Ask HN: How do you stay up to date without information overload?

5 points by bohdanstefaniuk 7 days ago | 4 comments

I'm a backend developer, but I'm interested in a lot of other areas too: frontend, AI, infrastructure, architecture, and system design. I want to keep up with new ideas and advances in all of these.

My problem is that most changelogs and news sources throw too much raw information at me. I spend a lot of effort going through it all just to figure out what actually matters. After a while I get overloaded, and then I give up and unsubscribe from everything.

So now I'm looking for more curated stuff. Maybe a newsletter, or some people who have a good point of view on software engineering and specific technologies. I want to follow people who filter the noise and explain the interesting parts well.

Right now my list is pretty short: - Hacker Newsletter - Platformer - The Pragmatic Engineer

What do you read? What newspapers are you subscribe to?

sermakarevich 6 days ago |

I have this list on x of 67 people posting on AI related topics: https://x.com/i/lists/2014953069700633085

For papers/articles processing I use AI with pre-defined instructions to create short/medium summaries. The summary should give me good understanding of the main idea and if its worth reading it deeper. Even if not - main idea would be in your head.

These summaries I accumulate into hierarchical knowledge base, optimized for Obsidian and llms https://github.com/sermakarevich/ai_knowledge_wiki

Nurysso 6 days ago |

I just read about system designs/agorithms for an hour max and take small notes helps me stay upto date without having a information overload. Regrading the too much raw info issue is real and I still struggle with it but i have learned to ignore it till i actually need that info

satvikpendem 7 days ago |

I don't. Any information that's important will naturally come to me by diffusion via coworkers, HN or similar.

bohdanstefaniuk 7 days ago | |

I use this approach with worlds news. I've noticed if I don't read any political news, I will eventually know the most important once which affects me.