HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you get your daily HN brief?

22 points by surds ↗ HN
I need to, and am trying to, reduce the number of times I visit HN and also the amount of time I spend on it.

What is your preferred way to get your daily summary? I do realize the folks who use this approach to limit time on HN might not be here right now to share their approach. :)

19 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 60.9 ms ] thread
angersock
Weekly summaries are pretty good...check out n-gate.
DanAndersen
I use http://hnapp.com/ to set up a custom RSS feed to filter out various topic keywords I find uninteresting/irrelevant, and then use Feedly to view the RSS feed.

If you are looking to reduce the amount of time you waste, I've found some success in using the Strict Workflow extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/strict-workflow/cg... ) which combines a browser blacklist with the Pomodoro timer.

surds
That combination is probably what I would need if simpler corrective attempts don't work. Thanks!
Confiks
I use https://hckrnews.com/ to get a view of everything that has been on the frontpage. Stems all FOMO that allows me to review posts once per so much time, usually about every day.
kyriakos
doing exactly the same for years now. its a great front for HN. I'm surprised its been running for so long without adding ads and other annoyances.
surds
Cool. That's handy. I will try it out for a few days.
torbica
For me the frontpage view is working only for today and does not work for previous days (and again only for 6.4.2018). :(
wvl
That's what is intended -- it shows the items currently on the frontpage. So it will not show entry from the previous days because they are no longer on the frontpage. (The UI should not show the previous days in this case, and maybe there is something more I could be doing to make more obvious what is supposed to be happening).

Curiously the entries from April 6 that do show up is a bug due to an issue I had with the process going down for a number of hours, leaving those two entries not being properly updated to remove the 'homepage' flag.

torbica
Thank you for the clarification. For me personally it would be useful to have following feature:

- show the list of all stories that were on the homepage any time during that day.

Maybe there is a way to do that even now but I did not found it.

no_protocol
That's what the 'all' option does. It shows all items that made the front page that were submitted on any given day, whether it was on the front page for 2 days straight or for just a few minutes.
Yetanfou
Add the HN RSS feed to a feed reader, use it to skim the subjects (HN doesn't put anything but the subject line in the feed) and only open those subjects which are of interest. Never hit the main page. This does two things:

1: it allows you to only look at those subjects which are of interest, either through the comments or by opening the page link without seeing the comments

2: it somewhat protects you from the effects of the HN echo chamber/popularity contest in that it shows you everything which made it to HN, no matter whether it was directly pushed off the front page due to flagging/downvoting/overactive moderation.

I'm using the Nextcloud [1] News app [2] as a feed reader, there are others but this one works well and handles large volumes without problems.

[1] https://github.com/nextcloud/server

[2] https://github.com/nextcloud/news

arsham
Yes, feed reader is definitely a good way to read items you haven't already and don't miss anything. I'm using [1] innoreader, which has both free and paid subscription. You can do with free version.

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

0x4f3759df
/etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com

127.0.0.1 hckrnews.com

teilo
The RSS feed in Newsblur.
charlieegan3
I use my own site I built while I was learning Rails. http://serializer.io/

It has a mark as read feature which I really need.

I moved it to a subdomain of my personal site to save renewing the to domain for another year. Upon doing so I immediately got about 10 emails from users asking about the domain. One offered to PayPal me the cost for it and now we're back on the original domain!

0x54MUR41
I use Hacker News Daily [0] to get daily top stories and Ask Hacker News Weekly [1] to get weekly top questions from Hacker News. I found this very useful because you can subscribe to the mailing list or add the RSS feed. So, you don't need to visit HN frequently (others have already told about this).

Another site I rare to visit is n-gate.com [2]. It gives you brief summary of the story. This site also has RSS that you can subscribe.

[0]: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

[1]: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-ask/

[2]: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/

rajacombinator
Look at HN. Click through any interesting posts. Not too hard.