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude
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.
I use https://hckrnews.com
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.
Octal (iOS)
> 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
I find I've not read HN as much over the last two years due to this. I think I see one interesting article a day at most now.
RSS
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.
> 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?
u are not missing out of anything bro