HN Explorer

Tell HN: Hacker News Is a Tool of the Devil

6 points by MichaelCrawford ↗ HN
One reason I read HN so much is that so many of the linked articles and essays are so helpful in my work and in my life, as are the followup discussions here.

However there are so very many of them that were I even to attempt to keep up, I'd never get any sleep, let alone get any work done.

It doesn't really work for me only to read the front page, because I find so many of the less-popular articles helpful. My present work focusses largely on how to write source that makes better use of the data cache. There are many who write about that kind of thing but they tend - unfortunately - to work in security.

If I were to read, let alone reply to all the HN articles that I find rewarding to read, surely I would perish before the year is out.

What do I do?

Help my Y Combinator, you're my only hope!

9 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 35.0 ms ] thread
bitshepherd
As a buddy of mine said to me "you don't keep up, you find 1 or 2 things to follow and stick with it".
MichaelCrawford
I commonly bookmark stuff that looks like it would be worth my while to read later. I even have several bookmark folders so I can classify the topics.

But now I have so very many bookmarks that I really have no hope of reading even most of it, let alone all of it.

S4M
You can turn the "noprocrast" flag on your profile, it will prevent you to visit HN more than a certain number of times per day.
MichaelCrawford
But then I miss all the good stuff.

The problem I've got is finding the stuff that will genuinely help me in my work, and having the time to read it.

I was using noprocrast for a little while, when not getting any sleep was getting to be a real problem for me.

S4M
Maybe limiting yourself to noprocrast and https://news.ycombinator.com/best, so you only get the best articles? Granted it's not sure you will be interested by what gets the most upvoted, and the community can pass on things interesting to you...
yitchelle
One idea I had was to convert the text of the articles I liked to read into a podcast style article, and listen to it at 2x speed. Maybe then I can get through the articles much quicker.
arh68
You're not going anywhere soon, are you? Everything, given enough time, gets reposted. Don't bookmark tangentially useful links, just upvote and check Saved Stories.

/newest page is best page