Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinsmith | Hacker News Reader

Easy. Just make HN your primary news source. Boom. Mental health saved.

I've actually done this, because most immediately important stories bubble up to the top, even though this isn't a site strictly for world news or politics.

Anything related to race and most news that could be construed as political gets flagged off the front page no matter how important it is or how many up votes it gets. You need to be constantly browsing or hope dang is browsing and decides to actually save an article against people using the flag button against the rules of the site to ever see any such news if this is your main news source.

I’m glad those incendiary articles are kept off of the main page, because they are available everywhere else on the Internet.

Allowing them here would likely have a negative snowball effect.

Sure, but GP said "most immediately important stories bubble up to the top".

Trasmatta said important stories.

I didn't say I never read any other news source. I just try to avoid them on a daily basis because they're almost never actionable, and just make me depressed and unable to function. If there's something that's immediately actionable, then I find it will generally bubble up somewhere like Hacker News.

Now I'm just mad that I'm not getting paid $250k/yr for knowing how to code FizzBuzz.

I wish it were that simple. I avoid the news for my mental health, but even the occasional doom post makes its way through

HN is a very specific demographic...

- people who think solutions imply most often technical ideas

- people who are educated enough to understand HN

- people who talk english

So you don't see much of the rest of the world here... For example, there's not much on political strategies...

I've done this for 5 years. I already find HN a tad too much, but it beats my RSS reader of way too many subscriptions years ago :)

Yes, as if there isn’t doom and gloom here.

Compared to other sites I've frequently visited in the past HN is on the tame side of things. I'm grateful that it exists, limiting where I get my daily info has been great for my mental health.

This very comment section is a great example. Insulting people who read the news, pretending that all media is just propaganda, anti-intellectualism, etc.

HN is great for tech, it's good to passable for tech-adjacent things (science*, math**) and usually really bad for anything far removed from tech (politics, humanities, philosophy, ...). Which should not be surprising, there is no a priori reason to believe that people experienced with technology should have interesting things to say about other topics.

(*) This excludes heavily politicised science topics.

(**) Though I have yet to see a math submission with more than a handful of comments without somebody complaining (and being upvoted!) about "math is too complicated" or "why don't they just use variables with more than one letter?".

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