Hacker News Reader

Comment by willismichael | Hacker News Reader

I made a goal to not sign into facebook for the summer of 2017 (I defined summer as all of June, July, and August). In September I signed back in and poked around a bit, only to feel like it was a waste of time and that I didn't have a compelling reason to stay.

Maybe I should try the same experiment with Hacker News and other online forums that I frequent.

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HN is a bit different scenario, most of us are here to discuss business and learn. Being text only also removes the fear of missing out, anxiety shit you get from people showing all the best moments of their lives.

Although I agree with you, I think the grandparent's point has merit. I've had to consciously curb my HN usage recently, and found it to be a struggle. I do think we get real and tangible benefits out of HN, but I guess the same could be said for more traditional social media as well.

I've been looking a bit more at "top of the week" on alt websites, and a bit less at the HN homepage. I think you can get most of it like this; maybe you could try. (e.g. http://www.hntoplinks.com/week or https://news.ycombinator.com/best)

This works well if you are mainly a lurker, but not if you're looking to engage in a conversation while it's hot. For me, the article is often just an excuse for discourse around its themes, which I find much more stimulating.

My personal angle for solving this problem of spending too much time sifting through news/comments is an auto-tagging and summarization platform built in Python with rss feeds as both input and output, sending the output to a self-hosted TTRSS instance. I plan to also store the output in a database with robust query support.

Interesting. I use ttrss as well, do you have a blog-post or anything about how you are doing that?

I'm still in the prototyping phase, and juggling it between work and another side project. I have a decent understanding of the stack I will need. I have feed parsing and HTML/XML stripping in place, currently I'm comparing auto-tagging libraries and seeing if any of them meets all of my needs.

If you're interested in bouncing around ideas and possibly contributing at some point (I plan to open source after the research and legwork is done), let me know.

Nah, I wish I could but I don't have time |:(

I was hoping for something more drop-in ready, but if you do open-source it, I'd be interested. It sounds cool

This is for HN only?

No, the scope will be a few aggregators, news websites, blogs, twitter, and a few others.

> most of us are here to discuss business and learn

HN stopped being about business quite a while ago. It's a general-interest board now. For example, I literally can't recall the last time I saw an article on A/B testing on the front page, nor an article about how best to deal with employee issues from the employer's side. Or an article about how to increase your product's market reach.

Worth doing, I think. Which ones do you miss after a week or three?

I've been doing some cutting back - deleted Twitter off my phone, unsubscribed from several subreddits (some of which I just never clicked on posts from, others which I spent a decent amount of time answering questions on) - and it's been pretty nice.

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