Ask HN: How to get the most out of Hacker News?

2 keepamovin 8 9/3/2025, 4:33:52 PM

I think this is an interesting place to find unique articles and news. Sometimes for an insightful or well written post. At times for a laugh or good joke. And sometimes to discover some hot new (or new to me) product, or amazing creator, or good person.

I also find a lot of the articles boring, and not interesting, nor worth a read. This happens often. Ditto the threads. I can’t classify my interests into categories or keywords, so RSS is wrong.

Does anyone else feel this way? This is already a high signal place, how do you increase that and maybe tune it specifically for you?

Comments (8)

PaulHoule · 8h ago

I turned this research

https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/

into a smart RSS reader that does the same for about 110 RSS feeds. Something missing out of most UI's is a "see something once why see it again" interface where you can x something out and not see it again rather than scan and scan and scan and scan.

yorwba · 3h ago

Did you ever manage to improve your classifier beyond what you described in that post or is getting past ≈0.75 AUC ROC simply too difficult.

PaulHoule · 16m ago

For recommendation you can't do that much better because the oracle is fickle. TikTok claims to get 0.83 or so. A better recommender practically has more objectives like diversity. If your recommender shows you just arXiv articles about recommeNeeds pretty soon articles about crypto or soccer or oncology start looking good! I have some ideas of what 'better' is but can't cook them down to one number to optimize.

I am thinking of how to build a general text classifier which is more state of the art but I'll need to make a test suite of hard but fair problems.

wonger_ · 7h ago

- asking questions in threads where the knowledgeable people are at

- I like to browse /newest and /show, and if something deserves more activity, I'll post a comment. Maybe it will get to the frontpage and attract better discussions

- search hn.algolia.com when I stumble upon interesting links, because maybe there was a past discussion with good commentary

- if there were no past submissions, then submit the link myself to attract commentary

- browsing posts from years ago if I'm bored

- don't get addicted

duxup · 8h ago

I find I get more out of HN making this my go to page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

keepamovin · 6h ago

I didn’t know about that! Thank you :-)

fsflover · 8h ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442888

PaulHoule · 8h ago

I've thought about strats to improve my votes/post ratio, one option is to seek out articles that have "gotten more than N votes more than M times" where N might be 200 and M might be 5 and blend them into my mixture.