Hacker News Reader

Comment by scanny | Hacker News Reader

I feel like Hackernews is more distracting to be honest, it's like crack, I just cannot stop looking through all these interesting posts.

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In between the SV hivemind posts is distributed just enough nuggets of mindblowing technical, business and even medical wisdom (from insanely switched-on people) that it keeps me checking. It's the ultimate infovore loot box.

Well said, finding compelling info on here is such a dopamine rush. Receiving a dopamine rush from learning something interesting is probably a good thing though.

Here's something interesting I'd like to share (if you don't already know of it): https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=70

For the past ~2 years I've only been looking at HN through this link. This limits the amount of listings I can see, while at the same time ensuring "higher quality" dopamine rushes. It's worked out for me quite well with giving me what I want to see, while wasting less time sifting through uninteresting stuff. Pretty much like reddit's top vs. hot functionality, just changing my defaults.

There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/best as an alternative for a similar purpose. I learned about those two and other undocumented features from https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

You could also subscribe to HN on feed reader with such limitations, https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ and http://hnapp.com/ are two that I have used in the past. e.g. https://hnrss.org/newest?comments=100 and http://hnapp.com/rss?q=comments%3E100 creates a feed limited by number of comments.

In the end I decided RSS wasn't ideal way to follow HN though, and for quite some time I have been using https://hckrnews.com/ almost exclusively to skim through top 10 posts for each day. Or top 20 or top 50%, if you have more free time. Plus I like the table layout, with comments/points in their respective columns.

I got a dopamine rush reading this!

You are all a bunch of junkies... scoot over.

What has helped me a bit is the https://hackernewsletter.com/ - I can be sure to get the good nuggets, just a couple days later.

Haha, you mention this, but I found it helps me find posts that slipped by my addiction. A blessing in disguise.

I would like to try that - but it looks like the last issue was in January?

The noprocrast setting is really helpful, personally. I wish every site had this.

I didn't even know this existed, thanks! Hopefully this will curb things a bit

What does that setting do? There is no tooltip.

Looks like turning it on enables the maxvisit and minaway categories. Maxvisit is how many minutes you can browse before getting shutoff. Minaway is how long before you can browse again.

Question: how many of the articles do you read in their entirety? Do you spend 1 or 5 or 20 minutes thinking about the content? I’d like a comparison between, say, a library where you can find a nice book and sit-and-read for a good 2 hours.

I think HN is more of a news aggregator with comments than social media platform. But it has the same problem as anything compared with “crack” and that’s a quick information fix.

I like a lot of the stuff on here too but I often book mark things and don’t necessarily go back to it. Some things yes but mostly no.

> Question: how many of the articles do you read in their entirety? Do you spend 1 or 5 or 20 minutes thinking about the content? I’d like a comparison between, say, a library where you can find a nice book and sit-and-read for a good 2 hours.

I don't read anything on Medium. I brush it off as marketing bs. Github pages though I do read. I read documentations of software frameworks on HN that I find intersting. Sometimes source code too (if I can understand it).

>I like a lot of the stuff on here too but I often book mark things and don’t necessarily go back to it. Some things yes but mostly no.

I use Firefox for this, but their bookmarking system is awful.

I only read the comments 99% of the time. This is usually because there are more interesting insights in the comments than in the post itself, and usually at least one person finds a mistake that renders the entire post nullified in its teachings. This may be a methodological error in a research article, a financial error in a business article, and so on.

In the off chance that commentors say it's good enough to read, I skim it, and very rarely, I will read it in depth.

Probably about 50% of those I read are done in full, the rest skimmed. Usually not much reflection happens after reading most articles unless they seem rather poignant.

I recently started bookmarking things and reading them in full later, but honestly what gives me the biggest kick are the comments. I also really dig the ask and show sections.

Try reading books on mobile. Once you get used to it, you just cannot stop. I read 5 books in 2 months - on container shipping, nikola tesla's biography stuff like that - none very useful to me but the point is I read them.

I want to get into this. How do you read your books? I have a TON of PDFs but reading PDFs on an iPhone is really frustrating because of the way the Books app displays them. I have to constantly zoom in and out and pan around.

Would you recommend a good resource for container shipping?

HN is a form of social media, though: users submit content, comment on content and each other, and can upvote content and comments.

The main upside though is not feeling the urge to compete with other people which makes it different from the likes of Facebook/Instagram.

I suspect most people using those other social media sites don't feel such an urge. If anything, some people use it as their primary means of socializing, communicating and consuming media, which is unhealthy, but they do so because the medium is convenient, not because it drives them in some relentless pursuit of "likes."

It still creates the internet karma points thing, visible in the top corner.

And there is "but there are people WRONG on the internet!" effect, which means demonstrating domain knowledge and winning arguments drive their interest -- something that seems strikingly more common with knowledge workers (e.g. lawyers, programmers, professors), than, say, construction workers. People wanna feel smart, esp. in their areas of proficiency and dominance.

I'm sure someone will post the relevant XKCD any minute now...

I disagree on the basis that a hacker news account has no intrinsic ties with a personal identity.

It also has no notion of relationships between users.

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