Reading the thread on whether or not HN should be a "general news" site I can't help but wonder if that opinion is affected by whether or not HN is your primary news source.
HN gives me the news that I care about. Lots of tech, some science, and only a tiny, tiny bit of world events. This mix means that only really good science articles make it through, and only really really good worldnews articles make it through.
I usually wake up every morning and check HN to make sure that the world isn't ending. If North Korea launches a nuke at South Korea, despite it not being technology news, I'd bet that it makes it to the top of HN within a few minutes.
Recently I also started using an RSS reader that I wrote a while ago (I wrote it, then pretty much forgot about it): http://newsyndicated.com/a/reader it aggregates my favorite feeds (including HN, which is how i found this thread to begin with), and also allows me to submit directly to HN.
I don't think articles about world events are bad -- but the way they're done in most of the media is: country x is doing y to country z. Who cares? Standard international bickering is just that: standard. Relatively few articles go beyond surface phenomena to figure out what's really going on, and those are the ones of interest that, as you point out, will sometimes get voted up on HN.
I do subscribe to other RSS feeds, but looking at netnewswire's "Attention" feed report, I do visit HN linked sites more than any other.
I think this is a function of how practically useful the information is to me personally.
Conventional news tells me about a lot of things I can't do anything about - I'm pretty much a passive observer. I mean, in terms of politics I get to vote once every year or two? And anything macroeconomic is far outside my control, but might inform me slightly of where people may spend money in the next year or two.
Contrast that with tech news and what gets posted on HN - it's stuff I can either pick up and use (new languages/concepts/scripts/etc.) or that people will actually go to me for advice on. I can take an active roll and have give and take - there are opportunities for interaction there that are manageable.
I answered yes but I probably read about the same number of articles linked on Twitter but I don't "go to Twitter" for news. I've stopped using a RSS reader, Twitter does a better job of curating the content I want.
HN is my main source for "my kind" of news. Google News is my main source for mainstream news. (BBC gets in there sometimes for more of a world/different from U.S. perspective)
I keep telling myself that I need to explore "real" news sites like the BBC or Guardian (or...), but never quite get there.
I primarily stick to Slashdot and HN but know full well that the views in the comments of the two sites can sometimes be very detached/different from the rest of society.
While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it is something to be careful of and I'd hate to find the day all of my own opinions fit a site perfectly.
I answered "Yes," but only in a convoluted reading of the question.
Most accurately, HN is the only online service I use that is mainly a source of news.
Put another way, I come here for the information and discussion, and it just happens to be a news site[1]. Before HN, I went nowhere (online or offline) explicitly to obtain news. After HN, I expect I will, again, simply do without.
[1] Which suits it well, IMO. I always flag old/repeat articles.
As much as I enjoy HN, no, it is only one small part of my news consumption in a number of fields, which primarily comes in the form of RSS feeds. Currently I use Google Reader but I've used all kinds of readers. Since I prefer the Dave Winer-style "stream of news" approach I can trivially change readers since I don't generate a backlog. I've used "stream of news" since it was, well, the only choice since there was only one RSS generator and consumer and that's what it used.
It's my primary source of tech news. I use Google Reader and still gave a fair number of feeds, but I use HN via the main page.
I used to read a lot of Reddit, but everything is too political there. I got sick of seeing 50 wikileak stories make it to the top of every sub-reddit.
Hacker News is the only thing I am guaranteed to read every day. I will occasionally click over to Google News if I wish to know what is going on in the world or Slashdot if I need something else to look at. But Hacker News usually satisfies me in knowing what is most important to me in the world, which has the same basic tech emphasis as here; the other content that shows up from time-to-time usually matches what I wish to read about fairly well.
I had an RSS aggregator with around a dozen popular news sources like slashdot, digg, reddit etc but I've found that 99.99% of the interesting stories pop up on HN pretty quickly.
So I gave up on news RSS feeds and just have a tab with HN and a tab with a netvibes account with actual blog feeds from the likes of the eevblog, ben heck show, adafruit industries, hack a day etc.. stuff with unique content being added which I was interested in but won't hit HN every time they posted something.
I'd call it my primary professional news source, along with Twitter. HN gives me a lot of useful information about trends in the startup world, in (mostly web) technology, and so on. And it's interesting seeing what people here think about the world news that makes it through.
But my real primary news source is probably my RSS reader. There's a LOT of news out there that I care about which doesn't make it onto HN. A lot of national and world news doesn't make it here, and I like being generally informed about what's going on. I also keep up with local news, and the current events in various scientific subfields which are relevant to my interests, but not the web startup crowd here.
It was, but lately it is not. News are constantly repeating and the target group is the "I do not have money, but I want to do something" group, which is largely dissatisfying as far as opinions go.
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[ 106 ms ] story [ 379 ms ] threadI usually wake up every morning and check HN to make sure that the world isn't ending. If North Korea launches a nuke at South Korea, despite it not being technology news, I'd bet that it makes it to the top of HN within a few minutes.
Recently I also started using an RSS reader that I wrote a while ago (I wrote it, then pretty much forgot about it): http://newsyndicated.com/a/reader it aggregates my favorite feeds (including HN, which is how i found this thread to begin with), and also allows me to submit directly to HN.
I don't think articles about world events are bad -- but the way they're done in most of the media is: country x is doing y to country z. Who cares? Standard international bickering is just that: standard. Relatively few articles go beyond surface phenomena to figure out what's really going on, and those are the ones of interest that, as you point out, will sometimes get voted up on HN.
I think this is a function of how practically useful the information is to me personally.
Conventional news tells me about a lot of things I can't do anything about - I'm pretty much a passive observer. I mean, in terms of politics I get to vote once every year or two? And anything macroeconomic is far outside my control, but might inform me slightly of where people may spend money in the next year or two.
Contrast that with tech news and what gets posted on HN - it's stuff I can either pick up and use (new languages/concepts/scripts/etc.) or that people will actually go to me for advice on. I can take an active roll and have give and take - there are opportunities for interaction there that are manageable.
2./r/worldnews
3./r/politics
4...More Reddit.
5.Twitter
I primarily stick to Slashdot and HN but know full well that the views in the comments of the two sites can sometimes be very detached/different from the rest of society.
While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it is something to be careful of and I'd hate to find the day all of my own opinions fit a site perfectly.
Most accurately, HN is the only online service I use that is mainly a source of news.
Put another way, I come here for the information and discussion, and it just happens to be a news site[1]. Before HN, I went nowhere (online or offline) explicitly to obtain news. After HN, I expect I will, again, simply do without.
[1] Which suits it well, IMO. I always flag old/repeat articles.
For `news' news, the BBC (Radio 4 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/).
-HN
-Drudge Report/Google News
-WSJ (Highest quality, but I like having the paper, which has eluded me recently)
I used to read a lot of Reddit, but everything is too political there. I got sick of seeing 50 wikileak stories make it to the top of every sub-reddit.
World news and traditional media are just depressing. I got jaded at a young age and tend not to follow it (for better and for worse).
Being serious, Hacker News shouldn't try to be a general news site "for hackers" because believing a hacker prototype exists is absurd.
So I gave up on news RSS feeds and just have a tab with HN and a tab with a netvibes account with actual blog feeds from the likes of the eevblog, ben heck show, adafruit industries, hack a day etc.. stuff with unique content being added which I was interested in but won't hit HN every time they posted something.
But my real primary news source is probably my RSS reader. There's a LOT of news out there that I care about which doesn't make it onto HN. A lot of national and world news doesn't make it here, and I like being generally informed about what's going on. I also keep up with local news, and the current events in various scientific subfields which are relevant to my interests, but not the web startup crowd here.
Search engines are great for answers. Reddit and HN are great for questions I didn't think of.
I mostly tend to avoid HN nowadays.