Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

I read about 20-40 articles per day, mostly tech or business related. Generally speaking, I find them on HN, Facebook, Twitter.

I'm surprised there are no comments on your question...so let me be the first. I'm a medical student about to start residency. I also have a master's degree in computer science.

I read a lot of articles about AI in medicine, pretty much anything I can get my hands on. I also read generic tech articles related to everything from Nintendo Switch, Tesla, Brain-Computer interfaces, and other popular media articles.

-How many articles do you read each day? Likely 10+. These aren't high-brow articles, just random blog posts and pop culture tech. I read about 2-3 research abstracts per day in medicine and maybe skim the text of 1-2 articles.

-They're usually related to your job or to some side projects? Usually they are related to my interest in medicine or technology. Sometimes they are related to my job (I work as a part-time developer / data scientist). I also run a small website (https://www.cronote.com). I encountered a number of issues with time-zone switching and the daylight savings change on March 12th. Read about 20 articles having to do with correctly implementing timezones in Python.

-Do you usually read about a variety of topics or it's focused in 2 or 3 topics only? Topics cover a vast span of medicine and computer science. I enjoy computer science more than medicine so it's a 20:80 split.

-Do you usually read during some time of the day or it's usually random? I read whenever I'm behind my computer, usually alternating between work and browsing the Internet. This amounts to ~5 hours per day.

I read random when i'm stuck on something or have to rethink on things. Doing something else for 5 minutes let's me suddenly think about it differently.

The subject doesn't count. I don't read the new stories though, otherwhise it would be a bigger timesink ;-) .

Always interested in hearing other people's thoughts, HN has some good reasoning in comments. I prefer it over watching the daily news in the noon :)

I save interesting stories on my side project http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/, which can also show HN comments when adding the tag: commentsbyhackernews ( it's currently a bookmarking service for myselve mostly, but it can do a lot more under the hood)

Eg. : http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/Item/Details?id=49b1ed7e-5d35...

Edit: Example feature, add a article to wsj.com ( paywalled) and it will automaticly create a link through facebook. So you can read it ( i hate paywalled articles)

1) I read HM during break time. For like 5-10 minutes.

2) Usually I open the interested topics in other tabs and have a quick scan on the passage/ website

3) If that's interesting, I will add it to my reading list

4) I go over the reading list after dinner when I have free time

I read mostly geopolitical articles and whatever TheBrowser kicks up to me. I used to read a lot of books, but these days a book has to be really attractive for me to get over the usual low signal to noise ratio that books offer.

I've been on a reading diet for the last few weeks, I plan to kick back into high gear soon, with a project I'm building to ingest all my reading materials and present them to me in bite-sized formats. I used to be satisfied with Pocket, but my reading workload is too heavy to comfortably shoulder, so I need my own power tools.

What would be great is if I could break books up by chapter and feed them into the system, so that way they don't feel so heavy. I'll find a way to do that eventually, probably based on some ugly hack of converting Kindle books to EPUB or something ungodly like that.

I read about 10 articles per day, filtering through the top 10 to find the ones that I could be interested in. I really like the comment section, as it's a lot more civilized than other online community, and they usually add another perspective to the post. I actually make it a point not to read comment on most articles/blog other than HN because it tends to be filled with trolls.

I skim Hacker News couple of times a day. I prefer reading books (on Kindle), ~30 mins to 1 hour every night before sleep and 20-30 mins every morning after waking up.

Mostly comments on websites. Even when I read something for learning (books/articles/blog posts) I tend to skim it at best. My attention span is getting fairly low.

Either about iOS development, design or (lately) learning thai language-material.

I have the RSS feed in my reader, I skim through he headlines with it mixed in among other technology RSS feeds, I read maybe 2-3 interesting topics, mostly in the morning while eating breakfast.

I read 3-5 articles per day, but oftentimes, I read the comments of 20-30 articles without clicking on the actual article. Recent example: Article about Angular 4.0 being released. I don't care about the article, but I do care about the comments of the JS folks.

I read for pleasure during my commute. (Days when I work at home are a little more stressful because I don't get that enforced downtime.)

During the workday, I check various sources of information about once an hour, unless I'm working on something that requires either research or flow.

I run an RSS collector to manage repeating sources of information and categorize them for me. I add sources as I come across them and clean it out about once every six months.

Everything I read during the workday is related to work, but that's about fifteen different topics.

I'd be interested in hearing if people share my habit of always reading 3ish nonfiction books in parallel. I have a pretty hard time sticking to one. It's usually a programming or related book, some science book and some pop-science or selfhelp or marketing related stuff (or something like outdoor living, fishing etc.). And usually fiction during the commute. Oftentimes I'll also have random collections of stuff (Lovecraft collection) or comic books lying around for a "quick read".

I use the RSS feed with Feedly. I only read things about actual technology relevant to me, and skip everything about silicon valley startup nonsense.

Most of my reading is off HN/Reddit, whatever catches my eye and looks interesting which can be up to 10 articles in a day, but often enough 0-1.

I use https://bazqux.com as a RSS reader to keep up with the stuff I actually want to follow. Some gaming sites, LWN, EFF's deeplinks and the blogs of various products my company or I use.

(BTW, I highly recommend bazqux. UI very close to Google Reader, very cheap and with a lifetime subscription option)

I read 2 to 5 articles a day. But this reading is not comprehensive instead it's like looking the important points, although skimming is the key of surfing but recently I've discovered that it shortens attention span so it seems theres a big effect to changing other habits too.

That's why I'm in the diet of not skimming through instead if I start one article I finish no matter how boring it is. But it's very hard I'm old surfer and suffering for deep concentration..

I read most things and it makes me happy but when I read a bunch of whiny white men on Hacker News I feel sad. ;(

My anecdata: I don't read much on internet anymore aside from what's linked on HN and what I research for a specific topic. Plus a bit of news at CNN and a bit of Producthunt.

I read about 15 articles on average and all comments to about 10 of them and scan some comments for the rest. My reading is batched around morning, lunch, and evening. I download few articles to Pocket for offline readin. During subway commute.

I read the comments before I read the articles, if at al

I'm not sure if the question is about reading habits on HN, or the reading habits of the HN demographic.

If it is the former, I middle-click 3-4 articles a day, and if they are also juicy topics, I middle-click the comments links as well.

If it is the latter, I read tons of articles a day (avg 20), some related to tech, but mostly not. I read in the morning, at lunch (very productive time to read), and after dinner.

Offline: I have subscriptions to dead-tree versions of Time, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Affairs. I also have 4-5 books on the go at any given time, mostly nonfiction. I go through phases, and my last major one was statistics and category theory.

Online: Slashdot, Reddit, HN, Marginal Revolution, John D Cook, Farnam Street, Quora, and a bunch of data science related blogs. I also read articles on the getpocket.com recommended list, and I find myself drawn to reading articles on The Atlantic.

I read 10-20 articles a day, don't really read too many comments.

A fun game to play with a co-worker is "what articles would you click on the homepage?" I just did that yesterday. My co-worker knew every link I'd opened (without looking at my screen) and I couldn't figure out most of his.

95% of the time I only read comments. People usually insert quotes from the article and discuss them right away. And it is much more valuable to read comments because there are a lot of smart people commenting who work in related fields.

I use The Old Reader as a news aggregator and my own emacs mode to read it via API. In fact I read HN in emacs :) At least when I'm home.

Usually would read topics that are of interest to me (i.e. technology, software development, frameworks, etc.).

For the others, I would usually skim through the article and also read the comments.

I am finding that there's a lot of value reading the comments, as some folks have that deep seated knowledge, as well as providing relevant links that will help you further grasp what's on the article.

Skim through via my RSS reader, and read around 10-20 articles a day.