How to keep up with Hacker News without reading all of it

If you have been wondering how to keep up with Hacker News and quietly concluding that you can't anymore, you are not slipping. Someone asked the site itself, in Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?, and the replies were near-unanimous: you can't, and the people who seem calm about it stopped trying.

What struck me was not the complaint. It was that almost every useful answer was a config change, not a habit change.

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🔍 The thread admits the feed broke, not the reader

The original poster blames the last two to three years, and points at AI as the reason the interesting-article rate outran anyone's reading rate. When I read the thread it was sitting at 31 points with 55 comments, which is small by HN standards and probably the most honest signal in it: this is a maintenance problem people solve privately and rarely write up.

The answers sorted into three camps, and only one of them scales:

Approach	What it actually is	Holds up over months?
Read harder, skim faster	Willpower	No — you burn out, then quit cold
Accept you'll miss things	A belief, not a system	Yes, but only paired with a filter
Threshold + blocklist	A saved URL and a list	Yes — it runs without you

Key takeaway: Treat your reading list as an engineering problem with a written spec, not as a personal discipline failure. A feed you tuned once beats a resolution you renew weekly.

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⚡ The point threshold is the whole trick

The single most repeated suggestion was an RSS feed gated on score. One commenter described pulling only new links that have already crossed 100 points. That one number does something no amount of skimming does: it makes the crowd do your triage, at the cost of seeing things roughly a day late.

That trade is almost always worth it. Late and filtered beats live and drowning.

# front page only
https://hnrss.org/frontpage

# new links, but only once they cross a score
https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100

# a specific topic, still score-gated
https://hnrss.org/newest?q=postgres&points=50

Drop those into any reader. Raise the threshold when your queue grows, lower it when it runs dry. That's the entire maintenance burden.

Named alternatives from the thread, all of which do the same job with a different interface:

• hckrnews.com — chronological, with the day's items grouped by score band
• hackernewsletter.com — a weekly email, human-curated
• brutalist.report — plain-text aggregation, no interface to speak of
• hcker.news — a client that includes an AI filter, which is a fitting solution to an AI-caused problem

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🛠️ The blocklist matters more than the threshold

Score filtering removes low-quality items. It does nothing about the category that broke the feed in the first place, because AI posts score extremely well. Two commenters described the same manual workaround: open HN, then skip everything about MCP, everything containing "agent", and so on.

That's a blocklist people run in their heads. Write it down instead:

1. Read your own last two weeks. Which posts did you open and not finish? Those are your noise categories, not the ones you feel guilty about ignoring.
2. Blocklist by keyword, not by topic. "agent" and "MCP" are keywords. "AI" is a topic, and blocking it removes things you actually want.
3. Hide domains, not posts. One commenter hides entire domains they never want to see again. This is the highest-leverage single action in the thread — one click removes a recurring source forever.
4. Set a review date. Terms rot. "MCP" was noise for one reader and load-bearing for another six months later.
5. Keep an escape hatch. Once a month, look at the unfiltered front page for ten minutes. If nothing there surprises you, your filter is calibrated.

A blocklist is not censorship of your own curiosity. It's an admission that the same three stories get rewritten forty times, and you already read the first one.

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🌐 The version of this problem we have in Sri Lanka is worse

Two things stack on top of the general overload if you're reading from Colombo, Kandy, or anywhere else on UTC+5:30:

• HN's active hours are US working hours. The front page churns while you sleep. By the time you open it with morning coffee, you're reading yesterday's leftovers with the comment threads already closed in practice. Chronological browsing is strictly worse for us than it is for someone in California.
• Attention is not the only budget. On a mobile data plan, opening thirty tabs to triage them is a real cost. A filtered feed of five items is cheaper in rupees, not just in minutes.

The time zone gap actually argues for the threshold approach rather than against it. If you're going to read it late anyway, you may as well read it sorted.

Reading style	Items surfaced per day	Roughly what it costs you
Full front page, twice daily	60+	An hour, plus the residue of half-read tabs
Front-page RSS	~30	20 minutes
Score threshold at 100 + blocklist	3–8	Under 10 minutes

Those counts are my own estimate from how the front page turns over, not numbers from the thread. Measure your own for a week before trusting anyone's, including mine.

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💡 Ask what "keeping up" was ever for

Here's the part the thread circles without quite saying. Several commenters land on acceptance, one noting that important topics get reposted, so missing something the first time still leaves you good odds of catching it. That's true, and it's also a clue.

If a thing matters, it comes back. If it only appeared once, it was news, not knowledge. Keeping up was never the goal. Shipping something, understanding one system properly, getting a job — those are goals. HN is an input to them, and inputs get throttled when they exceed what the system downstream can process.

The engineers I know who read the least of it ship the most.

When you do end up with a genuinely long piece worth reading, triage it before committing an hour. Paste it into our AI text summarizer for a two-line version, or check the reading time estimator to see whether it fits the gap you actually have. Both run free, no signup.

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What this means for you

Spend twenty minutes today, once:

• Subscribe to hnrss.org/newest?points=100 in whatever reader you already use. Do not install a new app for this.
• Write down five keywords and three domains you never want to see. Apply them in the reader's filter rules.
• Delete the HN bookmark from your phone's home screen. The feed comes to you now.
• Diary a reminder for one month out to re-check the threshold and the keyword list.

Then let go of the rest. The thread's honest conclusion is that the only answer preserving your sanity is to stop worrying about what you missed, and everyone offering tooling was really just building a machine that lets them stop worrying without feeling guilty about it.

Build the machine. Stop reading the machine's inbox.