How do you keep up with all the HN?

I don't read HN in reader. Nor do I bother trying to read everything, maybe just 10%. If it's important it'll either stay on the front page for a long time, or it will get reposted sooner or later.

Well, obviously the solution is to just check it 100 times a day! :)

(that's what I do)

I check the "new" section and "popular stories" section once every 3 minutes.

Well, okay, not that often. But close.

I really like Hacker Newsletter. They send me a e-mail with the biggest stories from HN every friday.

http://www.hackernewsletter.com/

I have the RSS feed in Netvibes that I check during the day/evening. I don't read everything, just skim through the titles trying to find what seems interesting to me. And from this I mark as "to read later" every article that I like but is too long to read now or to be sure to come back for comments later.

Then I also skim through the Ask HN/newest posts depending on the workload.

You don't have to follow everything, read everything, just skim through the topic that interest you. Overtime you'll instinctively dismiss a lot of articles just by their title.

And anyway, just go to the "frontpage" of HN to see which threads are really popular at a given moment.