My main method is the >400 points feed: https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=400

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.

It depends what do you want to use it for. If you do not want to reply and only want to consume, all you need is to go to "list" at the bottom, view the front-page of the day, and classic.

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 am an infovore and read every page in /newest, because my interests are many, and I don't want other people deciding what is important.

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43590233

I got a bot which follows everything that gets posted, or at least it is supposed to. I built it originally to gather the data to build a model which can predict if an article will get upvoted based on the headline, later I wanted to use it to prevent my YOShInOn RSS reader and agent from posting duplicates. I learned that the two things contradict because if you scan everything quickly everything has zero votes and zero comments!

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.