
Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits - pmcpinto
I think it would be interesting to talk about our reading habits, so here there are some questions related with this topic:
- How many articles do you read each day?
- They&#x27;re usually related to your job or to some side projects? - Do you usually read about a variety of topics or it&#x27;s focused in 2 or 3 topics only? 
- Do you usually read during some time of the day or it&#x27;s usually random?
======
WA
I read 3-5 articles per day, but oftentimes, I read the comments of 20-30
articles without clicking on the actual article. Recent example: Article about
Angular 4.0 being released. I don't care about the article, but I do care
about the comments of the JS folks.

~~~
Kiro
Same and I've thought about this a lot. I so often only read the comments
without reading the actual article. Surely the fact that so many people do
this must mean there's an untapped opportunity somewhere?

~~~
jaySmith
Yeah, it would be cool if someone made a bot to extract a summary from the
article and post it as a comment to help those who have not read the article.

~~~
reitanqild
Someone did. Or faked one. IIRC it was active for a few days but was told in
clear terms to stop or be banned.

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 :-)

~~~
detaro
A TL;DR service could maybe be made as a browser extension that pulls it from
some external source instead. Not visible for those that don't want it, and
also removes the problem from having to hunt for the TL;DR comment when there
are many replies.

------
aabajian
I'm surprised there are no comments on your question...so let me be the first.
I'm a medical student about to start residency. I also have a master's degree
in computer science.

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](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.

------
NicoJuicy
I read random when i'm stuck on something or have to rethink on things. Doing
something else for 5 minutes let's me suddenly think about it differently.

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/](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...](http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/Item/Details?id=49b1ed7e-5d35-4bb0-b0fb-44e837eab7f5)

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)

------
anpat
I have subscribed to RSS feed on feedly where I skim through the list when I
am idle/on the road/catching a smoking break and If I find something
interesting save the link to pocket.

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.

------
wenc
I'm not sure if the question is about reading habits on HN, or the reading
habits of the HN demographic.

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.

~~~
v3gas
What data science blogs?

~~~
wenc
Simply Statistics, Andrew Gelman, DataTau, Win-Vector, StatsBlogs (an
aggregator)

~~~
v3gas
Cool, thanks!

------
ybrah
I read the comments before I read the articles, if at al

------
scrollaway
Most of my reading is off HN/Reddit, whatever catches my eye and looks
interesting which can be up to 10 articles in a day, but often enough 0-1.

I use [https://bazqux.com](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)

~~~
andai
What is a deeplink?

~~~
discreditable
Deeplinks is an EFF blog.
[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks)

------
anotherevan
I do a lot of my news reading via RSS feeds to Newsblur. One of those RSS
feeds is from hnapp.com which generates an RSS feed of Hacker News submissions
with a score over 50 or more than 30 comments.

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.

[1]
[http://www.michevan.id.au/tag/books/](http://www.michevan.id.au/tag/books/)

------
zemo
check every weekday, but only click and read one, maybe two articles each day.
I always read comments in the articles about Go to see the Haskell programmers
having tantrums. I always read comments in the articles about JavaScript to
see the Go programmers having tantrums. I don't ever read anything about
politics from HN because people that read HN are not a representative sample
of the real world; HN isn't exactly a wellspring of political diversity. I
basically only look for announcements and stories about catastrophic failures
in production systems.

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 ;)

------
tmaly
I subscribe to some newsletters that aggregate weekly articles around some
category or topic. This is a lot easier for me as I do not have to continually
scan sources for new articles.

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.

------
hamstercat
I read about 10 articles per day, filtering through the top 10 to find the
ones that I could be interested in. I really like the comment section, as it's
a lot more civilized than other online community, and they usually add another
perspective to the post. I actually make it a point not to read comment on
most articles/blog other than HN because it tends to be filled with trolls.

------
Apaec
I read HN in this way I go to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=5](https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=5),
then
[https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=4](https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=4),
till "/news" which is the same as "?p=1". I do that every night before
bedtime.

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.

------
justboxing
> How many articles do you read each day?

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/](http://joel.is/the-power-of-ignoring-mainstream-news/)

P.S. I also use [https://hckrnews.com/](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.

------
vinceguidry
I read mostly geopolitical articles and whatever TheBrowser kicks up to me. I
used to read a lot of books, but these days a book has to be really attractive
for me to get over the usual low signal to noise ratio that books offer.

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.

~~~
fao_
Will you eventually open source these power tools? :)

~~~
vinceguidry
I could, but it's all very custom work. The world doesn't need my xpath to
slice up Stratfor or RubyWeekly emails. These small tools need a bigger
toolbox to live in, someone needs to build that toolbox. I could open-source
my toolbox, but it's not really anything special either, just a dumb interface
to a dumb database, and a dumb API layer on top of it.

If it starts to look like something better than a shop piece, I'll definitely
put it out there.

------
valbaca
I read about 8 articles a day, mostly from HN and Lifehacker.com, usually just
Productivity "Junk Food" Articles

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.

------
segmondy
20-50. :-( related to work, related to Tech, personal interests, news
(politics, world, finance)

------
mythrwy
3-4 articles per day.

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.

------
importantbrian
I actually read 3-5. I read the comments on another 3-5 without reading the
article. Like WA said above. Sometimes I care more about the comments than the
original article. I also find that if I'm not totally sure if an article is
worth my time or not there are usually a couple of high-quality comments that
will let me know if I should. I really love HN for that. I will also usually
bookmark 10-20 articles with the intention of coming back to read them later,
but I almost never do.

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.

------
dhimes
I tend to read a couple of scholarly-type articles a week and a bunch of
blog/tech sites as interesting things come up. That said, I've been reading a
lot of literary fiction lately as I've been spending time in that circle
because my wife just launched her first novel (and it's really quite
brilliant, actually).

[https://www.amazon.com/Mikhail-Margarita-Novel-Julie-
Himes/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Mikhail-Margarita-Novel-Julie-
Himes/dp/1609453751/)

Grab a copy at your local indie bookstore!

------
dsr_
I read for pleasure during my commute. (Days when I work at home are a little
more stressful because I don't get that enforced downtime.)

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.

------
kriro
I'd be interested in hearing if people share my habit of always reading 3ish
nonfiction books in parallel. I have a pretty hard time sticking to one. It's
usually a programming or related book, some science book and some pop-science
or selfhelp or marketing related stuff (or something like outdoor living,
fishing etc.). And usually fiction during the commute. Oftentimes I'll also
have random collections of stuff (Lovecraft collection) or comic books lying
around for a "quick read".

~~~
arethuza
I tend to be listening to at least one audiobook, reading at least one book on
Kindle and dipping into a few old favourite physical books.

~~~
ludovicianul
Forgot the audiobook I listen while driving.

~~~
arethuza
The main problem I have with audiobooks (and to a lesser extent books on the
Kindle) is the ease of dipping in and finding a good bit to read again.

I _know_ it should actually be easier - but it never seems to work that way.

~~~
andai
One of the reasons I am teaching myself to read spectrograms is so that I can
skim through audio.

You might see something about my progress on HN in a few years :)

------
mertnesvat
I read 2 to 5 articles a day. But this reading is not comprehensive instead
it's like looking the important points, although skimming is the key of
surfing but recently I've discovered that it shortens attention span so it
seems theres a big effect to changing other habits too.

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..

------
prattbhatt
I skim Hacker News couple of times a day. I prefer reading books (on Kindle),
~30 mins to 1 hour every night before sleep and 20-30 mins every morning after
waking up.

------
Proof
I'm a Mathematics major so I make a point of reading all maths related
articles and if I have something to contribute then definitely comment.

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.

------
mynegation
My anecdata: I don't read much on internet anymore aside from what's linked on
HN and what I research for a specific topic. Plus a bit of news at CNN and a
bit of Producthunt.

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.

------
AngeloAnolin
Usually would read topics that are of interest to me (i.e. technology,
software development, frameworks, etc.).

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.

------
solracanobra
Usually if I find an article that I'd like to read, I skim it and then decide
if I want to actually sit down and read it word for word, and if so I save it
for the weekend. Usually skim through a couple articles daily, and they go all
over ranging from tech to non related tech stuff.

------
Grangar
I always open the article and comments in separate tabs. I then skim the
article if it's very short, if it's long-form I read the comments first. If
the comments indicate it's worth reading I save it in my favorites for later.

I still have a list of ~40 articles to clear out...

------
pagade
Skim 5 to 10 articles daily. Interesting ones keep accumulating browser tabs
till weekend. Mostly tech, personal interest. Have allocated time for cleaning
up all the tabs on weekend. For long reads, I use TextAloud to quickly convert
to audio and listen with faster speed.

------
0xCMP
A fun game to play with a co-worker is "what articles would you click on the
homepage?" I just did that yesterday. My co-worker knew every link I'd opened
(without looking at my screen) and I couldn't figure out most of his.

------
penetrarthur
95% of the time I only read comments. People usually insert quotes from the
article and discuss them right away. And it is much more valuable to read
comments because there are a lot of smart people commenting who work in
related fields.

------
wingerlang
Mostly comments on websites. Even when I read something for learning
(books/articles/blog posts) I tend to skim it at best. My attention span is
getting fairly low.

Either about iOS development, design or (lately) learning thai language-
material.

------
david90
1) I read HM during break time. For like 5-10 minutes.

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

------
vikas0380
I read hacker news daily when ever i am free, hacker news is the next thing i
do. Apart from this i have subscribed to hacker news 500 Pushbullet channel.
When ever any news hits 500, i get notification on my phone or chrome.

------
jrs235
I read a handful of articles a day covering several disciplines. I usually am
reading two or three books at a time. Reading a few chapters of each, setting
it down and round robining through threw them.

------
RamenJunkie_
I have the RSS feed in my reader, I skim through he headlines with it mixed in
among other technology RSS feeds, I read maybe 2-3 interesting topics, mostly
in the morning while eating breakfast.

------
Apreche
I use the RSS feed with Feedly. I only read things about actual technology
relevant to me, and skip everything about silicon valley startup nonsense.

------
jerry40
I use The Old Reader as a news aggregator and my own emacs mode to read it via
API. In fact I read HN in emacs :) At least when I'm home.

------
Alduras
I read 3-5 articles on the average, mostly very different topics to enlarge my
knowledge and get to know Sites that I did not know before!

------
davidiach
I read about 20-40 articles per day, mostly tech or business related.
Generally speaking, I find them on HN, Facebook, Twitter.

------
jedicoffee
I read 10-20 articles a day, don't really read too many comments.

------
sangupta
Skim through via my RSS reader, and read around 10-20 articles a day.

------
rabboRubble
I read, or peruse, too much. You can thank Digg RSS Reader...

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....

------
anigbrowl
~10, no, variety, randomly.

------
kppiskingpp
I read most things and it makes me happy but when I read a bunch of whiny
white men on Hacker News I feel sad. ;(

~~~
andai
Such is life.

