That gives a handful of items a day that I can decide if I want to read or not. I tweak the threshold every once and a while when I feel like I am getting too much or too little.
I also have a few other feeds that I am subscribed to for keywords that I am particularly interested in with much lower thresholds.
Then of course when my feed reader is empty I will sometimes just browse the site.
Upvote submission, comments, add to favourite. Once you spend a few years reading you will get the general vibe of certain topics and community bias.
If you are not busy you could simply view all the top post during a weekend few hour sessions. Sometimes I have HN tabs that were opened from months before I just haven't have time to read it. Generally I grind it through when I have free time.
And if you read a lot on Desktop / Laptop with hundreds of Tabs, your browser is far more important than whatever reading habit you have. Chrome and Firefox is order of magnitude better than Safari in handling hundreds of tabs.
I open a few, and save meaty material as pdf (on the phone, I send it to the desktop)
This is similar to a post yesterday[0], brief comments.
> Browse No More
> The magic we once had with browsing the web is dwindling. March 13, 2025
> I'm no longer browsing the web; I'm consuming AI answers instead.
In this case, limiting my news feed to what others think is important (or hot, like emacs vs. vi) or not.
It used to use arangodb but the license for that sucks so I just tore it down to use postgres, I developed an adaptation layer that makes postgres look like arangodb, at least enough to port my applications. I added the data structures so it can recrawl posts after two weeks so it can be fresh and have accurate counts. I am talking with a friend about reranking comments so I am planning on using the bot to suck down comments for some big discussions and rerank them.
Consumption in moderation.
I am in the world only for the purpose of composing. — Franz Schubert
Sometimes I read them right away on my PC or smartphone, most of the times I just open the link and send it over to my iPad and read later when I have the time.
Then I still come back to best/top/favs at work because there is always something cool I missed or a "show HN" that has a project I'd like to test.
Mobile app helps to keep it tidy and HN has plenty of content easy to consume like that l.
Hacki is on fdroid.
An interesting alternative to the front page is the second-chance pool...
You can't keep up with most things, let alone everything.
The feeling that you aren't keeping up is the result of increased experience with the world as an adult combined with a mistaken belief held when your experiences consisted largely of childhood.
On the bright side, once you accept how much you don't know and that you can't know everything, you realize that the rest of your life can be spent being amazed by the new things you learn. Or not.
Or to put it another way, trying to keep up is a manifestation of FOMO. Good luck.