Somewhat related: I have been using the HN bot on Telegram. That way I could even catch a glimpse of wildly popular stories that have been flagged of the site :-)
Basically, people who are smarter than me usually get to tell me why the journalist is wrong.
I read a lot of articles about AI in medicine, pretty much anything I can get my hands on. I also read generic tech articles related to everything from Nintendo Switch, Tesla, Brain-Computer interfaces, and other popular media articles.
-How many articles do you read each day? Likely 10+. These aren't high-brow articles, just random blog posts and pop culture tech. I read about 2-3 research abstracts per day in medicine and maybe skim the text of 1-2 articles.
-They're usually related to your job or to some side projects? Usually they are related to my interest in medicine or technology. Sometimes they are related to my job (I work as a part-time developer / data scientist). I also run a small website (https://www.cronote.com). I encountered a number of issues with time-zone switching and the daylight savings change on March 12th. Read about 20 articles having to do with correctly implementing timezones in Python.
-Do you usually read about a variety of topics or it's focused in 2 or 3 topics only? Topics cover a vast span of medicine and computer science. I enjoy computer science more than medicine so it's a 20:80 split.
-Do you usually read during some time of the day or it's usually random? I read whenever I'm behind my computer, usually alternating between work and browsing the Internet. This amounts to ~5 hours per day.
The subject doesn't count. I don't read the new stories though, otherwhise it would be a bigger timesink ;-) .
Always interested in hearing other people's thoughts, HN has some good reasoning in comments. I prefer it over watching the daily news in the noon :)
I save interesting stories on my side project http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/, which can also show HN comments when adding the tag: commentsbyhackernews ( it's currently a bookmarking service for myselve mostly, but it can do a lot more under the hood)
Eg. : http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/Item/Details?id=49b1ed7e-5d35...
Edit: Example feature, add a article to wsj.com ( paywalled) and it will automaticly create a link through facebook. So you can read it ( i hate paywalled articles)
I usually clear my pocket reading list each weekend, even if there was something I dint finish reading (used to happen a lot), I just flush it out because that helps me determine my bandwidth for reading over a fixed time period.
Though mostly I am interested in comments section of tech/startups related topics, I also use feedly's reader count to decide whether to read or not articles on other topics.
If it is the former, I middle-click 3-4 articles a day, and if they are also juicy topics, I middle-click the comments links as well.
If it is the latter, I read tons of articles a day (avg 20), some related to tech, but mostly not. I read in the morning, at lunch (very productive time to read), and after dinner.
Offline: I have subscriptions to dead-tree versions of Time, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Affairs. I also have 4-5 books on the go at any given time, mostly nonfiction. I go through phases, and my last major one was statistics and category theory.
Online: Slashdot, Reddit, HN, Marginal Revolution, John D Cook, Farnam Street, Quora, and a bunch of data science related blogs. I also read articles on the getpocket.com recommended list, and I find myself drawn to reading articles on The Atlantic.
I use https://bazqux.com as a RSS reader to keep up with the stuff I actually want to follow. Some gaming sites, LWN, EFF's deeplinks and the blogs of various products my company or I use.
(BTW, I highly recommend bazqux. UI very close to Google Reader, very cheap and with a lifetime subscription option)
If there's something I want to read later I send it to Pocket which my ereader supports, so I can read them on my nice portable eink device whenever I have a spare moment stuck in a waiting room or on a bus or whatever.
According to my reading habits[1] I've averaged reading 690 articles that way in each of the last two years.
In order to track my article reading habits, plus follow up on articles in related forums such as Hacker News after I’d read them and such, so I wrote a litte PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket API to help me manage all that.
Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.
also fwiw this is by nature a broken census since the people that will click this link are already gonna be the people that like the comment threads (since it's only a comment thread) and the people that respond are the people that post comments. so basically your feedback about how people behave based on comments is already going to select down to people that post comments on HN, which is likely a single-digit percentage of people that visit HN. asking users how they use a website on that website will always be subject to extreme sampling bias. so... this is fun by all means but let's not look too far into it ;)
I also try to read a book or article on something new I want to learn. My most recent book I started reading is called the Mom Test. Its about doing customer development, and it touches on the subject of what type of questions you should be asking.
If maybe I'm too busy and can't read HN one night, what I do is read the next day starting from "?p=10", if I miss two days I start from "?p=15" and so on, though that query has a varying limit, going after the limit gives no results, in the past I've gotten a successful request til "?p=25" but today it seems the limit is just "?p=10", most times I've seen the "?p=15" working.
I don't want to miss new tools or discussions so I always try to keep a maximum of 2 days of not reading HN.
0 - 1 Articles
100+ Comments on 20 - 25 articles.
I use the comments as a curation tool, to decide if the article is really worth reading, or click-bait. Sometimes the comments also do a TL;DR; summary of the original article, so that saves me time (esp. on rambling articles that write 1000 words to prove a couple of points or make a statement / take a stance on something).
> They're usually related to your job or to some side projects?
Job, side-project and technology related. I'm here only for the comments as I see gems from software industry veterans and experts whose knowledge on various tech topics far exceeds mine.
> Do you usually read about a variety of topics or it's focused in 2 or 3 topics only?
Usually 2 to 3 - I mostly come here for "Show HN", "Ask HN" and technology related announcements / findings. I come here to find inspiration and motivation to ship my side-projects.
> Do you usually read during some time of the day or it's usually random?
Random, throughout the day. It's gone up more ever since I gave up reading mainstream news after the elections. ( Nov 10th 2016 to be precise). I try to avoid political news on HN also. The mods have done a great job of flagging and removing them, so I am very grateful for that.
Related Reading: http://joel.is/the-power-of-ignoring-mainstream-news/
P.S. I also use https://hckrnews.com/ It loads super fast , has a very clean pleasing UI and helps me quickly scan the top stories on HN and decide which ones to come and peruse.
I've been on a reading diet for the last few weeks, I plan to kick back into high gear soon, with a project I'm building to ingest all my reading materials and present them to me in bite-sized formats. I used to be satisfied with Pocket, but my reading workload is too heavy to comfortably shoulder, so I need my own power tools.
What would be great is if I could break books up by chapter and feed them into the system, so that way they don't feel so heavy. I'll find a way to do that eventually, probably based on some ugly hack of converting Kindle books to EPUB or something ungodly like that.
If it starts to look like something better than a shop piece, I'll definitely put it out there.
Depending on my energy and/or how long my build is taking, sometimes I just skim articles headings and throw them to Pocket. Then when I have medium energy and more time, I open up my Pocket, filter aggressively, and read the rest. Really long articles get tagged with #someday and go to the weekend.
I've been trying to focus on C & C++ related articles, as that's what I want to and will be doing more. But I also find articles about Functional Programming very interesting.
I couldn't care less about start-ups or the culture. I can't even open most policy or political posts now because it's just a punch to the gut every day. I read less than 1 comment on average per article.
Probably split equally between tech things I think might be helpful ("Python, Bash, SQL how tos" etc.) and non-tech things which are novel.
Like "Guy frozen in ice brought back to life after 600 years" (which wasn't a real article but if it had been you bet I would have read it).
I avoid most article from major news source (I keep up with the news anyway) and most Medium stories and anything with a social justice type slant (nothing wrong with that, it's just not of interest and not why I'm here). Also skip most "Our startup is doing XX or shutting down or whatever".
Skim comments for many more articles (~20) and if they look interesting read more in depth.
As to the type of article, I'm all over the place. Sometimes it's work related, sometimes a side project, sometimes just something I've got a passing interest in.
https://www.amazon.com/Mikhail-Margarita-Novel-Julie-Himes/d...
Grab a copy at your local indie bookstore!
During the workday, I check various sources of information about once an hour, unless I'm working on something that requires either research or flow.
I run an RSS collector to manage repeating sources of information and categorize them for me. I add sources as I come across them and clean it out about once every six months.
Everything I read during the workday is related to work, but that's about fifteen different topics.
I know it should actually be easier - but it never seems to work that way.
You might see something about my progress on HN in a few years :)
That's why I'm in the diet of not skimming through instead if I start one article I finish no matter how boring it is. But it's very hard I'm old surfer and suffering for deep concentration..
On average I read 2-3 articles fully but it also depends what's it on. On breaks I always try to read top 10 or 15 and sometimes comment. I find this community and commentators quite a pleasure to read because many of us posses something unique or at least it seems so.
I read about 15 articles on average and all comments to about 10 of them and scan some comments for the rest. My reading is batched around morning, lunch, and evening. I download few articles to Pocket for offline readin. During subway commute.
For the others, I would usually skim through the article and also read the comments.
I am finding that there's a lot of value reading the comments, as some folks have that deep seated knowledge, as well as providing relevant links that will help you further grasp what's on the article.
I still have a list of ~40 articles to clear out...
Either about iOS development, design or (lately) learning thai language-material.
2) Usually I open the interested topics in other tabs and have a quick scan on the passage/ website
3) If that's interesting, I will add it to my reading list
4) I go over the reading list after dinner when I have free time
Fun stuff : xkcd and the like, 4 sites
News: Chinese edition NYT and the like, 11 sites
Technical: Hacker News, Venture Beat, ARS Technica, etc. 12 sites
Daily I maybe read / peruse ~100 articles out of what is summarized in the RSS feeds. Meaning, I see an article headline, it interests me enough to actually click to open the underlying website article. Maybe half of what I open I spend 10 seconds looking at only to immediately close. Half of what remains gets a speed read scan through. Maybe 5-10 articles a day get a thorough slow read. I try not to comment as much as humanly possible. I need to do other stuff in life youknowwhatimean....