Ask HN: What are your heuristics for deciding which HN links to click on?

- don't click on anything with the word "quantum" in it — it's either too technical for me (physics or computing) or mainstream fluff with no substance

- don't click on very specific programming language links, unless they're about Python or frontend web stuff (just not interested in languages I don't use)

- will read anything from certain domains — danluu.com, stratechery.com, wikipedia.org, fermatslibrary.org

- won't click on the latest iteration of "ML tutorial for beginners" that makes it to the front page (not the right audience, but nice to see this stuff getting popular)

What are your heuristics?

- subjects I work on daily

That covers everything so needless to say it can be quite addictive.

1. any computer graphics reverse engineer article, or reverse engineering regarding a game console, or the posts about Dolphin the gamecube emulator.

2. any security article. Especially about exploits or vulnerabilities.

I was surprised at how well I understood them. But I think in part it has to do with that I sometimes venture out and expand my comfort zone. I keep on expanding my comfort zone through Hacker News, it really supplemented my computer science education quite well.

I also use it a lot as a search engine to find high quality educational content. All those upvotes matter. And if the upvotes don't matter -- the educational resource is quite bad -- then there's always some insightful comment about a good resource. I learned a thing or two about deep learning this way and how it relates to topology. I've never read anything about topology before! That's just really cool that some resources can give you a basic intuition about it.

I also click on words that appear to be made up, because I've been trained that I'll usually get to read about a cool new library, programming language, or programming tool.

In your example, "quantum" is too vague. Even though I've worked for years in quantum-whatever areas, I feel that the word "quantum" doesn't describe myself due to being too general, so it doesn't trigger my attention.

So basically, I just scan the front page for words that are attractive to me, never fully reading headlines until I've already decided I'll click on it.