Ask HN: What are your news sources other than HN?

> You're probably not going to get any actionable, meaningful information from news sources like those, especially day to day.

Not day to day perhaps, but I did once learn from the news that a certain French airline company had just gone bankrupt. This was about a month before I intended to fly with them, so I had enough time to rebook the tickets, avoiding the stress and additional expenses. Learning about this bankruptcy in time was very helpful, as the company did not care enough to send a warning email to its customers, so if it were not for the breaking news headline, I would have to buy the replacement tickets on a much shorter notice.

Skimming through the headlines can pay off in some unexpected ways, and does not take too much time/effort.

Twitter can be fine, it can be priceless. The problem with Twitter:

Their client is bad and they mostly killed off good third party clients. I build my own client to solve this, most people can't or wont.

I want a client that prioritizes the things I follow and read the most (i.e. everyday), @newsyc50 or @newycombinator, @zerohedge, @arstechnica, @techmeme, @pkedrosky. @kdnuggets, @reuters, @variety, @politico. @zerohedge is the controversial one of the bunch. My client shows counters on unread messages for each so I know when new tweets are available and they are one click away.

Next I surface trends from the larger body of follows I'm interested in but don't have time to read. I process everything through spaCy and use its increasingly very good entity recognition to find the trending topics in my feed, much better than Twitter's BS trending. When something is tweeted from 5 or 6 places its a trend I may be interested in. I can adjust this threshold up and down.

I lookup each entity in a local Wikipedia database so if its someone or something famous its one click to read about them in depth. If there is no match its probably someone or something new to the Internet which is also interesting to know.

You need a critical mass of follows for this to work, like several thousand. It is a chore to find several thousand interesting people and organizations to follow. Most people aren't going to do this work which is why most people hate Twitter. Following that many is also noisy so you need a client that prioritizes for signal.

Don't read replies to a tweet unless its really interesting, there are a few interesting replies but they are usually pointless, noisy and/or toxic.

Filter out replies by people you follow most of the time. Most of the time. though not always, these replies are noisy and uninteresting.

I have a smooth scrolling feed I just look at to see what everyone is talking about. It was a bit of of a pain to implement when they killed off the stream API, though I replaced it by polling the feed just below rate limit.

I poll everyone I follow if the client has been off for a while to fill the holes in my timeline.

I started regularly reading The Economist a few months ago and it's absolutely transformed my relationship with media and the news. I had previously given up on consuming any media other than HN. One of my close friends challenged me to think more about my relationship with others in the world outside of my small circle of friends and family which led to me deciding to subscribe to The Economist. It has been one of the best decisions I've made all year.

In addition to the points mentioned I'd also add:

1. It's clear about it's own bias and doesn't pretend to be completely neutral in its reporting (though it is generally quite balanced). That gives me a chance to read certain articles a little more carefully when I know they are likely to clash with my own world-view and biases (i.e. the controversial article "Inequality could be lower than you think").

2. They are absolutely fantastic at injecting a little humour in otherwise quite serious journalism. For example, this headline: "Soaring pork prices hog headlines and sow discontent in China"

3. It has a good amount of intelligent comment and debate on a massive range of topics that has opened my thinking up to ideas and perspectives I hadn't previously encountered or wrestled with in any meaningful way.

I hadn't expected regularly reading a newspaper would be as enjoyable and as challenging as it has been. It's been a lot more valuable than I would have thought. I'd highly recommend it.

I use News Items (for-pay). https://newsitems.substack.com/

That was funny, but from the page you linked to it seems that was a bungled caption onscreen for a few seconds, hardly a "Fox News Headline" or "news".