How do I make sure I never miss anything interesting on hacker news?

Just obsessively visit every five minutes. Like everyone else who should be writing code.

I have an additional monitor dedicated to HN that refreshed on /newest every 30 seconds.

First: Don't worry too much, it's bad for your health.

You can read some filtered versions like:

Best (less gravity): https://news.ycombinator.com/best

100points (filtered): https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100

Last: As a public service, please check Newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest from time to time to pick interesting stories before they disappear unnoticed. It's nice to be the first to upvote a story and see it later in the front page.

Subscribe to the Hacker News Newsletter

http://www.hackernewsletter.com/

Read https://lobste.rs ;-)

(P.S.: Somebody please invite me to that site.)

If you use the Chrome browser or Android/iOS, install 'Pushbullet'(https://www.pushbullet.com/) and subscribe to Hacker news channel in it.

Pushbullet will send you a notification whenever an article on Hacker news gets more than 500 upvotes. Generally, such articles are interesting.

I like cperciva's daily top hacker news posts:

http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

I've noticed that I missed some great articles, even though I visit Hacker News every couple of hours or so.

ohhh

Change your definition of "anything interesting" to stories about Paris Hilton's dead dog. If the definition includes much of anything technical, it's a lost cause.

Even if you could read all of HN, you'd still miss interesting stuff because everything interesting doesn't make it to HN. That's why people can submit stories.