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Comment by pnf | Hacker News Reader

Save it to a "read it later" app. Forget all about it. Move on with life. When you need something, search for it. By that time, there will be a hundred other hits saying or doing the same thing. If you really want to remember something, write it down in a giant text file with a date stamp. You'll still forget it, but you'll more likely remember it exists later if you need it.

Next step is to stop spending "a lot of time" looking at HN, Reddit, etc... These are life wasting activities that sap energy and lead to mild, undiagnosed psychosis in most people.

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Being too often on HN is clearly destructive for me.

Seeing a post about some advanced stuff where I don't understand anything in the article and seeing dozen of different people commenting on it gives me such an imposter syndrome.

My mind goes into the "HN is for people like you, you should know this stuff"

I saw the Social Dilemma 5-6 days back and since then I have been little vary of touching my phone. Since yesterday morning I had been putting my phone deliberately in other room and I certainly feel spiked in terms of energy. I guess I will do same thing for HN and Reddit.

I spend too much time on hn, but don't think I share your approach. Either I learn something, enjoy reading it (or both), or skip the issue alltogether. Is everything where you think "you should know this stuff" actually relevant to you, or just interesting?

That's the issue with my mind, the filter between "I should know it" and "you'll learn it if you need it" is sometimes not working.

Like the post about Numba, the Python compiler. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148455

I've never used Python, and probably won't ever use it, but some deep part of me "needs" to read the article.

It's harder for me to fight this insatiable desire to learn something unuseful, than to stop reading HN.

That's the catch though, stay out of media and then you're ignorant of things happening, as tiring as it is. Stay with social news apps like reddit and yeah they're a huge time waster but quick aggregation of news and can get you a good understanding of what's happening.

That's mostly just FOMO. Most of "what's happening" isn't really happening. Instead, the absolute majority of news is gossip and speculation. When something of consequence happens, it will reach you.

Most of the "news" is propaganda or advertorial marketing campaigns. If you want to make sure you don't get caught with your pants down if something affecting you happens then let someone else live on that content treadmill. Find a few newsletter digests by people you trust and read those daily or weekly. The only people who need to keep up with the news cycle are the ones creating it and using it to psyop their enemies and marks. Everything else is better when it's had time to mellow. Skip the hot takes. Wait for the cream to rise. Focus your life on things within your control. You'll be happier.

I just look at the Wikipedia Current Events page [0]. It's possibly the most straight-to-the-point and least biased way I've found to just know what's going on. If you have any specific interests, there are similar sites. I've found Blue's News [1] to be great for a quick catch up on gaming.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

[1]: https://www.bluesnews.com

My approach is different, don't know if better or worse: important news will eventually reach me, the rest is probably not important. This is excluding things I need to react quickly about, which are pretty much constrained to my job.

I didn't know about the Wikipedia Current Events page. This is genius. Thank you.

What's wrong with being ignorant? People lived being ignorant way before social media was even invented. In a way, ignorance is bliss. I would rather stay out of social media than consuming all bullshit news, that has no direct impact in my life.

Makes me think of this quote from Richard Hamming, to the extent that having an ear tuned into the news is like having your office door open:

    "Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

    (from "You and Your Research," 1986)

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