I'm with you. I'm here as a consumer. I skim most articles. I waste little time. Instead, I get a humongous wealth of information on a great variety of topics.

Also, one quick skim of the article list gives you a good idea of what's hot in tech. Even that has great value, and helps you decide what you should and shouldn't read.

About 10% of the time I jump into comments straightaway because they give you a good idea of the topic/validity of the article.

In short; consume, in moderation, with salt.

Also how many posts dont get voted to the top but are interesting in the new section? Plenty from what I have seen.

So true! HN comments on hot new tech also act like gyro stabilization for me. When I read an article on tomorrow's hot new framework I often go "wtf I can't go on using Ruby and Ember" (although Ember is pretty new itself, if we're being honest); comments then help me manage my expectations. A la "There's no silver bullet", "this aspect is suboptimal", "you could try optimization X for established tech Y to achieve the same"...

I couldn't agree more. Well said!!!

"I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories."

I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories either. What I hate is how some people reading those stories give super powers to those people who have succeeded as if there is no luck, timing or anything else and then those people, what they say, is oh so important even on subjects that they have little expertise in. The halo in other words.

Problem with some of the hyped stuff though is that it can become a self fulfilling prophecy when a mass of early adopters decides to go down a particular path with the latest thing.

Plus, most of what I see on HN these days is really bad business, political, social, and legal analysis, not any of the things discussed in this article. (This article is a great example of the same.)

> Plus, most of what I see on HN these days is really bad business, political, social, and legal analysis

Yeah really bad. It's all crap except my own.

It is possible for this to be true in general (in other words, there will be someone whose comments are more accurate than 99% of other people), but that's not the case for me. I just try to withhold my opinion on stuff that's not obviously true.

Sure, but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts and what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?

Less time being a mindless drone, never leaving your lane? ;)

I personally have learned quite a bit on HN that has led me to being a better programmer. A discovered Two Scoops of Django (https://django.2scoops.org/), Javascript Allongé (https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge), and plenty of other things that have expanded my mind. The debate between promises, callbacks, and generators made me think critically about how I do asynchronous JS. The local love of functional programming has inspired me to dive in, and ultimately made me a better imperative programmer as well. And overhype of Edward Snowden's every movement aside, HN does a great job of surfacing stories about the intersection of policy and tech.

I also value a lot of the discourse that happens here. I think HN, even with its flaws, is a better community for discussion than Slashdot, Ars, or most of the rest of the sites covering tech.

I definitely see the benefits here. But whenever I see a point like this I wonder: if you had replaced hacker news with a different activity, could you have formed a similar list of things you learned? Perhaps a longer list, or one of higher quality? Not trying to criticize you, just something I think about in these cases.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm not arguing that HN is somehow optimal. I'm just saying that as a continual time investment, it's provided greater returns than the alternatives I've used in the past, with regards to staying on top of the scene in tech, startups, and tech-related policy.

I think everything you've said in your comment is correct, but when did the alternatives become "be a mindless drone" and "be a mindless drone who reads hacker news?"

My point is to criticize the implied argument that keeping your nose down working on the problems in front of you is inherently more productive than spending some time on HN to trying to gain some wider perspective.

That's probably a strawman attack, but the first line of my comment wasn't meant to be taken so literally, which I tried to signal with the emoticon.

I generally agree that gaining a wider perspective is valuable, but it's not clear that HN is the best way to do that, and the OP outlines a number of reasons which make sense to me why it would be a bad way to do that.

At the least, HN exists in a thickly-walled bubble. There's not a very wide perspective here.

> Less time being a mindless drone, never leaving your lane? ;)

So the way avoid being a mindless drone is to read articles and comments telling you how to act and think?

Sure! You don't have to agree with everything you read. I obviously don't!

Awareness.

I'm development lead on my startup and just being aware of new tech, other startups, problems with frameworks, algorithms,... all help me be better informed for my job.

Exactly. Even a better reason to read curated content. You need to get awareness with what's going on in the tech community without sinking massive amounts of time. Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.

This implies that the average reader is diving into every article. If my job (or interests or sideproject or...) happens to be Ruby or Lisp related, perhaps that's a useful article. Personally, I rarely-if-ever use either, so I tend to skip those.

And that's really the point. Sure, reading (or even skimming) every last article is a waste of time, but I don't think most of us do; we jump to the stuff that interests us. At least I do. And if I'm reading only curated lists, all I get is what interests someone else. There's some overlap, but I'll end up mentally filtering by title anyway, and there's a good chance I'll miss quite a bit that would be of real interest and value to me.

HN doesn't have that much content, I never feel overwhelmed. The front-page turnover rate is really slow, to the point that I pretty quickly get my "fix" and then leave. Over the course of a day I might sink an hour into it, 2 if there's something interesting going on. However, I usually read maybe 3 articles per day at most.

>Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.

I find the recent "tiny JS app" craze to be kind of cool. It's neat that a language can be so expressive that you can throw together something so complicated in under a kilobyte. I guess I don't need that kind of stuff, but it usually ends with me learning something new and wastes 5 minutes of my day at most.

I agree. But the problem is quality of curation.

Another problem, and maybe one can call it FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is that sometimes the best knowledge is deep inside the comments.

They may or may not be there but you have to filter all the babble.

Yes, awareness. I was reading 2+ hours a day of HN at my previous work. I was still more productive than most of my co-workers and was able to introduce useful tools, solutions and practices. One of my fellow developers asked, "How do you find out about all these stuff?"

So yeah, how do we find out about all these stuff otherwise?

If you read my article, then you'd know how. Curated content. It gives you the best of both worlds. Being able to dig through less news to find "good" content while still keeping up with today's news. With the added bonus that you can choose your content (wide categories / general tech or specific communities like Android, or HTML5).

Curated content still gives you what you want, but with less work. Additionally, you're reading will be consolidated (in theory) into a larger block of time on a less frequent basis, freeing up more time throughout your week.

Works the same way for me, a project manager. I dont want to know ghe finest details of everything that hits the front pahe here, I just want to know theif names, what they do, where their value are at and who is using it. Reading comments is also interesting when there are conflicting opinions on the topic.

Why not just for amusement? Or to just see what interesting things people have come up with? Why does everything have to be "only towards this goal", what happened to just doing things just for curiosity's sake?

"but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts"

Agree that the downside always has to be taken into account.

One thing that I have noticed over time is that at least some successful people tend to be highly focused and less interested in the types of things that, as they say on HN are "anything that piques one's curiosity". I'm amazed at how little curiosity they have actually.

What you are describing (that I think some people are missing here) is that sometimes you read things on HN, you then fork, and then you are going down the next shiny ball of opportunity because it is so much fun to do. And so easy to do. Only a click away. So it's rationalized in a way like "well what could be bad about learning learning is always valuable!!" without taking into account the opportunity cost of all that learning.

The key is as you say "less" and limits. There have been things over the past that I have forked to that have paid off in actual results and money. And things that have not. By devoting a set amount of time to satisfy curiosity you can gain much. But like with anything else you have to make sure you aren't shortchanging something else that is more important.

This can be rephrased as, "What's the value to you of posting on HN?"

The value to tptacek can be denominated in units of "hundreds of thousands of dollars," for example.

I have to run -- I wish I could go into more detail with this comment. I'd talk about some other non-monetary benefits, like the ability to seek out a network, or to get feedback on weaknesses, or a bunch of other things.

> Sure, but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts

No idea, I just do it for leisure. And frankly, I hardly read any TFAs posted to HN. I first read the headlines, if something seems interesting, I skip to the comments. If I still think it's interesting, I might skim TFA. I'm not trying to be time efficient or anything, that's just how I enjoy using HN.

> what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?

I basically never read posts about new stuff, unless the title says it's from someone I respect. If something shows up repeatedly, I might get interested and Google it, maybe even skim that article about it.

All in all, I think I'm using HN a bit like Twitter: Lots of noise, with a little bit of signal in it I might want to follow up on.

HN isn't to blame for this, but the current Bay Area, VC-istan culture really is toxic. I don't know how people can stay motivated with their 0.03% equity slices when some completely unqualified idiot gets his IUsedThisToilet app acquired for $4 billion just because he went to the right schools going back to preschool. It's sick.

It's best to tune that shit out, but it's hard when people are young and impressionable, and given that the contemporary Silicon Valley culture is all about extending adolescence into the mid-30s (and then discarding people)... well it's easy see why people succumb to that nonsense.

The fundamental problem is that engineers are treated as a commodity in the Valley, and investor money is prized. It should be the other way; funding should be the commodity, and high-end engineering talent should be the seat of prestige.

> The fundamental problem is that engineers are treated as a commodity in the Valley, and investor money is prized. It should be the other way; funding should be the commodity, and high-end engineering talent should be the seat of prestige.

I wish I could upvote this more.