1. Will click on anything with the number of comments more than 100.
2. Then will read the first couple of comments
3. Then will decide whether to read the original article
Ask HN: What are your heuristics for deciding which HN links to click on?
81–87 of 87 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your heuristics for deciding which HN links to click on?
#82I find it amusing that my approach is almost the exact inverse of the OP.
- If it has the word "quantum" in it, I almost always click it. I like things that are too technical for me. I really enjoy challenging scientific/ mathmatical articles, they are fascinating & humbling at the same time.
- certainly click on very specific programming language links, especially languages that I don't use. I am curious, and try to expose myself to a wide range of languages.
- won't read anything from certain domains, anything of questionable quality or click-baity/ tabloidy, eg. buzzfeed.com. Also, go on rants in comments about said questionable websites & how mad it makes me we are driving traffic & ad revenue to those jerks :p
- will click on the latest iteration of "MLS tutorial for beginners". I AM the right audience, and am highly interested in the applications of training models.
Basically I use HN to learn about things I don't know. I try to expand my horizons, and glean any useful knowledge or information I can from people way smarter and experienced than me.
Re: Ask HN: What are your heuristics for deciding which HN links to click on?
#83Things that interest me. I try to avoid articles about politics, social issues, anything about millenial life, anything with react, kubernetes or other framework names in the title, clickbaity titles, anything that seems like it's probably just an ad for something, the random porn that gets added and killed fairly quickly, the strange dead articles with Arabic titles, spam....Hmmm
I like articles about interesting programming concepts or historical tidbits. Stuff that helps me learn C or just general computing stuff better. Articles about behind the scenes development of different software. Stuff about biology or chemistry. Sometimes the weird historical pieces that get added here. I've learned a lot of different obscure historical things from hn.
Re: Ask HN: What are your heuristics for deciding which HN links to click on?
#84Re: Ask HN: What are your heuristics for deciding which HN links to click on?
#85Re: Ask HN: What are your heuristics for deciding which HN links to click on?
#86I almost never click on a link where the title is the same as the domain name, e.g., "The Story of Foo" where the link is "thestoryoffoo.com"
Such links seem to me to be usually publicity-seeking rather than information-providing.
Re: Ask HN: What are your heuristics for deciding which HN links to click on?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was wrong with my comment? It's valid criticism of HN readers; it's perfectly substantive.
Cheap meta drama and overgeneralization is not substantive.
Sorry sir- I didn't mean to insult the Great State of YC. Hopefully my social credit won't go down too much. /s