I'd subscribe to just tech, personal projects, psychology and history if I could.
I was thinking something similar recently. I’m uninterested in well over half of the posts that appear on the front page, usually because they involve technical topics I don’t care about. Most HN readers must be similar, each with different needs and tastes.
Then I thought that the perfect solution would be an algorithm that would highlight posts and comments similar to those I’ve liked in the past and hide those I don’t like. Soon I would be seeing only what I want to see, and I wouldn’t be bothered by anything else.
Then a shiver went down my spine, and I decided that HN is best as it is.
You can do this with a time bound (day, week, month, year). Searches within the past 24 hours should turn up active discussions.
The hack I use is to search comments rather than posts, as the latter afford a larger search surface. You risk turning up some digression thread on a topic, but that's an occupational hazard...
Otherwise:
- Click on the "past" titlebar link to see top-ranked posts from the previous day. You can navigate by day/week/month/year through all of HN history.
- Click on the "past" post link to find earlier discussions of a particular story / link, if any.
- Click on the submitted link domain URL to find other items from that particular site.
- See what specific users are submitting. I occasionally find interesting content navigating HN by user rather than by submissions.
- Look to see what's getting submitted on the "New" queue. Voting or flagging early can influence what shows up on HN for discussion.
- Submit your own material. Odds are low, I'm lucky to have one in ten items see any activity. It's a numbers game. Submissions which relate to other recent submissions (but aren't merely fad-chasing) seem to do reasonably well. I turn up numerous older references through other research, some of which seems to do well on HN.
The guideline that "we should post things hackers [users] would find interesting" was good a decade ago, now we've good a ton of people that post their favourite long form articles and Twitter posts. I don't care for history, commentaries on society or personal philosophy musings with my code.
Honestly, I'm not really complaining, at least the quality of the discussion is still higher than elsewhere on the Internet.
Do you believe the only thing hackers should find interesting is "code?"
Again, I don't want to force HN to limits its discussion to tech _only_, I'm just saying that I think it's getting more and more diluted.
https://www.taggernews.com/tags/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337275 (2017)
The tags ended up being pretty interesting. You can even combine them: https://www.laarc.io/l/video|videos
It was neat watching the community figure out which tags to use.
Surely, if HN had a /web-dev I would stop using it as HN and use it more like I already use the specialized blog pages I already follow.
https://news.ycombinator.com/show
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
:(