Same way as always. Open the page, glance down it to see if there's anything that interests me, hit hide on the domains that I never want to see anything from. Lather, rinse, repeat.
But I'm guessing you have more of a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) kind of problem, which admittedly I don't have. However, you could look at something using RSS, maybe in combination with an agent told to find and show articles based on some heuristics.
Personally, I'm OK with missing something. If it's good, I figure it'll surface somewhere else and impinge on my notice sooner or later.
It just hides that particular entry. What I meant to say is, I see certain domains and always hit hide on them, because that's a place I don't want to see anything from.
> hit hide on the domains that I never want to see anything from
Ive been on hn with one account or another for close to a decade now. I have never used that feature nor did I think it would permanently hide the domains entirely. Super good to know though.
It used to feel like that for me even before AI. The trick I use is when glancing through the homepage, I just open all the tabs that interest me and move them to OneTab. Eventually I sift through the threads on a lazy weekend. Many weren't that interesting, so they end up getting closed on the spot, same for those that didn't gain traction. Others are keepers, those get bookmarked.
But be careful, compulsively bookmarking isn't a good idea either. I see my AI bookmarks from 2023, most are irrelevant now. Same for a ton of new releases at that time, whatever homelab config, rumors around silicon architecture, geopolitical events, retrocomputing, etc.
So what actually helped me was realizing that after any ramp up period there's stabilization: you let the world figure out what works, so eventually you will see whatever stuck mentioned everywhere when going back to that topic.
There are also some evergreen discussions here. Those get more than a thread a year, like the tinnitus stuff, and they tend to stay up for a good part of the week.
This is a very apt right now. The amount of AI posts is... boring to say the least.
I've always used the comments to upvotes ratio to workout if an article is worth reading. If the comments are higher than the upvotes, it's poor. Vice versa it's worth looking into. I skip all AI posts.
When you say "mostly because of AI", do you mean because there are so many posts about AI (and it's hard to keep up with the latest coding harness or version of a model, which seems to pop up at a rate close to js frameworks back in the days ?)
Or is it because of AI-generated posts ? (I have to admit I'm not good yet at "guessing" when a post is slop...)
There's an infinite amount of interesting stuff out there. The subset of that which appears on the HN front page is small, and not selected in any especially curated way. You really have no choice but to ignore interesting stuff, even if you read the entire HN feed. The only answer that preserves your sanity is to stop worrying.
I mainly press "past" in the top menu and skim the top posts of the previous days. It doesn't surface every interesting post/discussion, but most of it.
I've made a bot[0] for HN that posts whatever enters the top 10, summarizes it with AI and posts it on textlog[1], and so I get the fresh news like little summary notes and decide if it's worth my time. Bonus is I receive a notification on my phone because I follow it.
I typically use hckr news (https://hckrnews.com/) set to show only the top 10 or top 20. It also has the advantage of showing those i missed overnight or earlier.
Depends on what your goals are. If you want to be well-informed for the nerdy water-cooler talk in the office kitchen, then you need to read a lot. Otherwise, just don't worry about it, because important topics get re-posted. If you missed something the first time, then you still have good chances to catch it the second or third time.
Anecdotally 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.
We are strongly in the AI acceleration phase, so it'll keep getting harder. I use an RSS reader for the top posts only. In the RSS reader, I "star" what I want to read, and read what I can from among what I have starred. Of course I miss a lot, but I get the broad picture of where things are going.
Im not sure i understand your question. If you cant find it, how are you ignoring it?
At any rate, I find AI interesting, but have a similar opinion that most of the HN discourse has become low quality. My solution is to follow individual users I know are high quality with similar interests.
But I'm guessing you have more of a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) kind of problem, which admittedly I don't have. However, you could look at something using RSS, maybe in combination with an agent told to find and show articles based on some heuristics.
Personally, I'm OK with missing something. If it's good, I figure it'll surface somewhere else and impinge on my notice sooner or later.
I don't thing 'hide' applies to the domain of the post, but only the post itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=What%20do%...
I thought hide just hid that particular entry. Have I been wrong all this time?
Ive been on hn with one account or another for close to a decade now. I have never used that feature nor did I think it would permanently hide the domains entirely. Super good to know though.
But be careful, compulsively bookmarking isn't a good idea either. I see my AI bookmarks from 2023, most are irrelevant now. Same for a ton of new releases at that time, whatever homelab config, rumors around silicon architecture, geopolitical events, retrocomputing, etc.
So what actually helped me was realizing that after any ramp up period there's stabilization: you let the world figure out what works, so eventually you will see whatever stuck mentioned everywhere when going back to that topic.
There are also some evergreen discussions here. Those get more than a thread a year, like the tinnitus stuff, and they tend to stay up for a good part of the week.
I've always used the comments to upvotes ratio to workout if an article is worth reading. If the comments are higher than the upvotes, it's poor. Vice versa it's worth looking into. I skip all AI posts.
Or is it because of AI-generated posts ? (I have to admit I'm not good yet at "guessing" when a post is slop...)
There's also the "hidden" https://news.ycombinator.com/best which is a bit the same, but not per day
[0]: https://github.com/stagas/hn10
[1]: https://textlog.cc/u/hn10
A few weeks ago several HN users presented solutions for filtering out AI results, but I haven't used any of those solutions much.
I call it "Seeking Orange" because interesting posts are highlighted. Features include:
- Point/comment counts become increasingly more orange with higher counts (50+, 100+)
- Orange accent bar on left indicates new items since last visit
- Support for several different feeds including: HckrNews (chronological front page appearance time), Classic Stories, Best Stories, Active Stories
- Thresholds to de-emphasize posts from users with low karma/recent creation dates: https://hn.leftium.com/newest?min_karma=500&min_age_years=5
> ignore all posts about MCP
> ignore all posts containing "agent"
> also ignore everything frontier labs bragged about hacking this week
> ignore AI psychosis posts praised as being the future
> check out everything else
> close HN
or hit "v" to change views
https://hckrnight.com
If I tried to keep up, I'd be run over. It's too much input for the normal individual I am.
At any rate, I find AI interesting, but have a similar opinion that most of the HN discourse has become low quality. My solution is to follow individual users I know are high quality with similar interests.
I'm curious to hear why AI made it harder to read HN. Is it because there's lots of it and you don't like it?