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

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41–50 of 87 posts

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

#41
1. Major events and tech news. I don’t read or listen to many news sites so it helps keep me up on the world.

2. New programming languages, especially the hobbyist ones. I like to see what other people think is useful in a language.

3. Mainstream psychology articles. I find stuff like biases and decision making fascinating.

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

#43

I almost never click through on the source link initially. The only times I do are if the topic is something very specifically related to my personal interests / work, and/or from a reputable domain, and possibly only if it has a lot of upvotes. I'd say that links to github.com, and arxiv.org are among the top ones that I'm likely to click through to immediately. OTOH, anything that looks even vaguely interesting get…

> I almost never click through on the source link initially.

Too many on HN use this "hack" to avoid reading the article. It can become somewhat humorous when an entire comment thread debates points clarified in the first sentence of TFA.

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

#46
Posts that are either Ask/Show HN, or links to articles/tutorials of tools and services of personal usage - personal backup articles, a nice little desktop/mobile app, a new messaging service of note, or a new mobile or laptop that is trying to something new etc. Comments are where I look for interesting content on such posts.

I almost always avoid those yet another JS and JS/Native/web/blogging/static site framework articles. Android dev, my bread and butter, is rarely shared and discussed on HN and since I don't (usually) browse HN during work I would anyway be not interested in things related to my work (I try to compartmentalise it like that - leave work when I leave office). Most of the tech discussions here are of backend, dev ops, and web dev which don't really interest me. I also avoid discussions or articles which have low level implantation details.

I also avoid those list articles - "best way(s) to….", "best/most X..", "Y is X…" etc. Or an article that sounds like a rant from the title unless it's by someone like DHH or the Pinboard founder or has a large number of comments. Or posts about something from my country or this side of the world.

I also look for one of those rare excellent non-tech article (preferably a long-read) - on policy, on history et cetera. And articles related to policy, privacy etc - comments are pretty informative on such posts, even though the posts are overwhelmingly US centric but that I think is just the website demographic. Actually I think I prefer non-tech articles.

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

#47
post #21

- Anything with >500 upvotes that isn't general news, the more technical/esoteric, the better. - "How to write/build a [something]" if that "something" is fairly low-level, like a compiler. - Just about anything involving bees. - Highly-voted threads with mundane headlines -- i.e. either the content is good enough to not need a catchy headline, or its headline has been changed to be less clickbaity -- which might mea…

> bees Gosh, that's exhilarating to me you mentioned bees! I have read and know way more about bees than I could of ever planned for, or wanted to, due to HN!

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

#48
When in doubt from the title:

unknown domains, blogspot.com, some known high-quality sites > Github > general news/media sites > medium.com, hackernoon.com, dev.to

I tend to look at Show HN. I look at the new queue a lot, less so at the front page.

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

#49

I almost never click through on the source link initially. The only times I do are if the topic is something very specifically related to my personal interests / work, and/or from a reputable domain, and possibly only if it has a lot of upvotes. I'd say that links to github.com, and arxiv.org are among the top ones that I'm likely to click through to immediately. OTOH, anything that looks even vaguely interesting get…

> I almost never click through on the source link initially. Too many on HN use this "hack" to avoid reading the article. It can become somewhat humorous when an entire comment thread debates points clarified in the first sentence of TFA.

That is a fair point.
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