Ask HN: Reading comments on HN

1 point_ud4a1 comment

When you come back to a thread, how can you tell which are the newly posted comments? For example, there is a post with around 180 comments now and yesterday it only had 165. I want to make sure to only read the 15 new comments and not have to go through all 180 and see which one is new! am i missing something here? the order doesn't show the most recent at the top specially if it's a sub-comment.

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I look at the time stamps near each post (for example, your thread-opening post says "12 minutes ago") to tell when they are posted. I have been on Hacker News for 1113 days now, so I've developed varying strategies for reading threads over time. For some of my favorite authors of Hacker News posts, especially some of the persons on the leader board

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

who have high comment karma per comment, I look back to earlier threads by looking for their comments from their user pages, to find recent comments by those authors. Example: comments by mechanical_fish:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mechanical_fish

Other times, I just skim comment threads to see if some new issue has arisen, or especially if a participant has linked to a reliable source, preferably a professionally edited source.

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