HN Explorer

Ask HN: How many websites, apps or notifications do you look at to “catch-up”?

70 points by asim ↗ HN
Hey

I tend to look at 5-7 different websites, apps or notifications like 10 times a day. It's email, WhatsApp, hackernews, twitter, news, RSS feed, etc etc. It's sort of non stop. I was curious if anyone else ends up in this daily checkin hell or if you've found a way to summarise it?

103 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] thread
bookofjoe
I look at the following sites once a day in this order:

Google News

Guardian

Wall Street Journal

Washington Post

New York Times

Charlottesville Daily Progress

Core77

SwissMiss

NEW SAVANNA https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/

Kottke

reddit interesting as fuck

I tweet about 10x/day but never look at my tweetstream of peeps I follow: it's write-only for me

I post to HN about 10x/day and look at the front page 3-5 times/day

I post YouTube videos (Shorts, almost always featuring my cat) about 5-10/day but never watch others' YouTube videos

I post to my blog 3-5 times/day (since 2004)

I check email (and reply promptly) 2-3x/day

I have no RSS feed

I have 0 notifications on any/all devices

I average an hour/day reading a dead tree version of a book

TimCTRL
this site is the biggest culprit for me. My friends even ask "But what is that orange-grey site you are always on?"
tennisflyi
Hacker News and four other folders via RSS amongst many I just browse whenever.
stiiv
Twice a day:

- HN for what's interesting - Reuters (domestic) for what's news - Email for what's personal

I very rarely post. I'm pretty happy with this info diet.

subpixel
I pay for YouTube, have subscriptions to things I care about, and aggressively reject bad recommendations.

It’s not perfect but a scan of YouTube catches me up.

turkeygizzard
I run GPT on a cronjob to summarize my twitter timeline for me. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it catches a lot
lordnacho
What are the mechanics of doing that? How do you tell it what page to open, how far to scroll, what exactly you want to hear about, and how do you plug that into the model and get a result?
turkeygizzard
I shared the code in a comment below (https://github.com/purpleladydragons/ai-sanity) but

- scraping is relatively dumb and straightforward. I use playwright to login and just scroll my timeline for the first 100 tweets. I run the thing every 3 hours right now, but definitely could tweak the number of tweets vs frequency

- I only care about AI tweets really on my timeline, so filtering to that is pretty straightforward just passing it to GPT

- I included the prompts in the link. Definitely far from perfect, but it works well enough. It does surprisingly suck sometimes, like I've noticed that it doesn't always pick up on tweets about LangchainAI despite AI being in the name etc

Semonto
What?

Awesome loving that.

Will keep this workflow in mind when personal gpt models are out.

mrleinad
Care to share the script code?
turkeygizzard
Sure thing - but just FYI I really only care about AI tweets in my timeline, so YMMV if you want it to summarize your timeline in general. I tried a generic "summarize my timeline" approach before and it didn't work well. Filtering to within a certain topic seems to really help

https://github.com/purpleladydragons/ai-sanity

thex10
Daily/several times a day: HN, Twitter, Reddit, text messages (various platforms)

Work days this includes Github, Slack, Asana.

Not daily but a few times a week: E-mail, RSS, Discord

Rarely: Voicemails

yawnxyz
HN, Twitter, sidebar.io, emergentmind.com or Ben's Bites. Trying to not spend too many hours catching up every day...
zorr
No notifications aside from Signal, some Matrix channels of my OSS project and my work Teams.

All the rest including WhatsApp has notifications disabled. Phone is on DnD most of the time.

I occasionally check HN Frontpage,a local news website and a few selected subreddits and that's about it.

ttul
You are a productivity god.
zorr
More like an ADHD-sufferer that barely gets anything done
Brajeshwar
You will like this. ;-)

I made it to re-direct to people, some of whom, gets angry that I don't do unscheduled Voice calls.

https://phone.wtf

swah
I have no idea why phones don't have a "subtle then loud" default mode ? If I'm here, lighting the screen is enough. If I'm at the kitchen, ring, ok... I had this a decade ago on some modded Android and never again..
prepend
For me it’s:

-HN many times a day (probably too much to be healthy as it’s my default “I’ve got 60 seconds to spare”)

-Reddit used to be many times a day but since they turned off compact mode on mobile it’s maybe once a day using old.Reddit.com on my phone and really not like how I have to zoom to read stuff

-gmail as workflow for personal chores and work GitHub/GitLab, maybe 5 times a day

-discord once or twice a day to catch up with friends (this replaced old WhatsApp and Facebook messenger groups going back many years and there was a switch maybe 5 years when everyone stopped commenting on stuff publicly and moved to private rooms)

-I used to use reader and Feedly to bring everything into RSS but don’t have a replacement for it but have a lazy longing to recreate and test out different things. So I’m missing out on specific blogs and might check them every few weeks. I think this is a gap but things do come through to HN.

lddemi
Definitely recommend using Apollo with a little tuning for Reddit on mobile. Clean and clear of all their growth experiments
sarasasa28
I like Apollo but I ended up having to install the official reddit app because most times if you google something on Mobile, it just doesn't open Apollo and tries to install the official one :/
samlader
This problem can be solved using the Apollo Safari extension.

In the Apollo app, click Settings -> General -> Open Reddit Links in Apollo.

waboremo
They have an extension now for that reason, you enable it and automatically opens in Apollo (iirc the catch is to make sure the allow option is set to the reddit domain, not leaving it on "ask"). No more dealing with the purposefully downgraded mobile web page or the official reddit app.
muttled
Just be careful about paying for the (one time fee) Pro Apollo at this point. Reddit just changed their API terms and that app may stop working soon-ish without a monthly subscription.
prepend
Thanks. I tried it, but really don’t want a lot of apps as my phone doesn’t have much storage. And I like having a shared bookmark list for web sites. I appreciate simplicity and one less app means one less update schedule, one less UI, etc etc.

Reddit is exactly why the web was invented so using an app just makes me feel a little sad when one of the big benefits of html was that you wouldn’t need custom clients for everything.

12345hn6789
Reddit is cracking down on 3rd party clients. The experience will be degraded later this year.
1123581321
The big problem with Apollo is it's so good that it makes me spend way more time on reddit. I've installed and removed it many times. I happily paid for Ultra the day he started offering it because I appreciate the work that went into making it that smooth and useful.
ttul
I appreciate that HN has extremely high quality moderation. There is virtually no garbage content. I don’t know how this magic is achieved, but I am grateful.
smotched
there is, if you're in the new section like some of us
blackpill0w
Well, there will always be garbage on any site, the most important thing is not to let nonsense be the main focus of the site. If good threads top the front page most of the time I consider it a win.
smotched
Yup, whats I'm saying is that's because there's a small community that does through new and upvotes good content
prepend
I appreciate this too. Comically, I used it for many years before finally signing up so I could get voting and saving and whatnot.

I think it’s become more precious to me as one of the few remnants of what really excited me about the internet many years ago and is my last active community as all the others have fallen away - slashdot, kuro5hin, plastic, netslaves, fuckedcompany, digg, fark, Reddit and probably a few others I forget.

orev
Why do you need a replacement for Feedly? I’m posting this comment from it right now.
hasbot
Really just two: /r/politics and /r/news.
nickthegreek
Why is this downvoted? You might not think these are good sources, but they are this person's valid answer to the Ask HN question. We shouldn't be using downvotes like that.
suddenclarity
Potentially people reading it as trolling. It made me chuckle.
barakplasma
I cram everything that has an RSS feed into https://kindle4rss.com/ where I can read the feeds daily as an ebook on my kindle (including HN Best). WhatsApp / Telegram cover my "real-time" needs. Most important for me is to have digital wellbeing limits configured for social media.

Recently stumbled upon https://github.com/piqoni/matcha which is a Go RSS reader with a GPT-3 option for summarizing certain RSS feeds.

sogen
How does the Kindle to RSS service work?
barakplasma
it's actually RSS to kindle epub, where each feed/folder becomes it's own chapter, and a cron job bundles it up into a daily auto-delivery.
sogen
Thanks, did some digging myself and just found Calibre too can retrieve and send them as epubs, but this service might be better since it doesn't need to have my computer turned on.
sum1ren
I have this exact problem! About a year ago I built https://fetcher.page which fetches updates for me every 10 minutes or so, filters the ones I've already seen, and then notifies me of new updates.

It's not perfect, but at least I thought reopen 5 websites like 50 times a day.

I rebranded it as a social listening platform a couple months ago, but one can still use it for its initial purpose. Let me know if you find this useful, can grant free access.

chinathrow
Too many.

From the top of my head: HN, Twitter, imgur, LI, WhatsApp.

All via web, no apps, no notfications.

I tried blocking most of the sites via /etc/hosts but what is a sudo password against my FOMO...

bennyp101
I have 4 main sites in Livemarks on my browser:

- BBC News

- Ars Tech

- HN

- (local newspaper for my area)

I don't really checkin - more just click on the dropdown to see if there is anything interesting randomly throughout the day.

My wife looks at a lot of news sites, so I figure she will fill me in on anything else - I have breaking news alerts on for BBC on my phone, but I've found recently it's more just standard news than "breaking"

The only notifications I have on for my phone are BBC breaking news and whatsapp. (And Teams during work hours). Everything else can wait until I want to look.

thdc
Same here, I may browse various places periodically in search of an interesting article/content but I don't aim to be informed of every current event.

I may research topics individually if I want to "catch-up" (learn) about something that someone else has brought to my attention.

acidburnNSA
I love RSS for this. I go to one RSS aggregator that I self-host (trivial, via FreshRSS [1]) that has subscriptions to things like:

Fun: comics, pictures, APOD, some hobby reddit threads (fun fact: reddit presents pretty much anything including search queries as RSS if you append .rss)

Journals: professional journals in my field

Local: Neighborhood blogs, local news, utility company blog, local police crime notes, weather blogs, etc. (all have RSS feeds)

Industry: industry news from various podcasts, institutional blogs, regulator blogs, other subreddits reddits

Global news: RSS feeds from my local big city newspaper

Software news: Cloudflare status reports, release note blogs from my favorite softwares

Work: rss feeds from github on some work repos.

Then I come to HN and Twitter directly as well... (shame)

[1] https://www.freshrss.org/

LonelyWolfe
Out of curiosity... Does anyone use the rss reader in MS Outlook? I know MS is supposed to pack a lot of features to catch as much audience as possible, but are there enough people still using it to this day?
Darmody
RSS in your email client is a bad idea IMO.

I used thunderbird like that a lot but everytime I needed to read or send an email for something productive I'd see that there's a new post somewhere and I'd check it.

rcarmo
It was actually a pretty decent thing if you set up a dedicated account (I used to maintain rss2mail and https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap).

I still have archived posts in MIME format, complete with images, etc. Amazing for archival purposes.

The tricky thing is actually dealing with title-only feeds - these days apps like Reeder will fetch a readable version of posts automatically, and I never got around to implementing that in earnest.

prepend
I used it for a few years to access rss feeds from non-public internet routable jira servers. It was pretty nice to monitor new issues across lots of projects.
ROTMetro
I spent a couple of months trying to find podcasts, but they all seem to consume way to much time for value provided. Can you recommend any high value podcasts that don't just ramble about this weeks business press releases? I don't even care what fields, I used to love just the general consumption of what is going on in the world that the (now) dead internet used to provide.
rcarmo
Oxide and Friends is BY FAR the best tech podcast you could ever listen to. Look it up.
spronket_news
I built a thing that splices HackerNews into an RSS Reader so you can see it all in the same place.

What's neat is it ingests the points from HackerNews, so you can splice the feeds together in a way that preserves the ranking of both feeds.

website: www.spronket.com tutorial video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug4ZqLro0-o

lmk if you have any questions or feature requests

zamnos
If HN's your problem, check out the noprocrast feature in your profile to force yourself to take a break.
ElevenLathe
For personal stuff, just Discord (one server with my hometown friends, another with friends from another city) and email (which in turn contains the latest stuff from various RSS feeds/podcasts via rss2email)."

Work is mostly the same except we use Slack instead of Discord. My work inbox is mostly useless with the number of internal lists I'm on, but I make an effort to scan that for stuff that I might actually need to read or respond to. Then I respond to any red pips in Slack -- I'm in enough channels and threads that I just have to leave most channels "white" most of the time, and the "Unreads" and the "Threads" views are mostly useless.

ISL
Too many.
ttul
Okay, this is embarrassing but I feel the need to contribute as a catharsis.

LEISURE TIME

1. WSJ: the OpEd section is neocon trash, but the journalistic content is well sourced, objective, and interesting.

2. NYTimes: probably the highest quality journalism in the English-speaking world.

3. Economist: slower news cycle, more deeply analytical and intellectual than WSJ or NYT.

4. Bloomberg: nice in-depth stories about things WSJ would not put on their front page. Good data journalism.

5. YouTube: Lex Fridman interviews, machine learning channels, Minecraft hardcore play throughs, and whatever else the algorithm brings me.

6. Podcasts: Economist Intelligence, CBC The World At Six, PBS News Hour, Bloomberg Odd Lots, NYT The Daily, This Week in Virology, Practical AI, Last Week in AI (this is new to me and good)

WORK

1. Slack: managing my team and also connecting with a couple of industry groups.

2. Email: it pours in all day. I have a lot of Gmail filters and some custom scripting to automate things.

3. I’m working on automating every manual process in my job as CEO, even though it’s painful. The investment will be worthwhile.

_boffin_
What processes are you automating?
bilekas
> I’m working on automating every manual process in my job as CEO, even though it’s painful. The investment will be worthwhile.

Not to be funny but aren't you supposed to delegate what you don't need to be spending time doing as CEO?

ttul
Yeah that’s the classic assumption but the reality is Human Resources are expensive and as a tech CEO you really can automate a lot of stuff that perhaps a non-tech CEO would have to delegate to a person. It’s a hidden advantage (curse?) I suppose.
bunabhucan
>OpEd section

Chomsky was asked about what to read and mentioned the financial papers as a great source of foreign news because you can't succeed in business with a fake version of reality. He called out the WSJ by name but said the opinion section was "the funnies."

spronket_news
www.spronket.com/sharedConfig?shared-config=29270980

heh heh heh

(I added most of these into a feed reader and it works pretty well, although it didn't have time to grab all the podcasts)