I gave up "keeping up" years ago. I just follow my curiosity mostly.
If something is truly transformational in technology, you'll be reminded of it a lot, and eventually you'll find time to learn about it.
Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
111–120 of 154 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
#112I built a little front end that allows me to group stuff easily so I can visit the site for short durations during the day without having to repeat sorting through items.
I have some checkboxes on articles and a couple manual buttons to trigger movement between groups when I'm ready.
Groups:
New - Not seen by my utility yet
Like Group A - Definitely want to come back to it later (maybe didn't complete, or has interesting comments still active)
Like Group B - Maybe want to come back to it later (maybe it's done, or maybe I'm only partially interested)
Old Group A - Most recent group of links pushed from New - separate from Old Group B to reduce volume of stuff to wade through if I change my mind about something
Old Group B - Older/definitely no longer interested stuff
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
#113I follow HN via Fupio, basically fetches the RSS feeds and puts through a simple ranking algorithm. Gives me a scrollable UI.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
#114OT: there was a time when I could open my Usenet reader and go sequentially through each newsgroup I was subscribed to, scan the titles, read the interesting ones, mark the group as read, repeat, and in ~30-60 minutes be “caught up” on “everything.” Or at least that’s what it felt like, because basically anything I cared about had a newsgroup for it.
I had to let go of that feeling of being caught up in maybe 1993.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
#115Huge fan of https://serializer.io as a help with this. It shows you what is new that you haven't seen, then lets you move on so you're not digging through the same stories repeatedly. No account or registration required. Syncs across all your machines if you want to (just use the randomly generate heroku-style link). Defaults to showing you a few sites, which you can edit with a few clicks in the menu. Easy, lightwei…
sorry but ui looks terrible
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
#116Anecdotally it feels like comment threads are a lot like "megathreads" on forums now, where there might be hundreds of replies. Wonder if there's been a surge of users over the last three or four years.
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Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
#117For me, the primary issue is as follows. As the audience on HN has grown the rate of submissions has vastly increased. It used to be possible to follow new submissions which meant you could catch those gems of thoughtful submissions that didn’t gain enough traction to appear on the main list. This is totally impossible now.
I now simply follow the main list and hit “hide” on submissions I believe I don’t have interest in. Of those that remain, I read the submitted link and far more often than not they are not submission worthy so I hit “hide” again. Of those that remain, I hope comments arrive and an interesting discussion ensues.
In the past if felt like there was always something worth sifting through the dregs for. I’m unsure of how much longer I can sustain the effort. The technical implementation of the site could make things easier, where you use techniques from sybil-resistance to counter noise, but then if the compute cost on the backend goes up by an order of magnitude and I’m not sure Y Combinator is interested in financing the upkeep of that.
Difficult choices await me in terms of whether I ought to continue investing time in sifting though. It’d save me a lot of time, but then I’d have to find some way of making interesting friends. And if I knew that, I wouldn’t be here to begin with. :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
#118Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
#119I don't try to keep up with HN. I check the home page (and Ask) when I'm bored or need distraction. If there are things that look interesting then I'll open the comments in separate tabs. If the comments are interesting then I'll maybe even [1] look at the article. If I miss stuff then whatever. HN is a firehose not a book.
[1] The main exception to this is Ken Shirriff's posts on righto.com (and maybe others) where I go straight to the post because they're so good.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?
#120For as long as I've visited HN, the majority of submissions have been noise, albeit with clean and simple presentation (not just referring to ads but also forum signatures/avatars and other needless decoration).
This is entirely normal — I have my interests and they need not align with anyone else's. HN tends to have better odds of having submissions relevant to my interests, so it's a regular stop.
All I have ever done really is scan through the top 150 submissions for particular topics and if there's nothing there's nothing, and if there's something there's something.
There are a lot of submissions about AI, but before that it was kubernetes and before that it was React, and so on.
Let's say there's 50 threads about AI, then there's 20 about random applied science stuff, 10 about some political nonsense, 15 random blog posts about how someone does something in their special way, couple of tech demos...
I probably wouldn't check many of these, so I'm not really perturbed by the density of one particular topic in the subset of submissions I don't care about.