Ask HN: How do you consume HN?
HN account for majority of my open tabs. With a very dynamic top submissions list, I struggle to keep up with all the content and conversations. I was wondering how do you consume content you're interested in on this site? How do you keep up with topics and conversations?
It depends what do you want to use it for. If you do not want to reply and only want to consume, all you need is to go to "list" at the bottom, view the front-page of the day, and classic.
Upvote submission, comments, add to favourite. Once you spend a few years reading you will get the general vibe of certain topics and community bias.
If you are not busy you could simply view all the top post during a weekend few hour sessions. Sometimes I have HN tabs that were opened from months before I just haven't have time to read it. Generally I grind it through when I have free time.
And if you read a lot on Desktop / Laptop with hundreds of Tabs, your browser is far more important than whatever reading habit you have. Chrome and Firefox is order of magnitude better than Safari in handling hundreds of tabs.
I use Hacki mobile app mostly: it marks what I saw already, lets me favourite, upvote, reply, browse by top/best/ask and so on. It's easier to navigate large posts (many comments).
Then I still come back to best/top/favs at work because there is always something cool I missed or a "show HN" that has a project I'd like to test.
Mobile app helps to keep it tidy and HN has plenty of content easy to consume like that l.
Hacki is on fdroid.
I am an infovore and read every page in /newest, because my interests are many, and I don't want other people deciding what is important.
I open a few, and save meaty material as pdf (on the phone, I send it to the desktop)
This is similar to a post yesterday[0], brief comments.
> Browse No More
> The magic we once had with browsing the web is dwindling. March 13, 2025
> I'm no longer browsing the web; I'm consuming AI answers instead.
In this case, limiting my news feed to what others think is important (or hot, like emacs vs. vi) or not.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43590233
I got a bot which follows everything that gets posted, or at least it is supposed to. I built it originally to gather the data to build a model which can predict if an article will get upvoted based on the headline, later I wanted to use it to prevent my YOShInOn RSS reader and agent from posting duplicates. I learned that the two things contradict because if you scan everything quickly everything has zero votes and zero comments!
It used to use arangodb but the license for that sucks so I just tore it down to use postgres, I developed an adaptation layer that makes postgres look like arangodb, at least enough to port my applications. I added the data structures so it can recrawl posts after two weeks so it can be fresh and have accurate counts. I am talking with a friend about reranking comments so I am planning on using the bot to suck down comments for some big discussions and rerank them.
I generally only check the homepage and maybe page 2-3, otherwise it takes too much time. I also follow an RSS feed [1] for Show HN threads over 100 points or 25 comments, in my Miniflux instance.
Sometimes I read them right away on my PC or smartphone, most of the times I just open the link and send it over to my iPad and read later when I have the time.
[1] https://hnrss.org/show?points=100&comments=25
I have an old Linux PC and monitor dedicated to HN. I use uBlock to filter out boring topics that I am disinterested in and I consume all the rest all day and part of the night for the single purpose of waiting for a message from a long lost contact. I reply to many threads so they may recognize my stylometry or they could just stop by but I do not have wine.
Home page, new, ask. Repeat different times during the day.
That's how I use it.
same except I tend to go to ask first, and rarely go to new.
i read them using harmonic, an android client for Hn. For post which i commented on, i use the bookmarks and if i want to remember the post i use floccus to store the link in my cloud.
I struggle to keep up with all the content and conversations
You can't keep up with most things, let alone everything.
The feeling that you aren't keeping up is the result of increased experience with the world as an adult combined with a mistaken belief held when your experiences consisted largely of childhood.
On the bright side, once you accept how much you don't know and that you can't know everything, you realize that the rest of your life can be spent being amazed by the new things you learn. Or not.
Or to put it another way, trying to keep up is a manifestation of FOMO. Good luck.
I'll scan the headlines on the front page, but then spend most of my time on the "New" page, scrolling through every single headline, page after page...
An interesting alternative to the front page is the second-chance pool...
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
With a fork and knife!