HN Explorer

Ask HN: What else do you read as regularly as Hacker News?

53 points by pcarolan ↗ HN

68 comments

[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] thread
ninjakeyboard
This is pretty much my go-to source of curated media. Maybe my facebook feed for funny things.
aram
Same here. Since it combines most of my areas of interest, I don't need to use other sources.

If I'm not active on HN for some time, I check out Lobste.rs to keep up. They have way less members and posts, so hot news stay longer on the front page.

For funny things I go to regular Reddit front page.

efz1005
I go to Quora whenever they send me a Digest (every 2-4 days), and I'm all day on Twitter.
jankins
Yeah I'll recommend the quota email digests too. They do a great job, however those are curated. I'm not on it nearly as often as HN but it's a different category.
kachhalimbu
programming/angular/node/javascript subreddits
bmh_ca
Slashdot – headlines, anyway.
Jasamba
MIT Technology Review, and interesting articles from my Facebook feed.
noer
Twitter, the NY Times, Growth Hackers for marketing/product stuff (though the content there is pretty thin at times). If I'm bored & away from a computer I use the News App on iOS. I use newsblur as an RSS reader and I rarely update what I follow, but from there it's mostly sports blogs.
redwood
Reddit.com/r/truereddit
flo_23
Product Hunt, Flipboard, Golem.de and Heise
grandalf
A small number of quality subreddits. Sometimes quora. Private google group w college friends.
Mayzie
> A small number of quality subreddits.

Such as?

I'm always looking to expand my reading list, as I find that I frequently read everything and there being nothing left to consume. :-(

thurn
I enjoy the Audio Edition of The Economist -- I listen to it while biking to work.
13of40
This is the most high-brow site I visit, so I'd be embarrassed to give you my list...
JonAtkinson
Private Eye. The Week. The Spectator. The Information. Monday Note.
bjelkeman-again
For world context: The Economist

For industry context: O'Reilly Radar

A national newspaper for headlines.

The rest is hobby related: bass guitar, 3D printing etc.

charlieegan3
https://lobste.rs/ _sometimes_ gets things before HN. I also follow Product Hunt but I don't find either are as consistently high in quality has HN. Last year I made http://serializer.io/ that aggregates items linearly from all 3 (and some others) on a single page.
Klathmon
id love to try out lobste.rs but i cant seem to get an invite, and commenting is one of the biggest parts of these kinds of sites to me.
charlieegan3
Yeah I'm in the same situtation. Just haven't come across someone that's actually a user.
ck2
HN thread on lobste.rs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452384

Invites are supposedly via irc chat https://lobste.rs/chat

charlieegan3
> New contributors are always welcome on Lobsters, but pestering other members in the channel for invites is not acceptable. If you are the author or otherwise involved with a story that was submitted to the site, ask and someone will invite you. Alternately, offer some good links or thoughts on a story and someone will likely invite you so can post them.

Seems like you'd usually need some kind of reason/action to get into the community that first time.

kawera
Sent.
Klathmon
Not to bother you, but I never received anything...
joefarish
If you do manage to get signed up, would you be able to send an invite my way? Thanks
kawera
I can send you an invite too but you need to put your email address in your profile.
kawera
Humm... is the email address in your profile still valid?
ck2
Nice job on serializer - there are now newsworthy articles on the front page that are missing from HN front page.

ps. I think you should set a max-width on the content area, I see you made it flexible probably for mobile but on larger displays the unlimited width makes your eyes move too much (meanwhile I'll fix it with stylish)

pps. free https maybe?

charlieegan3
Thanks! I've thought about the content area before, I should do it really.

About the missing items. Only the top 25 are taken, and the top 5 from show HN. Items are refreshed every 10 mins.

charlieegan3
FWIW, I've updated the layout. Think it does look better that way.
tedsanders
There's so much good content out on the internet, and sadly, we are wildly ignorant of almost all of it. Discovery is still such a hard problem. Here's a list of the blogs, podcasts, and websites that I read.

Links available at http://www.tedsanders.com/my-information-diet/

Blogs

Economics blogs:

•Marginal Revolution, The Money Illusion, The Incidental Economist, The Growth Economics Blog, Conversable Economist, Overcoming Bias, Vox: Matthew Yglesias, Peter Diamandis, EconLog: Library Of Economics And Liberty

Physics/math blogs:

•Condensed concepts, Shtetl-Optimized, Sean Carroll’s Preposterous Universe, Prosperous Physicist, nanoscale views, Do the Math, Strong Correlations

Statistics blogs:

•Andrew Gelman’s Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, sometimes i’m wrong, Measure of Doubt (dead)

Other blogs:

•Slate Star Codex, Vox: Ezra Klein, The GiveWell Blog, Ramez Naam, Conor Friedersdorf, Andart II, Andrew McAfee’s Blog—The Business Impact of IT, Ben Casnocha, Gwern, How To Write Badly Well (dead), Lithoguru, Mike Bostock, DIYPS, Study Hacks Blog, The Rationalist Conspiracy, what if?, Sibylla Bostoniensis

Comics:

•xkcd, Existential Comics

Other websites:

•HN, Ars Technica, Chessbase, Vox, Reddit, YouTube

Podcasts:

•Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, Goggles Optional, Supreme Podcast, Comedy Bang Bang, EconTalk, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, Welcome to Night Vale, WTF with Marc Maron, StarTalk Radio Show with Neil Degrasse Tyson, Intelligence Squared (US), Fareed Zakaria GPS, a16z, Invisibilia, Serial

officialchicken
archdaily.com, arxiv.org/math, Supreme Court landmark decisions, random pubmed.com articles, or just a plain old book.
HenryTheHorse
Metafilter. (Hands down one of the best forums with quality conversations.)

Other than that, the usual suspects: Reddit, Vox, Quartz, WaPo, New Yorker, The Atlantic and NYT.

wanda
Slashdot

SomethingAwful

Front-end Front

Sublevel

Designer News

ljoshua
Side question: does anyone know of a browser extension or anything that would hide/gray out HN headlines that I've already seen on previous visits so I know only what stories are actually new on the front page? Would make scanning quicker.
r3bl
Accessing HN with Firefox (if your web history is turned on) does exactly that[1]. No extension is necessary. The same is true for every other browser since the CSS file it clearly says:

    a:link    { color:#000000; text-decoration:none; }
    a:visited { color:#828282; text-decoration:none; }
[1] http://i.imgur.com/CqKW1yK.png
ljoshua
Sorry, didn't mean just visited links. I want unvisited (but seen) links to be treated differently.

Example: I visit once, scan 30 links, click 2, and leave. Come back 2 hours later, there are 5 new links, 5 have dropped off, and my attention is drawn to just the five new links, regardless of whether I visited the other 25 or not.

bazzargh
I assume you mean seen but not visited, since as the other reply says, the browser tracks :visited for you.

I have a more aggressive greasemonkey script that hides lots of non-technical links on HN

    var links = document.links;

    var boring = [ "adage.com", "arstechnica", "bbc", "discovermagazine", "bloomberg", 
               "bloombergview", "buzzfeed", "businessinsider", 
              "californiasunday","cnn","csmonitor","dailymail",
              "digg", "economist","esquire", "fastcompany",
              "forbes", "ft.com", "fortune", "fusion", "geekwire",
              "gizmodo", "harvard.edu", "huffingtonpost", "inc.com",
              "longreads", "medium", "mondaynote",
              "nature", "nautil.us", "newscientist", "newstatesman",
              "newyorker", "npr.org", "nybooks", "nymag", "nytimes", "pando",
              "psychologytoday", "qz.com", "reddit", "reuters", "sciencedaily",
              "scientificamerican", "slate", "techcrunch", "telegraph",
              "theatlantic", "theguardian", "thenation","theparisreview",
              "theverge", "theregister", "time", "usatoday", "vancouversun",
              "vice", "vimeo",
              "vogue", "washingtonpost", "wired", "wsj", "yahoo",
              "youtube", "zdnet" ];
     matcher = new RegExp("\\b("+(boring.join("|").replace(/\./g,"\\."))+")\\b");
     for (i=0; i<links.length; i++) {
       hostname = links[i].hostname.replace(/^www\./,"");
       if (hostname.match(matcher)) {
         links[i].style.setProperty("display", "none");
  
         links[i].parentNode.insertBefore(document.createTextNode("[removed]"), links[i]);

      }
    }
Just to be clear, I read a lot of those sites - I'm just not interested in seeing them on HN, where I'm looking for technical news.

Anyway, you could adapt this by parsing the age field and making judgements based on how old the article is and your time of day (ie you'll have seen a 6 hour old article at the end of the day, but at the start of the day, it first appeared overnight)

applecore
Books. I make sure to allocate at least twice as much time to reading literature as I do reading online.