Hacker News Reader

Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

HN is a killer for my productivity, even though I only try to visit it a couple of times a day. Once in the morning to read the whole front page, and then later in the day to get updates.

I need to somehow massively increase my filtering of which articles I open. I often end up reading 50% of the stories on the front page, plus the comments.

View on HN

My worst productivity killer is getting into an argument early in the morning with someone on HN or a similar site. Even if I stop visiting the site, my mind keeps thinking about the argument for a couple of hours instead of whatever it is supposed to do.

NO IT ISN'T YOU FOOL! ;)

Reminds me of the good old XKCD, "someone is wrong on the internet!" [0]. I also enjoy commenting here and in other places, but lately I've been tapering back, and it's nice waking up without notifications from anyone telling you you're wrong. :)

[0] https://xkcd.com/386/

I wish I didn’t identify completely with this comment.

The two things that help are a) if it isn't too deep, like 4 nested comment threads deep on a three day old thread, then someone may chime in while I'm away and make a similar enough point that when I come back later, I don't anything to say/add, and b) even if no one does say anything, readers aren't dumb. if I say water is wet, but someone responds, calling me an an idiot and that water isn't wet. even if no one chimes in to further respond yes it is and here's why, readers can determine for themselves and decide water is or isn't wet.

“Am I arguing with someone I do not know?”

Asking myself that question when I reply to someone who replied to me helps cut that off.

I also picture that meme-ably smug fellow sitting behind a card table with some provoking statement, and the sentence “Prove me wrong.” No, I don’t owe you my time and energy to try changing a mind not interested in changing, but in attracting attention.

"Arguing on Hacker News isn't real arguing. Prove me wrong." (sips coffee cup)

It's the intermittent reinforcement caused by a useful thread once in a while that contributes to the addiction. You could choose to just check the topics you find useful, using https://histre.com/hn/

For example: https://histre.com/hn/?tags=+programming+python-ai

(disclaimer: mine)

This is exactly what keeps me on this site, and Twitter as well. Sometimes there are long spells of nothing interesting and I start to wonder why I'm even checking, but then something pops up and browsing HN becomes positive in my head again for awhile.

I save time by only reading HN for the comments.

I don't even read the comments, just stream of conscious writing.

I know what you mean. I always go to the comments first as the article might be summarized better there. It's only if I don't get what I need from the comments that I am forced to actually visit the article and read it.

I find it useful to filter to only stories over X points. 500 seems like a good bar for really great stuff. 300 for more casual reading, anything lower starts having a bunch more noise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=300

Thanks, good tip.

I switched to only looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/best and it helped a lot.

I created https://staticnews.pages.dev for myself to solve this exact problem. It only shows the top 30 stories from the previous day with a pruned comment tree. I liked the idea of a sibling comment here about filtering to stories by score, so I might tweak it to do something like that.

I've hit the point where nearly all content on Reddit and HN feels repetitive, outside a few novel articles.

The same trends and style of articles tend to pop up over and over and over. Eventually, most of them just don't resonate. They may be _amazing_ articles, but they'll just be forgotten in my sea of other work if they they're not directly relevant to what I'm working on right now.

I apparently can't link directly to the item, but the "In my profile, what is noprocrast?" on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html may interest you

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