
Ask HN: How do you consume Hacker News? - volare
Although I enjoy reading hacker news, I haven't found a satisfying interface for doing so.  I have major gripes with both the website interface and the RSS feed.<p>Why I dislike the website interface:<p>--Front page stories are not in chronological order (I can't keep track of which stories I've already read)<p>--Stories are limited to the latest 210 (if I don't visit frequently, I can't see which stories I've missed)<p>--Links to comments are too small and not not in a consistent location horizontally (I almost always want to read the discussion before I click through to the external site)<p>--I would also like to be able to filter stores that are below a certain points threshold.<p>Why I dislike using the RSS feed:<p>--Does not show the number of points or the number of comments (crucial for selecting what to read)<p>I'm not just trying to be a hater; I think these things significantly harm my experience here.<p>So, am I just ignorant of better ways to consume HN?  Do these things not annoy you too?
======
RevRal
No matter what, you'll always miss good stuff.

For example, most of HN missed the great article by unalone:
<http://journal.rinich.com/post/249408496/god> . Both of the submissions on
the article were flagged, killed.

I've been reading here for a very long time, but only recently signed up. I've
always tried to ignore the amount of points a submission has. Instead:

1\. Get to know the websites that consistently have good articles.

2\. Find the users who submit good stuff. Click on people's profiles, and look
at their karma.

3\. Learn to recognize link bait. A lot of users try to use titles that aren't
link bait.

4\. When a submission looks questionable, click the user profile and see if
they have good cred. Look at how long they've been a user and if they have
good karma. If the user seems to have good cred, then bite the bullet and
check out their submission as it is probably worthwhile.

5\. Start up-voting submissions that you like. Get yourself involved.

You'll get better at scanning through the submissions and getting to the good
stuff quickly.

~~~
araneae
I can see why it was killed. What a load of drivel...

I mean, seriously, who ends a blog post with "[w]e’re in this together"?

~~~
unalone
I do. Since that post went up, I've received quite a few emails from people
thanking me for that drivel, too. So I guess it's not drivel after all?

If my goal was to write simplistic, overemoting drivel, I'd have namedropped
Bukowski instead of Joyce.

~~~
araneae
No, your goal was to sound smart. It's cliche... just like saying "we're all
in this together."

I'll break your essay down for you.

A) A section in which you say you hate small talk. You use this fact to claim
that you are deep, because small talk is shallow.

B) A section in which you talk about your love of James Joyce, an author that
pretty much no one can read, in order to sound smart.

C) A section in which you talk about how lonely you are, because you're emo.
You are very sad and lonely because the girls you date like different music
than you.

D) The conclusion, in which you try but fail to connect the fact that you are
a) deep, b) smart, and c) lonely, by saying that we're all in this together.
_wipes away a tear_

If this sounds harsh, I've spent all day grading essays, so I'm out of
tolerance for bullshit.

~~~
unalone
You don't sound harsh. You sound like any other punkass with a short patience.

Take five seconds and look at anything else I've done. It's not like I'm
coming out of nowhere and saying these things. I'm the Hacker News presence
that writes essay responses to everything. It's not that I dislike people who
small talk, it's that — honestly — when I talk these minute little essays
shoot out. The people I hang out with tend to be people who talk about things
comprehensively. It's not particularly deep. If anything, it's an inherently
nerdy trait. But it's who I am.

My love for Joyce is similarly something that I talk about a lot. He was the
first major artist I fell in love with. Beckett was probably the second.
Understand that I came across Joyce and Beckett before I developed a diverse
taste in movies/music/art, and so they stick out in my mind in a way other
things don't.

But Joyce is _utterly_ readable, if you know how to read him. I read Ulysses
to thirteen-year-olds. They were stitching up. People that call Joyce
unreadable are people who never learned to hear an author's voice in their
head. Anybody with half an ear for tone can translate him into the hilarious
Irish comic that he is. I mean, his hero masturbates and fantasizes about sex!
It's a Seth Rogen comedy in the making.

I thought that I clarified the whole "lonely existence" thing in my writing.
In fact, I'm _sure_ I did, because you're the first person to complain about
that. The issue's not that I'm lonely, because I'm _not_ lonely. The issue's
that there's an inherent disconnect between the secular God I worship and the
various things other people worship. My idea of a good time is different from
a lot of other people's.

I don't need to brag about the girls I date. The fact that I write about girls
is because that happens to be a part of my life, as much as Joyce is. So I'm
not allowed to write about smart people things or social people things? What
am I allowed to write about? Lisp?

I wrote what I did for other people, not for me. Last year I was in a shitty
place; this year I'm in an awesome place and life is great. It's just that I
happen to have an audience of hundreds of people, and I do my best to follow
them when I have free time, and a good part of my audience is
alienated/isolated/heartbroken/generally human, and I thought I had some ideas
that might help them. I wrote that article, a lot of people loved it, and when
it got posted to Hacker News it got a more fiercely emotional response than
anything else I've posted here. I didn't post it, and I wasn't expecting HN of
all places to react the way they did. It was not an article I wrote for Hacker
News. But I'm glad that people found it and got some sort of strength out of
it.

If this sounds harsh, it's because you remind me of certain former professors
of mine who were vain assholes and who killed my former ambition to become a
teacher. Let's not mince words: I pity your students students if you're always
such a nagging fucker.

~~~
randallsquared
_People that call Joyce unreadable are people who never learned to hear an
author's voice in their head._

I believe it's generally thought that people learn to read at _first_ by
sounding out the author's words in their head, and as they become more
proficient at reading, learn _not_ to do that.

~~~
unalone
That's subvocalization. But you can read without subvocalizing and still
figure out tone as you read.

The problem I had reading Ulysses when I tried at fifteen was the opposite. I
was so bent on reading Ulysses as Serious Great Literature that I couldn't
read it as something amusing. So I got to the weirder parts of the book and
concluded, as a lot of people unfortunately do, that it was pretentious crap.
It's funny how pretentious masturbation sounds in a book when you don't let
yourself think it's funny.

There's another passage in particular that has the same effect on people.
Leopold Bloom looks at the sky and calls it "the grey sunken cunt of the
world". A lot of people jump on that passage and accuse Joyce of gratuitous
swearing for shock value and assume he's being a bitter, wordy arse; once you
convince yourself to read the passage as being thought by a cranky Irishman,
it suddenly becomes hilarious.

~~~
araneae
So you're saying...

The set of all people that think Joyce is pretentious __is the same as __the
set of all people that can't imagine the author speak in an Irish accent.

 _elaborated to emphasize absurdity_

~~~
unalone
No. I'm saying there are two ways to call the sky a sunken grey cunt. The
first is to strive earnestly to describe the sky in just the right way to
_define_ the sky. When you decide the proper thing to call the sky is a cunt,
then you might be accused of a _bit_ of pretension, and bad taste.

The second way to call the sky a cunt is to be a grumpy Irishman in the
morning who calls the sky a cunt whimsically, if annoyed. It's the difference
between the clean-shaven trendy beret-wearing guy who pronounces "cunt" with
much deliberation, and the long-nosed family man who says cunt like a curse.

They're both saying the same words, but the one guy's being an ass, and the
second guy is hilarious. I'm saying that the people that think Joyce is
pretentious are the people who haven't figured out he's hilarious.

You can do the same to any comedian, incidentally. Take George Carlin's rant
on reducing the ten commandments to two, remove his inflection, focus on the
words, and that could _easily_ be some dick's attempting a hoity-toity
statement about religion with no humor whatsoever. Steven Wright talking about
the museum that has all the heads and arms from all the other statues can be
less of a joke and more of a self-involved critique on the nature of art and
decay. But it's not, because it's Steven Wright telling a joke, and in _his_
case we know to laugh.

I _am_ saying that I find it irritating when people take rational statements
and attempt to make them absurd.

------
anatoly
I don't consume HN at all.

I read HN through the website. The things you mention are a little annoying,
but not something that worries me a lot.

------
ptn
_\--Front page stories are not in chronological order (I can't keep track of
which stories I've already read)_

That's kind of the point. Instead of seeing a bunch of stories, you see them
ordered by the opinion of users. Visited links are painted in a different
color, use that to keep track.

~~~
mattmaroon
Unless you automatically clear your history, as I do, when your browser
closes.

~~~
randallsquared
Your browser history is one of the best tools you have for making your web
experience better, not just here, but on every site. It's hard for me to
imagine any otherwise-tolerable situation in which I'd want to cut off my
browser history every time I pause for a bit.

~~~
lunchbox
Here's one problem with browser history: <http://startpanic.com/>

~~~
randallsquared
I don't view that as a problem -- at least, as a problem that can be solved
more than very temporarily.

We used to have (at least) three domains: public, private, and secret. The
private domain was clearly under attack by networks and data processing
decades ago, but it was thought that laws and care could combat it
successfully. Around the early to middle 1990s, it became clear that this
wasn't working, and that ordinary progress was going to push private things
into the public sphere. Some people (the cypherpunks) thought that the way to
resolve this was to move private things into the secret sphere, via public key
crypto. That could have worked for a while, but it eventually would have
failed in the same way that laws and "just be careful" were already failing,
and it didn't matter, in any case, since the vast majority of people never
bought into the need.

Today, I believe that it's clear that virtually everything now in the private
domain will soon become public, and that there's not really anything that can
be done about it. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the problems associated
with losing privacy to the public are less severe than the problems of losing
what should be public to the secret, insofar as it's possible.

So, basically, clearing your browser history is like plugging a hole in a
sieve: the only way to actually stop the leakage is to wall yourself off from
the world, a cure worse than the disease. Instead, I think we should focus on
keeping secret things that need to be secret, and abandon the merely private
to the public sphere. With the increasing proliferation of wireless cameras
and microphones, and software that the vast majority of users do not
understand, privacy is a lost cause.

Begin acting now as though everything you do is public -- it's the only safe
thing to do.

------
edw519
Hey volare, I can see how it can easily happen, but please don't let any of
these things confuse you:

    
    
      - the links to current hacker related content
      - a fairly sophisiticated way to present those links in an "optimal" manner
      - discussion like you'll find nowhere else
      - content from which to learn better hacking
      - content from which to learn better business skills
      - friendships & business contacts tough to make other places
      - people who put in a lot of TLC to maintain all of the above
    

Hacker News is _not_ a destination. It is an excellent resource to _augment_
the main thing that you should be doing.

Make no mistake about it, this is supposed to be a community of doers, not
lookers.

You have made some astute observations and provided interesting feedback, but
I'm concerned that you're missing the point...

If you notice so much about Hacker News that needs refining, then you're
probably paying too much attention. Come here for your break then leave and
put that energy of yours where it belongs, on your own project.

This site, although not ideal, is pretty good. Let's all stop worrying about
what we _might_ be missing here and focus on what we _are_ missing with our
own sites.

~~~
volare
_Hacker News is not a destination. It is an excellent resource ..._

Sure, but I want a better resource. I'm not looking to spend more time here.
I'm looking to see all of the good content while spending less time here.

------
kijun
Try using hn-filter, a feed that I made last week.

For example, [http://hn-
filter.heroku.com/rss?cmt_gte=2&point_gte=5...](http://hn-
filter.heroku.com/rss?cmt_gte=2&point_gte=5&limit=10) gives you 10 HN articles
with more than 1 comment and 4 points in RSS format.

It also gives you the number of comments and points.

The source is at <http://github.com/kijun/hn-filter>

Hope it helps.

------
reidab
I use Nirmal Patel's neat republishing of the RSS feed that uses Readability
to extract content from target links.

<http://www.nirmalpatel.com/hacks/hnrss.html>

~~~
skorgu
Wow, this is exactly what I never thought to wish for.

~~~
cschep
everything you never you always wanted.

------
petercooper
I visit the site every day or so, scan the front page for interesting things,
then read those. I definitely don't care for seeing every single article. It's
a river, I take a dip.

I don't care about "missing" anything because new stuff is always coming
along. The "missing" attitude leads to information overload. E-mail's the only
thing I don't want to miss, not inane news on the net.

~~~
volare
I don't want to read every article either. But if there was a story last week
that got 300+ points and is no longer on the website, I want to be able to
find it.

~~~
s-phi-nl
You can do that using the best list at <http://news.ycombinator.com/best>.
This is the best recent stories, for some value of recent (I believe 10 days).

------
Xichekolas
Like this:

<http://andrewfarmer.name/screenshot.png>

Using this:

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039>

Not sure it really addresses any of your issues though. Just know that it
wouldn't be hard to implement some of your ideas with a GM script.

~~~
diN0bot
i like your script. Ask HN are the best part of HN.

------
DanielBMarkham
Shameless plug time: I've got a temp site up that pulls current articles from
all the major tech sites and gives you 1) more stories, 2) movement in comment
count, votes, and rankings across each site, and 3) emphasis on fast-moving
stories at the top.

<http://project-management-methodologies.net>

I could add sorting, but it's only a lark right now. (I set it up to gather
test data for another app I'm writing.) But if anybody wants sorting by time,
let me know.

That's currently the way I consume HN. I still visit the comments feed and
branch off from there occasionally, but not as often as I used to. I find it
more interesting to watch relative movement of stories (sinking or rising?)
and movement of stories across the major boards.

------
benwr
I use Google Reader, but you're right. There isn't enough information in the
RSS feed to make it really enjoyable to use. You have to judge what you want
to read based solely on the title. One thing that helps, for firefox users at
least, is the "Better GReader" extension. It lets you open the link in the
article header in an iframe, instead of a new window/tab. This makes perusal
of the actual article much faster.

One other useful feature for the RSS feed (beyond the current rank) might be
the top comments on an article, instead of just a link to the comments page.

~~~
tinio
I've been using an RSS feed I created for a while now which also "tries" to
include a summary of the article.

feed://ynewsrss.appspot.com/

It's not perfect, but it helps out quite a bit in getting a little bit more
context before deciding to click through a link.

------
thaumaturgy
I consume HN as a light snack between projects throughout the day.

I'm not too bothered by it if I miss something.

~~~
Concours
that's almost how I also do it, but reading the question above, I've tried to
work out a solution and set a Hacker news subcategory here:
<http://bit.ly/4WxNeI> on mcsquare.me (category: Technology, subcategory:
Hackers), you can not just check hacker news titles, but also Paul Graham's
blog and the Y combinator posterous Blog, and track back old stories very
fast. The bad part of this is just that, external links won't bring you to
hacker news, but the original post, for Ask HN, it works very well, I've tried
to figure out how to find the rss-link for new items and for the discussion
tread (or comment), couldn't figure it out, I suspect there's no such a thing
(Admin ?), so if one of you find out how to get it, thanks for sharing, or the
admin may try to put those datas on a feed. Hope this can help some folk here,
and if they are additional Y combinator feed I'm missing and you may want to
see there, let me know.

------
bayareaguy
I often read HN when I happen to be at an impasse away from my laptop or
desktop. I'd like to HN's interface offer better support for mobile browsers.

For example, <http://m.ycombinator.com> could be a version of
news.ycombinator.com with margins, indentation and other settings appropriate
for a Blackberry or iPhone.

Also I don't know what's up with Viigo, but it doesn't seem to work with HN's
RSS url. Anyone else have that problem?

~~~
andyking
The simplicity of this site makes it far more conducive to mobile browsing
than, say, BBC News or the NYT. Some of the indentation on comments can be a
bit of a pain, but it's perfectly workable on the Opera Mini browser I use.

------
timf
I would _like to_ respond by saying "instead of griping, show us your counter
idea as a demo" but that currently seems like a steep hill to climb. I have
been curious for some time when/if a read-only API (with access to all
information past/present) might be introduced to let people easily create
alternate 'views.'

Everyone seems to start with building their own screenscraper + polling
infrastructure (see two cool sites, for example, <http://hntrends.com> and
<http://searchyc.com/> ) which seems like a demotivating and fragile obstacle
in the way of getting at the problem space where people actually want to
experiment.

The SearchYC site (which is great don't get me wrong) has a JSON interface but
only for search queries, not the more comprehensive and notification-based
system that a definitive API could be.

My comment that there is no API could also be seen as a "gripe" I guess, but I
am not really complaining about anything. I love HN and will continue to
excessively visit the current website as-is. I also don't even know how PG
feels about the issue (i.e., is it "will never happen" or "no time"?).

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Why doesn't someone build the site-scraper, and provide an API to its results?

~~~
timf
I assumed it would be worse technically. Perhaps if it was OK to relentlessly
poll, it could be a good service. Things like votes and comment edits would be
hard to capture quickly unless every single item was relentlessly polled.

On the other hand I am not trying to rule out viable alternatives by
suggesting it comes straight from HN, I even considered making what you are
saying at one time. I just don't think it would be as good as an HN one.

------
simonista
Two things that help to see what you've missed in the past several days are
<http://news.ycombinator.com/lists> (specifically best and bestcomments,
although all are useful), and <http://ask.searchyc.com/> which unfortunately
is only for Ask NH posts, but is chronological with points and comments.

~~~
simonista
Another thing which I don't personally do, but which might be helpful is to
come up with a list of HN regulars who often comment on stories you enjoy, and
then check out their comment history (eg for pg:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg>)

------
nfnaaron
I could be wrong, but I also could be pretty close to right.

I think the RSS feed tracks <http://news.ycombinator.com/newest> , the _new_
link in the top menu bar. The feed and _new_ link appear to me to be in
reverse chron order.

If you don't visit often, your rss reader should keep track of everything
until you check in; without the points/comments, as you point out.

If you check in often enough, following the _new_ page should be the best of
both worlds: chron, and points/comments.

In answer to your title question, I: \- click on interesting stuff in my rss
reader \- then look through the first couple of pages of the front page to see
what's gathering comments that I'm interested in \- then, if I still haven't
found enough to keep me from working, I look at the _new_ page to see if
there's anything I haven't seen yet.

~~~
tptacek
Unless I use a different RSS feed from you, I'm pretty sure it doesn't track
"New"; things usually need a few upvotes until they hit the feed.

~~~
nfnaaron
Ah, looks like you're right. "New with points."

------
scythe
>(I can't keep track of which stories I've already read)

Most browsers will color a link you've clicked on differently. I know I've
read a story because its link is gray.

Of course, if I didn't remember them most of the time, I'd wonder if I wasn't
wasting time in a more heinous way that I'd originally imagined.

------
riklomas
I made a Twitter-bot a while ago for HN, I find it useful and there's over
7000 people following it now. It's only new stories in the top 5 though,
mainly to stop information overload.

<http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/>

~~~
jonathandeamer
I'm a big fan of this, mainly because of the top 5 filter, but also because I
tend to use Twitter as a centralised hub for much of my media consumption,
rather than visiting different websites, so it suits this use.

I have a "reading material" Twitter list set up, including @newsycombinator,
and I regularly scan this for this to add to Instapaper, which I then
generally read when travelling.

Admittedly, the problem with this is that it means I'm a less active
participant in the community here than I'd like to be.

------
tdupree
I always thought a HN API would be awesome, would give us a lot more freedom
to mold HN into different interfaces. I have toyed with the idea of a scraper
but I think that ends up being a bit of a broken solution.

I wrote a greasemonkey script for HN a while back that I can't live without
now. There are actually a couple great HN greasemonkey scripts out there. You
could always try making a mashup of those that have your favorite elements.
You may end up making something that a lot of people find useful.

If you like, give Hacker News OnePage a whirl:
<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512>

------
Pistos2
I used to use <http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/> but then became
dissatisfied with its choice of links, so I made my own:

<http://hn.purepistos.net/>

which takes <http://news.ycombinator.com/active> and filters for a minimum
vote count (currently 40). I provide the title, the link, and a link to the HN
thread. Consumable via FriendFeed, Twitter, RSS and Atom.

------
anigbrowl
Website. Yeah, it's imperfect but I've gotten used to it. Your life won't
suffer that much if you miss stuff, anything sufficiently significant will get
reposted somewhere else.

------
adrianwaj
I consume on Twitter via hackerlinks: <http://twitter.com/hackerlinks> \-
(personally over Twitya <http://twitya.com/#hackerlinks>) ..parses the new
comments for links and posts up the result - check it out, over 500 followers
and stabilizing \-- it is a bit of a hosepipe so open wide

------
jgamman
left to right, top to bottom. other standards exist in the world but YMMV

------
IgorPartola
I mainly use the RSS feed from NetVibes. I wish clicking on the link there
took me to HN, instead of to the source article. Sometimes I am more
interested in comments to a feature than the actual feature (the title might
say it all, but the reaction is what's interesting). I am to the point where I
might create my own wrapper around HN's RSS feed.

------
prakash
Here are some links that might be useful:

\- <http://hackerhackernews.com/>

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/lists>

\- <http://hnsort.com/>

------
gills
I just use the web interface. Skim the front page first, then the new page. I
check out articles with a high comments/points ratio first (or _only_ )
because the discussion of the intelligent folks here is what I value.

------
caf
I just use the RSS feed and pick the stories based on the title. Seems to work
OK.

~~~
robotron
Yep. It would be nice if the body of the story was included also since they're
usually fairly short.

------
rosshill
I consume HN through a feedmyinbox.com subscription, that takes the most
popular articles of the day and emails them to me at 3pm each day. I then
click the interesting ones into new tabs and go through them.

------
mhartl
I recommend "hnweekly: this week's top stories from Hacker News" at
<http://hnweekly.chibidesign.com/> to find good stories you might have missed.

------
jlees
With reluctance, of late.

I tend to click through to showcased items via the twitter @newsycombinator
feed or on IRC. Other than that, the website, but I don't visit as much as I
used to. I just find less of interest lately.

------
sabon
If you want to come rarely but don't want to miss the most important stuff,
this should help: <http://news.ycombinator.com/best>

------
windock
I use <http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/> That's just a nice newspaper-like
layout.

------
jarsj
I would rather love to see it go more complicated and geeky. Hackers would
figure it out and non-hackers would get filtered away.

~~~
unalone
Being a hacker doesn't mean embracing unnecessary clutter. In fact, many
people would argue it's the opposite.

I don't do complicated and geeky. I'm smart enough to figure it out, but I
have better things to do than subscribe to an asshole designer's ego trip. I
stick around on Hacker News in part because its design respects me.

~~~
jarsj
I do not embrace that too. I have spent a good deal of my last 3 years out of
college learning usability and can not agree more on what you said.

However, I do believe if hacker news was more obvious and followed all those
principles, it would attract \- Hey, we got a job for you. \- How do you read
the contents of the file in a string in Java ?

and other such things.

~~~
unalone
Fair enough. Though recent alternatives to Hacker News have lessened a lot of
those posts, and I'm glad. Stack Overflow in particular has drawn away a lot
of newbie questions (including many of my own that I'd have probably asked
here). Now we just need an HN job board: Those are the posts I see
increasingly more of.

------
chengas123
I'll tell you how I don't - via Chrome. The site looks awful in it. I have to
switch to FireFox.

~~~
selven
What's so bad about the site in Chrome? I'm looking at the site in (Linux)
Chrome and Firefox side by side and, aside from the extra 4 lines of vertical
screen space that Chrome gives you, they look exactly the same.

------
tptacek
Via SearchYC RSS subscription to patio11's comments.

------
jwallz
Google Reader

~~~
volare
The problem is I usual select what to read by the number of points and/or
comments. I don't want to click through every item to see those things.

------
josephkern
Twitter.

------
ddemchuk
excessively

------
k0n2ad
With smoked Gouda and a side of caviar.

------
vaksel
1\. Visit site 2\. Hit Threads 3\. See if my words of wisdom got voted
up(heheh) and if they need a response 4\. Scan the front page for Ask/Tell HN
type questions. 5\. Scan the page for posts with a lot of comments and see if
the topic is interesting enough to check out.

I usually just check once an hour or, and it takes like ~10 minutes.

