Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#71

Post by wenc » Wed, Mar 29, 2017, 11:53 PM UTC

v3gas wrote: post #39

wenc wrote: post #34

I'm not sure if the question is about reading habits on HN, or the reading habits of the HN demographic. If it is the former, I middle-click 3-4 articles a day, and if they are also juicy topics, I middle-click the comments links as well. If it is the latter, I read tons of articles a day (avg 20), some related to tech, but mostly not. I read in the morning, at lunch (very productive time to read), and after dinner.…

What data science blogs?

Simply Statistics, Andrew Gelman, DataTau, Win-Vector, StatsBlogs (an aggregator)

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#72

Post by anotherevan » Thu, Mar 30, 2017, 12:11 AM UTC

I do a lot of my news reading via RSS feeds to Newsblur. One of those RSS feeds is from hnapp.com which generates an RSS feed of Hacker News submissions with a score over 50 or more than 30 comments.

If there's something I want to read later I send it to Pocket which my ereader supports, so I can read them on my nice portable eink device whenever I have a spare moment stuck in a waiting room or on a bus or whatever.

According to my reading habits[1] I've averaged reading 690 articles that way in each of the last two years.

In order to track my article reading habits, plus follow up on articles in related forums such as Hacker News after I’d read them and such, so I wrote a litte PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket API to help me manage all that.

Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.

[1] http://www.michevan.id.au/tag/books/

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#73

Post by Apaec » Thu, Mar 30, 2017, 3:37 AM UTC

I read HN in this way I go to https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=5, then https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=4, till "/news" which is the same as "?p=1". I do that every night before bedtime.

If maybe I'm too busy and can't read HN one night, what I do is read the next day starting from "?p=10", if I miss two days I start from "?p=15" and so on, though that query has a varying limit, going after the limit gives no results, in the past I've gotten a successful request til "?p=25" but today it seems the limit is just "?p=10", most times I've seen the "?p=15" working.

I don't want to miss new tools or discussions so I always try to keep a maximum of 2 days of not reading HN.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#74

Post by Proof » Thu, Mar 30, 2017, 9:03 AM UTC

I'm a Mathematics major so I make a point of reading all maths related articles and if I have something to contribute then definitely comment.

On average I read 2-3 articles fully but it also depends what's it on. On breaks I always try to read top 10 or 15 and sometimes comment. I find this community and commentators quite a pleasure to read because many of us posses something unique or at least it seems so.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#75

Post by v3gas » Thu, Mar 30, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

wenc wrote: post #71

v3gas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What data science blogs?

Simply Statistics, Andrew Gelman, DataTau, Win-Vector, StatsBlogs (an aggregator)

Cool, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#76

Post by mod » Thu, Mar 30, 2017, 7:22 PM UTC

mromanuk wrote: post #27

Kiro wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same and I've thought about this a lot. I so often only read the comments without reading the actual article. Surely the fact that so many people do this must mean there's an untapped opportunity somewhere?

Yes, I thought that, I have a note in my sketch ideas: "Extract comments from HN", normally I value them more than the actual article. They are important, like reviews.

Going along with "reviews," in this era of blogspam, I like to read the comments first so I start out a skeptic, if I should be. Very often, the top comment for an article is a rebuttal, if there is some misinformation in an article, or perhaps a poorly-done study.

Basically, people who are smarter than me usually get to tell me why the journalist is wrong.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#77

Post by antoaravinth » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 3:24 AM UTC

WA wrote: post #11

I read 3-5 articles per day, but oftentimes, I read the comments of 20-30 articles without clicking on the actual article. Recent example: Article about Angular 4.0 being released. I don't care about the article, but I do care about the comments of the JS folks.

Exactly the same. By reading comments, you do get the community idea on that particular article. To be frank, I felt comments gives more information than the article it self, atleast IMHO.