Ask HN: What is your content discovery daily routine?

235 points by smorac 8 years ago | 155 comments

I'm quite curious about how people on Hacker News find interesting content along the day. What are the topics you are interesting in? What are the websites you go to? (HN is probably in there) Do you have some mailing list you are counting on to deliver you good content? Are there some tools you like to use to store and read later?

On my side, I like to read HN and getting a lot of information on subreddits that are related to my favorite topics : MachineLearning, LanguageTechnology, Node, GoLang, Cooking, Baking, CheeseMaking, Beer. In my perception, the more niche the topic, the more you can find quality stuff on.

When I find a link of interest I bookmark it on Chrome where I have Google's Bookmark Manager plugin to make it more sexy. Personally I'm not a fan of Pocket but I know a lot of people like it.

So, what about you?

jonathansizz 8 years ago |

I gave up on Twitter, as even after massive ongoing curation the signal/noise is far too low. There's no way to filter tweets from sources I'm following, and it's a constant source of anxiety leading to compulsive reloading of the feed. Other social networks are worse. Life's too short for this.

I've also cut down on the web sources I follow, as information overload is a real thing, and we rapidly run into diminishing returns.

For news, I now just peruse the FT, Guardian and Atlantic (+HN via http://hckrnews.com/ using the 'top 50%' setting) a couple of times a day, and Politico Magazine once per week. This covers a decent section of the political spectrum and if there's anything important going on I'll find it amongst those sources. I probably read half a dozen full articles each day.

For non-immediate information, I browse A&L Daily, and I have print subscriptions to the following: The Atlantic, Harper's, Sky & Telescope, American Scientist, Foreign Affairs, Philosophy Now, and The Philosophers' Magazine.

Additionally, I listen to a selection of podcasts when I'm in the car. These cover international relations and news analysis, history, philosophy and comedy.

That just about covers it; since I hit 40 and had a son my priorities changed, as did my outlook on life. Other than my family, I'm spending much more of my time on real hobbies and interests (in my case a bit of astronomy and photography, occasional writing, some cooking, and a lot of cycling and serious reading (books)), and less on time-wasting activities (social networks, web forums, television and video games).

It's amazing how much extra time you can find if you cut useless things out of your life.

chillee 8 years ago | |

+1 for hckrnews. Even if I miss a day, I can easily go back through the last couple days and see what's interesting.

If my backlog is getting too much for me to want to deal with, I simply reduce the number of articles to top 10 or top 20, and go from there.

chasely 8 years ago | |

If you have a lot of people you follow on Twitter, Nuzzel [1] can be useful. Basically, if people you follow are sharing the same article, it will get highlighted by the app.

[1] http://nuzzel.com/

dabockster 8 years ago | |

> even after massive ongoing curation the signal/noise is far too low

Agreed. Even with programs like TweetDeck that can apply some basic filtering, you're still left with a bunch of junk content. (And the UX of TweetDeck is terrible in my opinion, but that's best left for another post.)

smithsmith 8 years ago | |

hckrnews is awesome. Before i found hckrnews i had no idea at what point to stop scrolling for more news if i missed looking hacker news a day later. The problem was since the feed is not linear with time and the newer articles can go beyond the articles you have already visited, there was no right way at what point to stop. hckrnews has addressed this issue very cleverly with the 20% , 50 % vote. Amazing.

aphextron 8 years ago | |

I would add nautil.us to that list. But yeah, that's essentially the entirety of what's worth reading online in terms of traditional "news".

kthejoker2 8 years ago | |

What international affairs podcasts do you listen to? It's an area I would like more analytical insights into.

jonathansizz 8 years ago | | |

CFR (the publishers of Foreign Affairs) have The World Next Week and The President's Inbox (and other more specialized ones)

Carnegie Endowment does The Carnegie Podcast

FT has World Weekly

BBC (e.g. Global News, Newshour, The Inquiry), NPR and PRI (e.g. America Abroad) all have a few to try out, and CSIS also have a good one. Universities like Oxford and Harvard have their own podcasts as well.

Try them all and pick your favourites. I just listen to CFR and Carnegie these days.

alexpetralia 8 years ago | |

Thanks a ton for hckr news. Great resource.

LoudogUno 8 years ago |

I don't really have an answer for the source of good content but could tell you one of my logistical solutions.

I use BetterTouchTool to remap the "Three Finger Click" gesture to my Chrome keyboard shortcut for the "Save to Pocket" Extension and the "Four Finger Click" gesture to "Clip to Evernote"...

As I browse HN, read emails, and generally surf the web, I identify what content I might be interested in reading or might be useful later and click accordingly. Pocket for things I want stripped of styling and organized in a nice little FIFO list I can quickly pull up on my phone while waiting in line at Costco. Evernote for things I want the presentation in kept intact and searchable

My time at my workstation with a full keyboard and 4 monitors is a much better time to find content while processing content I could easily do on mobile during the day's numerous downtimes: listening on the ride to work, on the bike at the gym...

Pocket has a useful "Listen To" feature with variable speed settings and some other simple thoughtful additions.

Evernote for all its problems has the "Jump To" quick search and reliable multi-device platform-agnostic syncing secret sauce.

The system feels really good when I'm perusing an article with a bunch of hyperlinks to content that I should probably read eventually but will distract me from the task at hand if I were to follow them now.

Thanks for asking this, I love hearing about other peoples solutions.

dchuk 8 years ago |

I built this site: https://engineered.at

It's like HN, but powered by hundreds of startup tech/engineering blog feeds. It pulls in some really good stuff! Not a lot of users yet, just barely getting it going so far, let me know what you think.

EDIT: Lots more planned for this site, just only able to spend free time on it:

1. Following users/messaging them privately

2. Notifications when users reply to you, follow you, etc

3. Self-curated front pages. I realize not everyone cares about all of the feeds in the site, so give the ability for people to hide certain feeds if they want.

harigov 8 years ago | |

That's a great idea and something that I would love to use. You should probably give some weight to blogs known for kick-ass engineering so that they surface up lot more. That would be a good way to seed articles to this service. Also, you need dark mode!

dchuk 8 years ago | | |

Both great suggestions! I think the weighting will be dependent on getting more engagement on the site overall, which is a tricky thing early on, but working on it!

thirdsun 8 years ago | |

> I built this site: https://engineered.at

Looks great. In fact, and I like HN's simplicity, it makes me realize how much better, cleaner, and more readable HN could look with a few minor design tweaks and better spacing.

dchuk 8 years ago | | |

Thank you!

kureikain 8 years ago | |

wow, it's very similar to mine idea: https://one.betterdev.link/

But yours is more completed featured full. Kudo to it.

dchuk 8 years ago | | |

Very cool design!

otterpro 8 years ago |

This is how I discovered contents throughout history:

* Late 80's - pre-WWW era: Books, word-of-mouth, computer magazines (Dr. Dobbs, etc), snail-mail newsletters, USENET / newsgroups on internet via shell terminal

* 1990's: Web forums, Slashdot, IRC

* 2000's: Slashdot, Digg, RSS feeds from blogs / Google Reader

* 2010's: HN

danesparza 8 years ago | |

Ahhh yes. I remember the good old days when tech books were half decent. Good times.

godelmachine 8 years ago |

I regularly read Adrian Colyer's blog. -> blog.acolyer.org. Every single day. Simply reading through his reviews has increased my knowledge about Computer Science by leaps and bounds. Also, I see for new uploads in "Emerging Technologies" and "Hardware Architecture" section of Arxiv everyday. My daily ritual.

ice109 8 years ago | |

the arxiv tip is a very good one indeed

qorrect 8 years ago | | |

You might also like http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/

jamestimmins 8 years ago | |

What value have you found in reading his reviews vs reading the actual papers?

godelmachine 8 years ago | | |

The actual papers are 10 pages long, on an average. Reading 10 pages long hard core technical papers everyday is tough for me. His reviews are succint and easy to understand. Enough for me to get the gist of the work done. While my aim is to be able to read those technical papers everyday on my own, eventually, for the time being I could use his reviews.

appleflaxen 8 years ago |

I find that the more efficient my daily content discovery routine is, the less efficient my life is.

And my daily discovery routine is very efficient :(

sabasedighi 8 years ago |

Since 60% of my job is finding content for our audience, this is what's been working for me:

1. Quality newsletters - they help you know what's important and aggregate commentary around it. My favorites - Mattermark's Daily Digest, Pocket hits, JS Daily/Weekly, Quartz Daily Bried

2. BUZZSUMO (paid but worth it) - helps you sort through the noise and see share volumes for each channel based on a domain (ex. wired.com) or you can set topics where it aggregates most trending pieces based on virality of shares. Also has content analysis tool that allows you to see what keywords are most common for a domain and analyze FB page content for shares and popularity. Does much more but that's the quick and dirty.

3. Of course HackerNews is great, especially if you cater your content to a techie audience.

4. Twitter Lists + Nuzzel

mjleino 8 years ago |

I read the Economist on paper to keep up with the world. There are multiple upsides I like about this approach.

- There's only so much to read per week, I can't unhealthily binge news through night. - There's a delay, most of the news are at least a couple of days old when the paper comes. I find it's a calming influence in the hectic world. Also, the reporting tends to be a bit more balanced vs. minute-by-minute live coverage. - It's on paper. There won't be any notification on it. I can throw the paper away, once done with it.

kerbalspacepro 8 years ago | |

*recycle

Right??? =)

deepakkarki 8 years ago |

I had the same problem of finding interesting blogs to read, so made a side project - https://www.discoverdev.io

Curated and tagged list of top engineering blog articles everyday! Do check it out :)

harigov 8 years ago | |

I love the idea but the design needs some work. If you can also display a quick summary and time to read an article, that would improve our reading efficiency quite a bit. That, and of course, dark design.

deepakkarki 8 years ago | | |

Thank you for the feedback! By a dark design, do you mean like a toggle of sorts - b/w a white dominant and a dark dominant UI? Or completely switch to a dark UI?

mrleinad 8 years ago | |

Looks like a really nice project, but since you've been running it for a month now, I'd recommend switching to a weekly post. Otherwise, I think you might get burned or start skipping some days. Weekly is much more manageable in the long run.

deepakkarki 8 years ago | | |

Most of it is automated - I just do a final quality check. Takes about half an hour a day. Ideal case is to automate it completely via ML. It's just that it's hard to create a model that can tell a good blogpost from a spammy one. So as of now little bit of manual intervention is required.

deepakkarki 8 years ago | | |

For example it took me about 15 min to publish the links today. Just done, have a look :)

dchuk 8 years ago | |

How are you handling the tagging on this? By hand, 3rd party service, algorithm?

deepakkarki 8 years ago | | |

Most of it is automated using some basic ML foo. you can read our about page for more info. All posts go through manual quality check and retagging if necessary!

garysieling 8 years ago |

I try to follow interesting people on twitter and Instagram - this uncovers a lot of book recommendations, which I save in an amazon wishlist.

For technology topics, the Cooper Press email lists are great - https://cooperpress.com/

I also subscribe to the Economist and Nautilus - with Nautilus sometimes the authors are active online (e.g. giving talks). Sometimes it is also interesting to follow citations in books or articles.

For talks, I "bookmark" good things I find by including them in a search engine I built: https://www.findlectures.com/

gorekee 8 years ago | |

> including them in a search engine I built

Awesome idea. Is the content of the links also evaluated when you trigger search?

stefek99 8 years ago |

OFFTOPIC: avoid it at all cost. Energy, time, attention, focus = the most valuable resources out there.

Valuable content will find you anyway.

rufb 8 years ago |

My strategy pretty much consists of subscribing to good creators and curators across all channels.

I have a bookmark folder (aptly named 1) which opens:

    - My Gmail "newsletters" filter view
    - My AOL Reader
    - HackerNews
    - MetaFilter
    - My Facebook "Must read" user list
    - My Twitter "Must read" list
    - My Reddit "Must read" list
    - My Youtube "Subscriptions" page

In each one of these there's my selection of profiles that reliably create or flag good content (to my standards).

If I have the time, I also go for the noisier and long-form channels in 2:

    - Newspapers
    - My YouTube "Watch Later" list
    - My Pinboard "Read later" list
    - HN Explain (in case I missed something big)

Being able to prioritize what comes into my "inbox" and being able to defer longer or more exhaustive content for later helps me always get a pulse of things quickly without spending too much time or mental energy.

Podcasts have a routine of their own because I listen during commute and workout but I treat it like my inbox: two daily scrubs of new content, and what seems interesting goes to the "Up next" playlist.

tgb 8 years ago | |

What is HN Explain?

rufb 8 years ago | | |

A satire page that reviews HN's weekly top posts in a very condescending manner (the humor to me very much welcome but you may be put off by it)

youzesix 8 years ago |

HN and Reddit mostly, friends/colleagues

I've been wrestling with this issue, though.

If I'm being honest, I still love RSS feeds, but I'm unhappy with all the implementations.

What I want to be able to do is seed an RSS reader with a set of sites I want to be aware of, and then have it recommend other sites and stories based on what I give it, maybe even pull in random things from time to time. I want to read what I'm interested in, but also to be made aware of things I wouldn't otherwise because of the myopia that kind of comes from a human left to their own devices.

I haven't found anything quite like that. What I have found has either (1) is great at letting me customize it, but then doesn't suggest anything, or (2) suggests crap I'm not interested in at all, or (3) has some other problem, like eating up bandwidth with no way to control it.

It seems like you could take an open-source RSS reader and slap some sort of p2p recommender system on top...

hypercluster 8 years ago |

I always was a religious RSS user and put all the interesting feeds in there. But I realized that it just becomes too much work to get to "inbox zero".

So now I have some feeds left with acceptable volume (games: Eurogamer, Polygon, Kotaku..; Apple feeds; Webcomics; Deals).

The rest I just browse throughout the day: Guardian, Arstechnica, Reddit.. Little exception for HN: I use hckrnews.com now because there I can choose whether I want to see all homepage entries or -if I don't have the time- only the top 20%. (every site should have that!)

I used to use bookmarks as well but now I just dump it into iOS Notes although I'm not fully happy with that.

kendallpark 8 years ago |

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection."

I have a friend that is a collector. Every now and then I ask him what's new. By far the most efficient use of my time.

Dowwie 8 years ago |

This has been asked in a variety of more targeted ways, such as:

Favorite Podcasts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9207360 Favorite Tech Podcasts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747563

Mailing Lists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14086259

etc etc

1337biz 8 years ago |

Since RSS is not a mainstream thing anymore, it is getting harder and harder. My best strategy so far is creating twitter lists on topics that I am interested in an curate them with people who are engaged in their focus area. Still tricky to discover interesting people who don't just hype their personal angle. More and more the conversation seems also to shift from Twitter to LinkedIn.

smorac 8 years ago | |

Yes, it used to be quite easy with Google RSS Reader and Feedly to keep track of the stuff thanks to RSS, but a lot is happening on not in public anymore going to Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups. I gave up on Twitter a year ago because to much ads and feed got too crowded too quickly but I'm going back to it and their algorithm is doing a better job at curation for now.

dchuk 8 years ago | | |

As former heavy RSS users, what do you think of a site like this one I put together? https://engineered.at

It sort of "hides" the RSS feeds behind a social news interface, using a ranking algo like reddit/HN.

Balgair 8 years ago |

Mind if I turn the question upside-down? What would be features of a site that you would like for news?

In browsing the comments:

Personalization is super important. How would that be defined? How personal? How impersonal?

'Signal-to-noise' is important. What does that mean for you? What is signal? Do you know before hand? Can you rank a few items that are more 'signal' than 'noise'? What is noise? Does that vary from day to day for you?

Addiction is important. What is 'addictive' to you? Is that a good thing during some parts of the day and not others? Do you want your nephews to have access to that addictive news service? Do you want ot have a 'stop it' button to stop yourself?

New content is important. How new? What is content to you? What type of medium, like videos or text? A mix of many media? What languages and from what countries?

Any other ideas/important things to grep from this comments section?

idlewords 8 years ago |

My daily content discovery routine is a slowly mounting sense of horror.

danesparza 8 years ago |

Tech stuff:

Hacker News

Pinboard Popular https://pinboard.in/popular/

Podcasts (specifically Hanselminutes) https://hanselminutes.com/

Stackoverflow

Reddit (occasionally)

Food: Good Eats http://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/good-eats (and I'm happy to hear it may be coming back on air soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovc2Q-zdoyM )

ge96 8 years ago | |

Have you heard of the stack overflow podcast? Pretty good

Some others

Embedded - Coding blocks - Artificial Intelligence - Ted Radio Hour - Changelog - Masters of Scale - Indie Hackers - Hack the Entrepreneur

Pretty much listen to any coding/programming/entrepreneur/news related stuff.

Dowwie 8 years ago | |

Good Eats is coming back? You just made my day. If they replaced Alton I won't watch, in protest

danesparza 8 years ago | | |

Watch the video. Pretty sure that's Alton (and his old props)

smorac 8 years ago | |

Oh, on food there is something fantastic that I like to look at: http://www.seriouseats.com/. I remember their video on the perfect cooking for baked potatoes and their meta-recipe for soups.

jansho 8 years ago |

I have the standard list of newspapers and magazines that I browse right after hitting the morning alarm.

Instagram for design. A few other art publications..

My bookcase is also extremely well-stocked. Not that it reflects my intellect - most of them are unread! But it makes an excellent discovery engine as I can pick up any book of any subject I happen to fancy in moment x. Which is why as amazing Google is, it can never be that kind of discovery engine, heheheh.

And I rationalise to myself that surely, given half a century of dipping in and out, I'll eventually read all of them.

arcbyte 8 years ago |

My daily go-to source is a custom RSS reader I built a few years ago and host on Amazon's free tier. It is still the best for me and I haven't had to touch it's code in years. I follow the run of the mill tech blogs and I always like finding new independent bloggers to add.

I find myself visiting HN on a daily basis as well. I believe there is a HN RSS feed so I will probably work on adding that my reader at some point.

I visit (sub)Reddits only when I'm looking for something specific, but not for periodic news.

lettergram 8 years ago |

This is going to come off like a plug, but I really enjoy the webapp I wrote:

https://projectpiglet.com/

Im developing it for investing, and am about to release the first version of the robo-financial advisor.

However, in the process of developing it, I added the feature to follow topics. Then it sends users email updates of top news articles when either:

(A) Opinions on those topics change

(B) A spike in discussion occurs

That is to say, if bitcoins price goes up, the sentiment will be positive, but if the sentiment was already positive I wouldn't get notified. However, if for instance there was a recent coin split - I'd get notified because the sentiment would change.

Think of it as automated and accurate news curation.

To get the most recent news I used to visit HN every day, subreddits, and I follow blogs on Feedly. Now, the system I described actually targets my interest and sends me topics super well, so I don't have to scan HN or Reddit. Better than I thought it would, actually. I still visit HN obviously and will visit Reddit, but much less so and only when the topics I'm interested aren't changing (i.e. I'm not receiving an email of curated content).

The only pattern that hasn't changed are specific blogs such as loweringthebar.net which is still content I'm interested in, but not one that the piglet app I wrote can identify as interesting for me.

nexxer 8 years ago |

After many years of RSS (Google Reader, then Feedly), I gave up on it due to sheer volume and now get my daily fix from curated email newsletters, a mix of news and tech-related ones. This post lead me to make an inventory of them:

http://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/morning-briefing-europe

https://qz.com/

https://webopsweekly.com/

https://www.finimize.com/

http://ben-evans.com/newsletter/

https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-macro/

https://labnotes.org/

https://aeon.co/

http://softwareleadweekly.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/the-interpreter

http://www.phpweekly.com/

http://www.hackernewsletter.com/

http://www.electricdreaming.com/

https://www.dpreview.com/newsletter

And a few Greek ones, might as well add them:

https://insidestory.gr/

http://factnews.gr/

http://www.georgakopoulos.org/2014/05/newsletter/

PeanutCurry 8 years ago |

Over the course of my day I skim Reuters, Bloomberg, The Wallstreet Journal, Vice, Reddit(Front page, news, and worldnews), and Hacker News. I'd say 70% of the time I'm browsing those sites I'm just skimming headlines. On websites like Vice or Reddit's frontpage, I'm really just there to see what topics are generally hot and rarely read too deeply into the articles. I do something similar for the r/news and r/worldnews subreddits but more on that in a moment. For hard news, I go to Reuters, Bloomberg, and WSJ. If I recognize a topic from r/news or r/worldnews I'll give that article priority over others that look appealing. This strategy is generally enough to maintain an awareness of pop-news while allocating more attention to news that matters with regard to the economy or international events. The rest of my time is whimsy reading which might include articles I passed over before or it might be browsing articles from other sites like BBC or Al Jazeera. Whimsy reading comes at the end mainly to keep myself from wasting too much time reading appealing/popular but ultimately vapid articles about things like what the President just tweeted.

da_n 8 years ago |

Tl/dr Hacker News, Podcasts, RSS, YouTube and Reddit.

Perhaps because I've been on internet since early days I still use RSS (self-hosted Stringer + Unread app). I keep RSS feeds as selective and few as possible. I have a couple of dozen podcasts I listen to, some of which deliver daily episodes. I subscribe to a fair number of YouTube channels which is (mostly) good for conference talks and tutorials. Reddit I am getting close to ditching.

hackermailman 8 years ago |

I bookmark the personal pages/blogs of professors and follow their grad students pages/blogs in fields I'm interested in like Robert Harper's blog Existential Type. Once a week I'll go through stallman.org too, sometimes RMS will write a really good historical analysis on something in the news and also to keep up with the state of free software.

Local news I listen to the radio for a few minutes during the day, international news I read journals (through sci-hub) like Oxford's Foreign Policy Analysis journal, a good recent article to check out is Analyzing the Foreign Policy of Microstates: The Relevance of the International Patron-Client Model.

On the weekend sometimes I'll go through the NY Times weekend edition or Wall Street Journal physical copy. Daily news for me unless it's local is a waste of my time resources. As for daily content discovery it's pretty much just this site, stallman.org, and my friends who feel the need to spam text me every single article they find that I've tried to ignore to get work done.

markusweimar 8 years ago |

I’m using my own site redigest.it (https://www.redigest.it/), which is a configurable digest for HN and Reddit. It’s nice not to miss anything relevant without regularly checking these sites and to easily limit how much content I see.

In addition, I’m following the work of specific people regardless of where they publish (e.g. their own website or YouTube, mostly by RSS). I find the signal to noise ratio to be higher than on HN and Reddit. Discovery also happens via linking, endorsements, collaborations, recommendation algorithms (e.g. YouTube).

Sites like HN and Reddit seem to reinforce daily routines to not miss out, which is exactly what I’m trying to avoid. I’m also questioning how effective the popular voting systems of these sites are in bringing content to the top that I find relevant. This is probably the main reason why my content consumption shifted away from them.

angelinemm 8 years ago |

I do like Pocket a lot. I have a few IFTTT recipes that automatically enqueue articles from RSS feeds I like into my pocket, and at any point in the day if I read something interesting (from here, from reddit, from something sent by someone), I just add it to my pocket queue and I read it as the day goes.

kureikain 8 years ago |

I relied on Mailling List. I subscribe and create rule to tagged on of them wit `devnews` tags.

Then during my commute to work I started to checkout them.

Then later on, I personally paste links into a Evernote note to make them searchable for later. I then decide to share with the world and start my own mailing list[0]

I also use Hacker News as a way to keep up with development trend and technology. I learn so much stuff on Hacker News by researching on thing people say that I don't understand.

One thing I found really helpful is I stopped worrying about how to find content but more about how to consume content. We're never lack of content nowsaday and if thing is good or worth to know, they will appear in your eyes at some point in some form.

---

[0] https://betterdev.link/

alanctkc 8 years ago |

Breaking the cycle of compulsive checking and distracted browsing is important to me.

There are two places I consume content:

  1. When working at the computer, I read from Pocket
    (or Kindle Cloud Reader), and
  2. After hours, I read only my Kindle Paperwhite.

The discovery and delivery for me:

  - Stream RSS feeds (HN[*], Xkcd, local news, etc.) to Pocket
    (possible with IFTTT)
  - Add links from coworkers to Pocket
  - Buy books for Kindle
  - Subscribe to The Economist[†] weekly on Kindle
  - Use Pocket to Kindle nightly[‡]
    p2k creates an e-book from random unread articles in Pocket
    archives them, then delivers to Kindle at a set time.

So, in the evenings on my Kindle, I have a mix of articles to read from Pocket (delivered at 5pm) and The Economist, plus other books, but much less rabbit-trail browsing and wandering the web.

* I filter HN by points using https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/

† The Economist has a "The World This Week" section that sums up the world's politics and business from the previous week with a paragraph for each subject, and it's more refined and less sensational than the daily news cycle. It's enough to keep me in the loop, and there are more interesting articles deeper within the magazine.

‡ https://p2k.co

PascLeRasc 8 years ago |

Pocket is really great for saving articles and they have some good recommendations too. I listen to a lot of podcasts like 99% Invisible, Planet Money, Reply All, Up First, WWDTM, Why Oh Why, and Embedded.fm. I also follow a lot of PhD students on Twitter who can write really well.

ctw 8 years ago |

Pretty much only HN at this point. I've been trying to also use Feedly to follow plain old websites with RSS feeds, but the content is much slower to come out, much less exciting usually, and there are no comment sections, which are the best part of HN imo.

lukaszkups 8 years ago |

I've reduced my twitter followers to 15 - I follow only these accounts who are sources of new content that belongs to my interests - all of friends and other accounts has been moved to twitter lists.

I've follow @newsync150 - a HN feed that tweets about threads that has +150 points. If there's a day where I feel unsatisfied with amount of content, I go straight to first 1-2 pages of HN and read what seems interesting.

I also follow some inspiration accounts, such ash TheUltralinx etc. and local (Polish) Tech websites - don't really like TechCrunch or Wired - they're focused too much on business side or things that I'm not interested in.

mattbrewsbytes 8 years ago |

I have found content on HN and if deemed worthy add it to my feedly list of blogs/sites.

Feedly is great in that you can scan headlines and mark as read and if there is something of interest read it in depth.

I don't do twitter since it seems like 99% noise or echo chamber. Same with Facebook lately other than seeing what actual people I know are up to it is just noise.

I have subscribed to a few Youtube'rs and do the same (scan titles of vids), if it is of interest I'll watch them. Mostly those are DIY types of things so at some point searching thru them will become handy depending on a project.

BlackjackCF 8 years ago |

I subscribe to weekly newsletters for languages I'm interested in learning, so right now that's how I find my Go, Rust, Ruby, and Elixir stuff.

HackerNews and the programming subreddits so far have done the trick for me.

crucio 8 years ago |

I've built Anders Pink (https://anderspink.com) to help with content discovery. It allows you to follow topics just by entering a search term, or by creating something more specific (e.g. must contain term X, but not term Y). New articles get pulled in every few hours, and get emailed to you every morning in a digest.

It also allows you to pull in content from rss feeds, then filter it. There's boards to save articles to, and team features to allow collaboration if needed.

chasely 8 years ago |

I subscribe to The Browser [1] and Audm [2], which are both story aggregators. The editors pick higher-quality, often longer-form writing. Audm provides articles read by audiobook narrators, and I've found it a good alternative to podcasts.

Both of these will email you with recommendations so the discovery "work" it outsourced.

[1] https://thebrowser.com/ [2] https://www.audm.com/

drnickr 8 years ago |

I recently re-discovered newsletters as a good source. Let the news come to you!

Things like https://www.cronweekly.com etc. are gold.

Bobbleoxs 8 years ago |

Echo most what mentioned - add:

The Economist audio version - to cover a broad view of world affairs for general awareness but not in-depth analysis

Pocket - I use Pocket app which recommends based on articles I saved into it. Their AI seems good for relevancy.

Google/trends - hit and miss but occassionally useful stuff Medium digest - even less hit and miss but occassionally Project Syndicate - again, occassionally https://www.project-syndicate.org/

+HN of course - this is daily must

john_mack 8 years ago |

I built Virwire to auto curate news from thousands of sources worldwide 24/7.

https://virwire.com

Original motivation was to to scratch my own itch for news. I found I was spending far too much time foraging for content so decided to automate discovery and relevance filtering. The app is web based but formatted for mobile.

The story stream is increasingly global, random and tolerant of competing biases, I hope a new way to experience news and see the world.

moretai 8 years ago | |

This is cool.

Olshansky 8 years ago |

The only addition I want to make that I haven't seen in the comments yet is http://nuzzel.com/.

TySchultz 8 years ago |

I've had a hard time finding a news source like yahoo news digest once it had shut down, so I've been working on a side project: http://bluebookcasedesign.com/Pages/AktaDigest.html

For tech it's all the usual; Hacker News, reddit, Also I enjoy going through GitHub trending to see what is currently popular/new.

saucow 8 years ago |

For listening to Hacker news in the car, or during your commute try: http://hackerwave.com

thefreedomfight 8 years ago |

Obligatory: HN, Reddit

I also use a Discord chatroom with me and a couple of my mates where we all post links from our various feeds. I introduced a Discord chatroom at work too and everyone seems to love it so it might be a good idea for you as well.

Also I do another music discovery / link discovery chatroom on https://www.jqbx.fm.

Long story short, I just realized I'm not very productive...

blacksmith_tb 8 years ago |

Before I settle into a day of staring at screens, I like to listen to the news on the BBC World Service[1] (it's an old habit, I used to listen to it via shortwave years ago), as I find most of the news outlets in the US lacking.

1: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/bbc_world_service

pgeorgep 8 years ago |

I usually browse through HN & different subreddits. Random articles also get saved to Pocket, but I never actually read any of them.

There are always 'spur of the moment' articles I find throughout the day using a handy Chrome extension that gives me hand curated content everytime I open up a new tab (https://zest.is/)

pgeorgep 8 years ago | |

Oh, I forgot podcasts too!

jrvarela56 8 years ago |

Reddit and HN. There's more quality content in those two sources than I can consume. My problem is the opposite: how can I manage/organise the huge amount of stuff that's out there. Posted this to get some input from HNers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919027

jes5199 8 years ago |

I do my best not to read the internet, but I have compulsive habits and I find myself looking at sites like this one without really intending to

urahara 8 years ago |

I don't have any specific routine. There is a large list of various sources in my head, which I check randomly when I feel I need to read something. I don't bookmark things, but occasionally write down my impressions from some sources and posts, which helps me to remember them.

ps Oh, I actually bookmark links on HN, probably this is the only place where I bookmark anything

i_r7al 8 years ago |

I've been using this lately http://serializer.io/

wiremine 8 years ago |

If you're interested in developing good content habits, and not just content tooling, I highly recommend The Information Diet. Short read and very thoughtful. You won't likely agree with everything (I didn't), but it's worth your time:

http://informationdiet.com/

jklinger410 8 years ago |

1. Feedly

2. Hackernews

3. Google News

4. Refind (I am in marketing)

I have a blog post about what I read via RSS here (http://bit.ly/2s6ghd4)

Also as a side-note about Twitter: I find that if you only follow human beings, and create lists of brands and other accounts that you like, your feed narrows, your engagement goes up, and real networking can occur.

kayman 8 years ago |

Hacker News Wall Street Journal New York Times If I had more time, I'd read the economist.

Newsletters: Javascript Weekly Python Weekly

aloukissas 8 years ago |

Mattermark Daily (https://mattermark.com/category/mattermark-daily/). Best curated startup/VC news, once a day in your inbox, done in 5 minutes or less. No affiliation.

chmike 8 years ago | |

This service is not Free. It's quite expensive in fact. What do we get for the free service ? Advertisement for mattermark ?

djKianoosh 8 years ago |

Prismatic was awesome at this. I mean really amazing. Nothing I've tried since they shut down has been anywhere near as good. Nuzzel, the News app on ios, flipboard, whatever. None of those had the right combination of new/interesting/important/high quality/etc...

Joeri 8 years ago |

Mostly podcasts, because they boil a week's worth of info on a particular domain down to an hour and also tell me what i'm supposed to think about it. I tried giving up hn for 6 months and didn't feel less informed. I'm here for the proceastination, not the information.

beejiu 8 years ago |

Tweetdeck is a useful tool for this kind of thing. You can just set up some keyword searches.

Vaanir 8 years ago |

Frontpage of HN, reddit, then check certain subreddits. Browse Twitter to check up on what certain devs/companies are saying.

During the day I periodically check certain Discords, IRC, HN, and reddit (I add items to Pocket if I see anything interesting).

lauretas 8 years ago |

RSS, email subscriptions (mailing lists), and content aggregators for specific topics like HN or www.freepo.st

I used to read reddit years ago, but nowadays it's just too much noise and bad content (even the slower subreddits).

etelej 8 years ago |

I have a hn clone at https://hn.etelej.com/ quite minimal, mostly on frontpage items I wouldn't want to miss

adityar 8 years ago |

HN, Reddit, Imgur, Newsblur - http://www.newsblur.com/folder/global-blurblogs

molestrangler 8 years ago |

FeedBin and constantly updating the feeds (adding and removing) when I come across an interesting feed.

I only visit actually websites if I really need to.

So spend most of the time in FeedBin.

What RSS feed I have is my competitive advantage!

boardmad 8 years ago |

>> Twitter on the train >> Internal chatroom & microblog platform once in the office >> HN in a permatab in Chrome thorughout the day on a 10min refresh

adamc 8 years ago |

Mostly, I browse HN for random tidbits, then do directed searches for things that come up in my work. I don't have time to spend much more of it surfing randomly... :-(

portpecos 8 years ago |

Someone submitted a Show HN where the site showed the top HN articles sorted by points for each day. Anybody remember the name? It was like an HN daily best of.

charlieegan3 8 years ago |

About 2 years ago I made http://serializer.io - I still use that

fsloth 8 years ago |

HN, Economist, Amazon. What? Yes. The fact is, there is an amazing amount of high quality literature on the most amazing of topics. I'm currently on a 'I'm soon 40, I have a MSc in an STEM subject and I don't know shit about how the modern world works or was built' reading binge. Much more interesting than new stuff to consume, IMO.

Davetron 8 years ago |

I've found Blendle quite good (after HN). Based on your interests, it offers a somewhat curated selection of articles from a variety of magazines and newspapers via micropayments so you don't need a load of subscriptions. I think it's better reading a few in-depth articles than trying to keep up with the random fire-hose of social media.

vivalapython 8 years ago |

This is something I've recently restructured in my own life. While I am aware that reading on a laptop display does not cause any harm to your eyes (1) I rather like the entire experience of consuming longer text on e-paper. So I went out an bought a Kindle. My favorite part with the Kindle is that I can email myself articles which are interesting, as well as browse text-based websites on the experimental browser.

I essentially have the following setup: - Laptop runs my 'morning coffee' script before work, scrapes my favorite few blogs + HN for the latest articles and adds them to a queue - All the articles I shared (via email) to family and friends get added to the queue as well - Script sticks top news headlines and content together in 1 PDF file and emails it to my Kindle

Now I can read comfortably with my coffee in and hand and even see how much "progress" I've made with the content I plan to consume.

(1) NYT blog post on e-reader eye -strain behind paywall https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/do-e-readers-cause...

evek 8 years ago | |

I use Instapaper for similar purpose. I set it up so it sends me 10 articles from Unread every morning in a digest form.

bmcusick 8 years ago |

Twitter Lists that I curate myself, The Old Reader (RSS), Hckrnews, Google News

forkLding 8 years ago |

HN, Datatau.com, Reuters, Software Engineering Daily, SwiftedNews and Youtube

tomc1985 8 years ago |

A bunch of poisoned waterholes: HN, reddit, Facebook.

I need to reevaluate my habits...

karai 8 years ago |

shameless plug: I run a weekly, curated newsletter for keto/low-carb enthusiasts. Niched, interesting content.

https://keto.fm

redorb 8 years ago |

hacker news > TheOldReader (RSS) which includes, Techcrunch, Verge, Smashing Magazine, Signal vs Noise .. sub reddits /options > tastytrade (more options) ..

omarkn 8 years ago |

I use news.ycombinator.com and tiplash.com

emcf 8 years ago |

HN and Purpose driven internet search.

vladimir-y 8 years ago |

HC + some specific audio podcasts.

miguelrochefort 8 years ago |

Daily:

- Messenger

- Email

- Hacker News

- Reddit

Weekly:

- YouTube

- Pocket

- Chrome tabs

cJ0th 8 years ago |

rss feeds and mailing lists.

dhp1161 8 years ago |

-Daily WSJ 10 point newsletter

-WSJ

-New Yorker

-NYT Magazine

-Bloomberg Businessweek

-Economist

-HackerNews

johnsmith21006 8 years ago |

Google alerts every morning works well for me. Then Reddit and then HN.

Froyoh 8 years ago |

Reddit, HackerNews, and Facebook.