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

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

#71
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…

How do you find stories which meet your vote or comment thresholds?

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

#72

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.

Yep, totally agree. One problem is the way many articles are written. People want efficiency, but the relevant information is buried and scattered in the article full of pointless drivel. I'm not generally interested in how this journalist met the interviewee on a sunny day at a certain cafeteria, or that this interviewee wore this or that kind of dress, etc. First and foremost, I'd expect to get a very short summary on the whole thing in order to be able to decide if this article is worth using mental energy at all. But at the moment this kind of possibility of hierarchically expanding the content from high information density to low information density is not available.

Edit: bad english

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

#73
I've basically learned web design and development through HN.

The only links I click on are related to making static websites without any frameworks. Otherwise, if the websites domain is a new one, I'll click on it to see if the website has an interesting font or layout.

I never check the comments on HN for many things non-STEM, more specifically economics, philosophy, psychology, education, academic research, political science, fashion, and more. Those comments are generally filled with people trying to use first principles poorly to speak on subjects they don't have industrial experience in.

The best resources I've gained via HN

1. practicaltypography.com - Basically my foundation when it comes to designing any text in personal documents, websites, video games and more.

2. worrydream.com - The best HCI resource freely available on the internet. It opened my eyes to the sorry state of software with respect to usability.

3. Data Oriented Design - Research into this field gave me a definitive answer on the merits of continuing to struggle with learning functional programming versus going all in on traditional C style development.

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

#76

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.

Everybody's guilty secret? Occasional awareness of not having read the article then adds restraint to active participation in on-topic discussions ("I might make a fool of myself for not having read TFA") that is absent in the inevitable off-topic subthreads, hence more participation there. It's amazing that hn is still so good despite all this!

Back to the original topic (no article to not read in an "ask hn", it's safe) : an exception are stories that reach a very high number of posts, that usually means that:

a) TFA will be something I should not completely miss, even if it's just another Macbook announcement

and b) the comments that might be interesting to me will be buried, I won't bother finding them unless the topic is something I specialize in

Therefore, if comment counter at 300 and up, straight to TFA

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

#77
post #28

Hacker News is basically slowly but surely converting me more into a technical person. When I came here first, I mostly looked at the psychological articles and some web articles. But when I felt a bit more focused and bold I'd go for more technical articles. I have been doing this ever since and I have noticed there are two types of technical articles I really like: 1. any computer graphics reverse engineer article,…

It's surprising what you can learn by osmosis! You don't necessarily have to understand everything but you absorb over time, just like how children learn their first language I suppose

I found that following humor blogs about certain specialist area's also help a lot with the osmosis. One example is DBAreactions. I'm Dev/Ops, so naturally I have to touch on DBA tasks but not enough to get fully involved in the field. Following the humor blog and sometimes stumbling upon a joke I don't get tells me there is some knowledge that must be so common (ie important) in that field that I miss. So then a task arises for me to learn to laugh at the joke.

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

#79

Hacker News is basically slowly but surely converting me more into a technical person. When I came here first, I mostly looked at the psychological articles and some web articles. But when I felt a bit more focused and bold I'd go for more technical articles. I have been doing this ever since and I have noticed there are two types of technical articles I really like: 1. any computer graphics reverse engineer article,…

Really interesting point. Several years ago I started browsing out of some cargo cult mentality (everyone cool is browsing, I should too) and found a handful of interesting articles. But many titles looked impenetrable or like gibberish (or both). Slowly over the years I've gained enough familiarity with a varied subject matter that I recognize and understand what everything will likely be about, and can dive into many technical articles that I couldn't before. Of course, many are still way over my head.

I've also found that the comments give me some ground truth on articles, whether they're good or not, and what points the article made that don't hold up in the real world or are super opinionated.

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

#80
The science articles are usually pretty interesting. Also, it's a nice place to catch up on tech announcements from Google, Apple, Facebook etc. In fact I'd be happy if these were the vast majority of news items.

I tend to avoid links to NYTimes and other paywalled articles. Could be interesting material but usually all I see is "You have read 5/5 articles. Please subscribe or wait until next month."

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