Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia? - <AUTHOR>

The "Wikipedia for Sale" post on the front page made me wonder how many people on HN actually contribute to Wikipedia. I have never, but am interested in figuring out why. I love Wikipedia and would love to contribute by keeping spam away and stopping PR companies from being in control.<p>I'm a long time lurker, with a recently created account. This would have made more sense as a poll. Can any admin change this Ask HN into a poll with the following data points - everyday (daily contributer), once a week, once a month, few times, never <comment><USER2> I do fairly regularly, since about 2003. I used to be very involved in meta- Wikipedia stuff in the early days (policy, mailing lists, meetups, dispute- arbitration, etc.), but sort of drifted away from that once it got more professionalized, and had a Foundation set up and such.

Now I mostly write short (~2-10 paragraphs) articles on subjects that don't have articles. I usually start from a good source, like an encyclopedia of scientists, or a book on 18th-century Scandinavian art, and look at what it covers that Wikipedia doesn't yet. Then I pick one of those things, look on Google Books/Scholar for additional sources (it's ideal to have at least 2 sources for an article), and write a short summary of what I've found on the subject.

A different kind of editing, which I do mostly as a kind of "don't have to think too much" unwinding that I find enjoyable somehow, is various stuff from a long list of filing/curation/sorting tasks that always need to be done. For example, take something from the category listing the thousands of articles that could/should have lat/long coordinates added but don't yet [1], and see if I can find its coordinates (on OpenStreetMap, on official websites, etc.).

Another useful low-key thing to do is to pick some articles that you know something about or have an interest in, but which are less popular (not hugely popular articles like [[Barack Obama]] that already have many editors), and add them to your Watchlist. If you then check the Watchlist periodically for edits to those articles, you can be part of the distributed tiny communities curating the more obscure parts of Wikipedia. This can be sometimes just be noticing when someone makes a questionable edit (whether spam or otherwise). But it can also be positive attention, e.g. if another editor asks a question on the Talk page proposing a change to an article or questioning part of it or asking if something they added is ok, you'll see that on your Watchlist and might have something to weigh in with, which makes the parts of the encyclopedia you're paying attention to feel like less of a ghost town (it can be frustrating when you comment on a less-popular article and literally nobody answers for months... the opposite of the problem you get in really contentious parts of the encyclopedia).

A final really easy thing to do, and probably Wikipedia's most famous cultural export, is to add {{citation needed}} if you run across a sentence making a claim that seems like it really should be backed up, but doesn't seem to be cited anywhere in the vicinity. Even better to find a source and add <ref>Source</ref>, but tagging as citation-needed is still helpful. This is not only for claims that you think are dubious or wrong, since even likely correct claims should have a reference where readers can verify.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_missing_geoco...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_missing_geocoordinate_data_by_country)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've tried on a three occasions to contribute to wikipedia - Two occasions where I've found articles with incorrect data based off of poor sources, and once to correct a minor grammatical issue, with all of the articles in question being small and non-political in nature. Every time I was promptly reverted. In the former's case I always provided sources for my updated info, which were completely ignored the first occasion, and on the second occasion the article was later edited to include both pieces of info, despite clear scientific consensus for the new. In the latter's case I was simply reverted without explanation.

I really didn't feel like fighting the reverts, and I suppose I probably won't edit any more pages. It really seems like a contributor-hostile environment.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious to see the change you made, since I've done the same thing hundreds of times (adding or changing an article and giving a reference) and I haven't noticed random reversion.

<comment><USER3> I considered including that in this post, but it would have the net effect of tying several of my online accounts to my real name, and I'd like to avoid that. Sorry!

<comment><USER4> I understand, I don't even like linking my pseudo-anonymous accounts across different sites. Eventually you'd give away enough information that you could be easily identified anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, let's see...

I submitted an article about one of the most important writers of my country, and it was deleted because it is apparently irrelevant. Years later someone submitted a stub, and it remains like that until today.

I fixed a dead link on the Kalman Filters page, and the change was promptly reverted because apparently linking to youtube is not allowed. So now only I have the correct link. Oh, well.

I contributed to the discussion regarding the statistics for rape in the US (the "1 in 6" figure doesn't hold), but the discussion went nowhere, as expected.

The only thing I've actually managed to fix was a reference to "Les Miserables" taking place during the French Revolution (it doesn't) and the occasional typo, but nothing really important.

<comment><USER6> I've fixed typos and then they got reverted back.

<comment><USER7> Thats the sort of thing that would definately make me loose hope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've contributed to some articles on string search algorithms. Most of my work has gone into the Boyer-Moore article, which has seen only minor edits since I rewrote it two years ago. There are many pages on algorithms that need some love, and it's a great way to gain an in-depth understanding of the algorithm in question. I haven't edited anything in a while though, mostly due to lack of compulsion.

For math and computer science topics there doesn't seem to be any of the edit warring or toxicity you hear so much about in other areas. Given HN's audience I would recommend starting out by adopting the page of your favorite algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER9> I only ever correct errors or add extra detail. I've never created an article or written anything substantial, mostly because the risk of having substantial work removed because I didn't "do it right" is extremely unappealing to me (and I could spend the time on my own business or content).

I think you have to be extremely intrinsically motivated or community minded (both good things, of course!) to contribute significantly there because the only reward seems to be happy about a job well done.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been an active editor since 2011, primarily on the topics of computational biology and African American history.[1] I started by inserting citations, then by incorporating a couple of term papers I had collecting dust, before finally graduating to major rewrites of (relatively) popular articles.

Thankfully, in computational biology articles PR flacks and wiki-lawyers are at a minimum. The extent of my experience with the former extends to over- enthusiastic academics promoting their particular software. I recommend it to students, not only as a way to get some use out of old term papers, but also as a way to sharpen one's writing skills. Because it's an important vehicle for outreach there's the potential for recognition as well.[2]

I'd have to say that one of the highlights of my editing career has been receiving an email from the descendant of an article's subject thanking me for telling their story.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Estevezj](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Estevezj)

[2]: [http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...](http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1003242)

</comment><comment><USER11> I contribute to Wikipedia.

User page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dllu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dllu)

I've started a few articles on niche topics and created many pictures/animations.

<comment><USER2> Those are some really nice animations and diagrams! What do you use to make the 2d vector graphics? Inkscape?

<comment><USER11> Some of them are generated using my own C++ programs. For example, the series on Monte Carlo localization ([https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Robot_localizati...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Robot_localization)) is simply too tedious to be created by hand. The C++ program source code generating the nine pictures can be found at [https://gist.github.com/dllu/7076603](https://gist.github.com/dllu/7076603)

As for the diagram of the teletherapy capsule ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Teletherapy_Capsule_3.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Teletherapy_Capsule_3.svg)), I wrote out the SVG file by hand in a text editor. Extreme boredom sometimes makes one do that kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I fix typos or obvious errors when I see them (mostly grammatical rather than factual). Beyond that, the politics is a bit of a turn-off and most of the articles on subjects I know a thing or two about are well-maintained. I guess my knowledge isn't very unique... :(

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't make a hobby out of editing, but when I'm reading an article in a field I know a little about and I come across an egregious error, I usually edit it, or leave an edit request if the page is protected.

I do the same thing for articles outside my areas of knowledge if the error is particularly galling and unambiguously incorrect.

Because I use wikipedia quite a lot, I'd say I leave an edit about twice a month.

Having said that, much, much more often I encounter a minor error that I don't have the time to investigate. In this kind of case I think "boy, I bet the source doesn't actually back that up", but it doesn't seem important enough to break my workflow to look into.

</comment><comment><USER14> Edited frequently about 2002-2004. About Israel. At that time, Wikipedia was so young and sparsely populated that it was still possible to make great advances on such a contentious topic despite hugely different point of views.

Then the trolls came, pov pushers and various ideologues who thought that the best way to push their view on wikipedia was to make "the other sides" editors be as miserable as possible. People that don't really care about history or facts or even being right as long as their side wins.

So every edit or addition became stuck in discussions on talk pages or the mailing list. Lots of slurs about editors being anti-semites, racism etc.. Not only from trolls but also from admins. Thing is, when you want to write stuff you're at a distinct disadvantage versus those who likes to delete it. It can take you days to research a single paragraph while people who don't like you just have to spend a few minutes coming up with a reason why it's off-topic for the article, biased or something else. Then the ones with the most political clout in the Wikipedia establishment wins.

You also can't start a fresh on Wikipedia. If you edited about Israel (or Palestine for that matter) and upset some people, they will follow you around and try to find reasons why your edits suck even in totally different topic areas.

It's incredibly frustrating experience and huge amount of work. So you'll ask yourself what's the point? Unless you're a fanatic the answer is "absolutely no fucking point" so you let the extremists have their way and spend your time with more fullfilling hobbies!

<comment><USER15> Not that you're wrong, but it should be no suprise when you engaged in edit wars on one of the most touchy subjects on earth.

<comment><USER2> That's generally been my experience, that editing contentious topics on Wikipedia is roughly average for the topic, rather than having any strongly Wikipedia-specific characteristics. Sometimes better than elsewhere, sometimes worse.

I've been on committees in academia to co-write overviews of subjects in which there is some contentious debate, even in the computer-science sense of political rather than real-world politics, and they have not all been straightforward or enjoyable experiences. If 10 people have very different views of a subject, where several of them hold the views strongly, and we are collaboratively supposed to write a neutral overview of a topic, it takes a lot of work and negotiation to reach any kind of agreement.

I suspect if you were to select 10 experts in the I/P conflict from across the ideological spectrum, and put them in a room for a week, asking them to replace a few of these Wikipedia articles with better ones, you would not get anything better, if anything at all. You might get some fistfights!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been kicking around there for a few years. Mostly writing about military history. :) my advice is to avoid the dramas and pick a nice quiet topic area to contribute in.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes, but I've substantially reduced my editing over the last 3 years.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gwern](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gwern) / [http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume](http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume) / [http://www.gwern.net/tags/Wikipedia](http://www.gwern.net/tags/Wikipedia)

</comment><comment><USER18> I was a pretty active editor in the early days, mostly building out articles on Jazz musicians that were particularly stubby.

I had a watchlist of pages I cared about and everything. I gave up as my personal life became more interesting.

I also had a knack of finding movies in the Public Domain and getting good image captures for their photos. Photos of Charlie Barnett and Count Basie are two examples that still exist. The photo of Paulette Goddard (which I'm the most proud of) did not survive on the English language wikipedia ([http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/PauletteG...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/PauletteGoddardinSecondChorus.jpg))

Now, if I edit something, it's a typo, or something stupid (akin to "George Washington had X-ray vision.")

</comment><comment><USER19> I generally don't contribute, because the rules are incredibly complicated and I don't really care for them.

Recently I stumbled onto an article with a [citation needed] after watching a video that (I suppose) would have been the perfect citation for it (I mean a mustached retired high school teacher, speaking about the old times, that's the best source you can get!).

Hell broke loose, the doc for video citation is intractable, so I wanted to put the link on the talk page for someone with knowledge to do it, but youtube is banned in text. So my wikipedia career in on hold until my motivation crosses a certain threshold. It's not beginner friendly, and i don't really care about their editing procedure (it's mostly based on the scientific one which is bogus too).

If someone cares, it's on White Lead talk page.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've contributed since 2006 (under a different username than here), with several peak years, totaling 14k edits so far. I'm an inclusionist who insists on good reliable sourcing for extraordinary claims, and who frequently defends articles from deletion by adding obvious sources (or which would be obvious if the deletionists _ever_ bothered to look). The couple dozen articles I've written have been sourced well enough not to be nominated for deletion or attacked in any significant way. I've also helped out over the years on the #en-wikipedia-help IRC channel. I'm a [http://enwp.org/WP:Wikignome](http://enwp.org/WP:Wikignome) and anti-PR activist, and I'm proud of (but a little jealous I missed out on) the recent investigation of and purge of the Wiki-PR infestation.

</comment><comment><USER21> I correct errors and flag missing sources when I see them but nothing more than that. The bigger issues I've seen would require a lot more time to fix. Given all the terrible experiences I've heard with admins I'm not willing to spend that time just to have it reverted.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been a contributor since 2010 [1]. My first contribution was to create the NuGet package manager article [2]. Since then I mostly fix typo's, undo vandalism, fix or delete dead links and other wee odds and sods.

I avoid controversial topic stuff because I just don't have the time or energy to argue the toss about whether something should be in the wiki or about the content of a wiki article.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Teh_klev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Teh_klev)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuget](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuget)

</comment><comment><USER23> I used to contribute for a few years, around 2003–2005. I largely stopped because the amount of ideology and trolling is just too much to bother. I see Wikipedia as a failed community – there is a strong bureaucracy very strong groupthink and everything that falls outside that is often met with resistance, outlash and deletionism. Also, what bjourne says in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6584940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6584940)

</comment><comment><USER24> Been an editor for quite a while---mostly to correct things. Could be typos, factual errors, errors of omission, normal editor kind of stuff for those categories I know well enough to do the job. I've rarely been involved in a disagreement and as I remember it all of those were resolved peaceably :) Funny that you should ask this as I just did an edit on the 4th Infantry page a few hours ago. You kind of have to be a little bit OCD for this kind of stuff, but as I am, no problem!

</comment><comment><USER25> I edited quite a lot in the early days, gave up after an administrator decided to wiki-lawyer me to death on the C++ page (he/she seemed to think that C++ should be defined as "things that g++ accepts"). Realised it was a battle I would never win.

Now I occasionally edit very minor articles if I look at them, but never anything that gets more than an edit a month, as such changes will be swallowed up and spit out fairly quickly, in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been a contributor to Wikipedia for a few years. I mostly do small corrections but occasionally make an article or vastly improve an article.

My most significant wiki-creation is my Peltier element diagram (which explains how to read Peltier element IDs.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peltier_IDs_explained.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peltier_IDs_explained.svg)

</comment><comment><USER27> The extent of my contributions are purely financial. I'm still waiting for the day that they will announce Bitcoin as a donation method. I email them every year to ask if they will accept it.

In terms of edits and content, I'm with the others, I'm reluctant to get involved due to all of the moderation and politics involved. I find many of them can be very arrogant especially when you point out that they are wrong.

</comment><comment><USER15> I anonymously contributed mostly to automotive pages, and mostly for the Polish versions. I found everything in English got reverted, in Polish the vast part holded up (even a link to my own on-topic website). Probably regional versions aren't that nazi as the main one, although I've seen crazy discussions on every subject even mildly touching politics, for obvious reasons (some zealots are just ridiculous).

<comment><USER2> I think it varies a bit; the German Wikipedia is actually considerably more strict on inclusion criteria than the English Wikipedia, but others are less strict.

<comment><USER15> Maybe. I always avoided getting into 'somebody is wrong on the internet' over touchy subjects, rather filled in technical data or trivia on my hobby topics or more often niche wiki sites (not wikipedia.org). Sometimes I regret the lost street-cred of doing it anon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> W00t w00t. >2K edits over nearly 10 years. I contribute in spurts around topics I know things about that don't have articles yet.

<comment><USER24> W00t indeed! +1 to you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've written a few articles for Wikipedia, and also fix vandalism occasionally. The only problem i have is when i try to create an article for a product or company. People always think that they are biased, which isn't a bad thing since the Wiki-PR came about. But it gets very irritating when the article is not biased, but still gets marked as such.

</comment><comment><USER30> For me Wikipedia is the second most valuable resource on the web after Google. I donate $30 every year without hesitation.

<comment><USER31> I've donated $10 once or twice. Feels good to support it! Too many people take it for granted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I contributed fairly regularly during the early days of the site, but these days I contribute rarely -- mostly to make minor factual corrections or add sources. I haven't run into much of the site's famed editorial bureaucracy but what little I have doesn't encourage me to contribute more.

</comment><comment><USER6> i used to contribute. But now I don't. Too many times my edits were changed back.

People want their stupid links on the site and they're plastered everywhere. In the future, the first thing you'll read about Leonardo da Vinci is that he came in 8th place in your Time Magazine Gold Special Genius Award with a link to the Time Magazine website. Of course in the fine print you'll find out that the award was decided by readers' votes.

You'll see this trend when you look at British people on wikipedia like Tim Berners Lee who was ranked number 1 in greatest living geniuses in 2007 by of course a british paper. A few years ago, this was mentioned in the first paragraph of the wikipedia article.

The future of wikipedia is the largest pile of spam on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER33> i once tried to improve an explanation of some physical process and was criticised for adding "original research". i have no idea how explaining something in terms of basic physics is "research", but that ended my wikipedia career.

</comment><comment><USER34> Well.. I do fix errors in existing articles when I find out one. Yesterday I've fixed two. The only time that I tried to submit article I failed because I leave it to do the next day, but someone was very fast and did it at midnight.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've done a little bit of light editing, mostly fixing or adding links and correcting the occasional typo. Probably averages to once or twice per year.

</comment><comment><USER36> I mostly correct typos or small inaccuracies, but I've occasionally expanded articles on niche topics that I know very well (such as my high school).

</comment><comment><USER37> I can only do minor edits in niche pages, other pages are already quite full or simply above my head. My account is also new, maybe 1 year.

</comment><comment><USER38> I donate money when they ask (about $5 each time) and I correct typos about 2-3 times per year (as I see them).

</comment><comment><USER39> 17,558 edits since 2003.

<comment><USER40> nice! i broke 10k a few years back, but haven't touched it much since the [[citation needed]] brigade took over.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Curve – abstracting away your bank - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/17/throwng-a-fintech-curveball/ <comment><USER2> "Show HN" is for submissions that users can try out.

Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> > All your cards

That is the problem. It is also easy to solve. Just don't have so many cards.

</comment><comment><USER4> Less cards ftw.</comment>


Sparks: A Package Management System for Codeigniter - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/03/sparks-a-package-management-system-for-codeigniter.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d7c456bb83ca796%2C0 <comment><USER2> I wish more attention would return to Kohana (kohanaframework.org), which is basically CodeIgniter done better by a community of coders, except the documentation for 3.x is sparse and IMO certain things in 2.x were better.

This idea for CI is nice, but the video reminded me of one of the more annoying parts of CI: $this->load->whatever()ing everything, which should be rightfully obsoleted for everybody running PHP5 as it is in Kohana, because PHP can autoload classes with your own custom __autoload() function. It's wasted effort to manually load everything and the collisions created in the local namespace are intolerable.

<comment><USER3> Kohana 3.x has nothing to do with the Codeigniter framework. Even Kohana 2.x was a complete rewrite from Codeigniter.

Kohana is indeed a much modern PHP MVC framework. It supports a cascading file-system and HMVC out of the box. There is a lack a polished documentation but I've been working with Kohana 3.x since it's release and the documentation hasn't been much of an issue.

However, if you're new to MVC and/or programming Codeigniter might be a better choice.

Concerning the post. I'm not sure how useful this is. The amount of time you spend installing modules/plugins is disproportional to the amount of time you spend on building your site. Normally you end up using a handful of modules over and over again anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this'll be a big deal.

While I do have to agree with pak about the ugliness (and annoying semantics) of $this->load->thing(), it was something the CI team had to keep around since the framework was already very successful in the wild, and the devs had their backs against the wall to support PHP 4. The Kohana team (or any newer framework) had the benefit of initially not needing to appease anybody when they wanted to build something for pure PHP 5.

Kohana had great beginnings, and I used it to develop a major website owned by NBC. The most annoying part of using it? The documentation was sorely lacking, and class names were inconsistent at best. At least docs are something that can change for the better quickly, but broken docs are something that have persisted through 2.x and 3.x.

Beauty is not something CodeIgniter has going for it. In fact, if you agree with that, you're likely to agree that PHP in general in an ugly language. But CodeIgniter has gained it's loyalty and reputation because of:

1\. Speed - It's always at the top of PHP framework benchmarks, and use of minimal resources is ingrained in it's design philosophy

2\. Documentation - It has the best documentation of any framework that I've seen or used

3\. Principle of Least Astonishment - There is little magic in CodeIgniter, and things in CI only happen because you told CI to do it. Like $this->load->view(). It means more typing, but it's logical, and explicitly stated.

CodeIgniter has a big user-base, and it's weathered time, which is more than other frameworks for the language can say. Now, users are begging the Reactor team to add libraries and helpers to the framework as features. The Reactor team's goal is to keep CI light and fast — the idea is to pack a lot of power in a small footprint.

That's where Sparks comes in. It's not just about easily installable libs (@pan69), it's about keeping the core framework ultra-light and doing what a framework should be doing.

I think sparks is going to help CodeIgniter cement its place as a staple PHP framework, which really doesn't exist for the language. Newer frameworks with snazzier syntax and cool features will always pop up, but the Reactor team plans to make it /the/ primary framework to use for PHP.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hope they add db migrations soon, the reactor has really breathed life back into the CodeIgniter community. However, I'm still in love with FuelPHP for PHP Frameworks.</comment>


Did You Hear We Got Osama? - <AUTHOR> http://roshfu.com/2012/02/17/did-you-hear-we-got-osama.html <comment><USER2> It is really, really, really, really, really hard for me to find a good temporary distraction nowadays. The noise is so monotonous, so repetitive, so completely devoid of intellectual stimulation that I go between four websites in a loop looking for something interesting to read.

HN has maybe one article every two hours that pops up to the top that I find worth reading, and maybe half the time worth upvoting. And that's the only good source of noise I have. Everything else is shit.

I don't care about politics. I don't care about the tech scene, or gadgets, or games, or celebrities, or sports, or this quarter's fiscal projections for a multinational corporation. You name a "news" story and I probably would hate to read about it. Even if I want to read it, it has almost no background information or anything more than the re-cutting of a press release with a paragraph describing why the press release was released. Regurgitated stock information with nothing of value.

Here's some choice excerpts from Google News, which I guess is supposed to be some representation of what's happening in journalism today:

      * Microsoft unveils new, more window-like logo for Windows 8
      * Robin Thicke Arrested for Pot Possession
      * The mostly good and sometimes bad Top 10 moments of Tim Wakefield's Red Sox career
      * [John] Glenn worries the US is ceding its space leadership
      * Ohio AG DeWine switches from Romney to Santorum
      * Identity Theft Tops IRS's 2012 "Dirty Dozen" Tax Scams
      * GOP candidates fighting over Michigan
      * Anthony Shadid, New York Times foreign correspondent, dies at 43
      * FDA Still Wary of Diet Pill's Side Effects

I don't want noise, but sometimes I _need_ noise. And when I want it, I want it to be worth while. It seems like nothing on the internet ever is.

<comment><USER3> Frequency and quality are negatively correlated when it comes to news.

I would recommend Instapaper's curated list of articles, which tend to be long-form and more interesting than most, as well as The Browser ("Writing Worth Reading") for curated quality content. <http://www.thebrowser.com>

But you're not going to find quality content many times a day, no matter where you look.

<comment><USER2> I'm sure you're right. There's just not enough people writing to explain random complex subjects to people that don't study that field. And i'm correlating the concept of "news" with interesting information, when news reporting is basically repeating that which happens every single day. Thank you for the link, that may be just what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a topic that I've thought some on in that my company is in the recommendations space, and some thoughts on what make news recommendations difficult:

 _The function of news is to facilitate smalltalk._

I am reasonably convinced of this. News, as such, is mostly just something that you're supposed to have read so that you can get by in usual social interactions. What we read (and are supposed to have read) is very tied to our place in the social hierarchy. Most folks don't actually want news to be _too_ personalized because then it loses its social function.

I stopped reading the news at one point -- for a couple years -- because of its persistent lack of depth. I realized that reading 100 BBC articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would leave me knowing virtually _nothing_ about it, other than some factoids, whereas the same time spent reading books would be worthwhile.

There's an interesting problem to be solved here -- one that's been on my mental back-burner for a while. I'm not sure if Pandora's box can be resealed and we can work our way back to mediums with more depth and less distraction, but I both hope we can, and have much interest in the mechanism for such.

<comment><USER5> Why is there not a service that tracks news stories and algorithmically relates them into the narrative of history, driven by the singular question of "why?"? Something in between google news and quora/stack exchange (anonymized to avoid embarrassment of dumb questions like "what are Israel and Palestine fighting over anyway?" but with a points/voting system to propagate quality answers.) Whoever makes this, please Tell HN so I can sign up for your beta.

<comment><USER6> I am working on this very thing, and in fact it's called Whybase (<http://whybase.com>).

<comment><USER7> Got invites for HNers?

<comment><USER6> Hi Will. Sure, you can use the standard invite form on the home page now, and we'll post a special HN sign-up form when we make the official announcement in the upcoming months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of the classic Sherlock Holmes quote:

"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

<comment><USER9> I love that excerpt. The Holmes books were among my favorites growing up, read all of them several times, and that was one of the most memorable exchanges.

I'm a big believer that what is easy to produce (blog posts, daily news articles) is generally less valuable than what is hard to produce (books, journal articles, working code). If you want to fill your 'empty attic' with high-value information, focus on the latter as much as possible.

<comment><USER10> > I'm a big believer that what is easy to produce (blog posts, daily news > articles) is generally less valuable than what is hard to produce (books, > journal articles, working code).

I agree with you, especially in light of your "generally" caveat, but taking the lesson from the Holmes quote above... there are contexts in which the easily accessible approach of a blog post is far more valuable than a journal article on the same topic, along with the ability to provide prompt updates when the situation changes.

Context, my dear Watson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> John Irving nailed it in A Prayer for Owen Meany:

"Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news—the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, and whatever appetites and capacities I may have had for detachment and reflection are suddenly subordinate to this cheeseburger in my life! I offer this as self-criticism; but what it means to be "political" is that you welcome these obsessions with cheeseburgers—at great cost to the rest of your life."

<comment><USER12> Most of what's in a newspaper is junk food, but there are very worthy parts: I find columns in NYT by Krugman, Brooks and Douthat to be thought-provoking even if I don't agree. And I find feature pieces of social or economic trends to be enlightening and helpful in terms of understanding people and the workings of our world.

You might not find such understanding of people and of the world to be worthy goal in itself, but even so such an understanding is useful as a framing device or an anology store for general reasonsing. In the same way that a mastery of philosophy has value as a reasoning device.

And, there is the value as source of inspiration: pointers towards topics to read up on or ideas to incorporate into one's life/work

<comment><USER11> I think what Irving was going for was less about news being worthless in the sense of the content being garbage, but rather that the distractions introduced into ones life by caring about national/world affairs of which we as individuals have little impact come at a great cost to our reserve of emotional energy.

That said... I work in politics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well put. My only counterpoint: sure, if you want to be 100% productive 100% of the time, don't succumb to distractions.

If you see coworkers chatting over a coffee, do you think, "wow, they're being totally unproductive. They don't need those coffees, they should be working!"? Of course not.

Consuming _and discussing_ news is a social activity. If your life is your work and nothing else, you'd be a very boring person.

Consuming information by choice allows us to express ourselves later with our opinions. Everyone should make an effort to learn about their surroundings to be an informed, contributing member of a democratic society. People say politicians are out of touch, but compared to a lot of Americans who willingly cut off their exposure to news, are they really?

It's actually funny reading your post, because you sound exactly like me when I was your age. As you get older, I think you'll learn to appreciate relationships with people more. The 18+ hour startup days lose their appeal.

<comment><USER14> _Consuming information by choice allows us to express ourselves later with our opinions. Everyone should make an effort to learn about their surroundings to be an informed, contributing member of a democratic society. People say politicians are out of touch, but compared to a lot of Americans who willingly cut off their exposure to news, are they really?_

If you are not an expert on a political issue. You are uninformed, period. You don't have time to write papers, do extensive research, email scientists. The reality of being humans is that we don't know most of everything and we can't. We specialize, not have uber intelligent men decide the fate of humanity.

This is the problem with politics. It's not that we are stupid, it's just that our brain can't store and think through the vast amount of knowledge needed to decide on multiple complex issues. To believe that we can build our society with informed voters in democracies is extremely naive.

<comment><USER15> "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

\- Sir Winston Churchill

<comment><USER16> "the best argument against democracy is a ten minute conversation with the average voter" - reportedly Churchill as well

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that's the point. Democracy sucks. But what's the alternative?

<comment><USER17> I was wondering just that a few weeks ago. I found this perspective interesting to think about, even if it's impractical... <http://www.see.org/garcia/e02.htm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you work in a tech startup, obviously you don't have to read every political story but I believe you absolutely should be aware about the Path situation, Kickstarter, and all other trends and most companies in our industry.

If you're not aware of these things, your boss is, and they are going to ask you to implement a screen that informs the user you are uploading their address book. If you've seen a large breadth of products and companies like Kickstarter, you will easily pick up on macro trends like UI/UX paradigms and significant technologies.

If you had some sophisticated filtering like a user has in another popular HN post today to get rid of things you don't like, you might miss out on trends like NoSQL or Node or Redis or Clojure, or you might upload a user's address book without permission and get caught.

If you are not up-to-date with your industry, I think in reality you will always be an employee of or a laggard to the person who knows about those things.

<comment><USER19> I think the author's is people make mistakes way too much more on the other end of the spectrum where they read news while deceiving themselves into thinking it's a productive activity. I know I'm guilty.

It might be worth it to push the boundaries in the other direction until you get too little information and miss out. You might be surprised how far that boundary is. It was certainly true in the author's case. Until you try, you don't know and you won't be able to calibrate your system correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow. This really hit me in the face. This is exactly my situation, my issues right now (and I am also a college/university freshman). I am spending so much time consuming information that I am behind on essentially everything I should and could be doing. I think I needed to read this.

"What followed were the most productive three years of my life."

It's become an addiction for sure, but I have had enough. Seeing someone else with the exact same issue, stating the above about productive years, is inspiring. I'm done, it's time to do things, get my life back on track. I don't need to know "everything", and I shouldn't try to build my world around that.

Thank you for making me realize it.

<comment><USER21> You sound like me 3 years ago. I used to go into zombie-mode for long periods of time just reading every single link on Reddit, Google Reader, random news sites, etc. and afterwards I'd hardly be able to remember any of it. I still do this on occasion, but it's much less of a problem now. I had to take a tough approach with myself to build some better habits, but it worked.

I decided was that if I was going to take the time to read something, I would get something out of it. I would only read things that were genuinely useful, interesting, or valuable in some way. I had to come up with a way to force myself to think about what I was reading a little, so I kept a text file on my desktop with a record of every single article I had read. I started with just copying the URL and writing a 1-3 sentence summary, and even this was enough to make me think twice before opening links - "Is this article worth the effort to think about it enough to write a summary?" That was still pretty quick, so I added two more requirements- a 1-3 sentence critique of the article- just what I thought about it, whether I thought the author was incorrect/lying/exaggerating, etc. - and something interesting in the article- the kind of thing I might bring up if I was telling somebody about it.

Writing these things for every article started to feel a little like English class, but it worked. I got in the habit of pausing to think about whether I should click a link or continue reading, I started reading closely and critically, rather than just skimming half of it and moving on, I started paying attention to which news sites, blogs, and domains had worthwhile content and which had garbage, and most importantly, I would actually remember what I had read, and could talk or think intelligibly about it. Also, even though I was only 'requiring' myself to write a few sentences about each article, I found that I often didn't mind writing more, and trying to put some simple structure into my written thoughts would lead to new insights.

I've stopped regularly keeping the journal, but the habit of thinking about what I'm doing while surfing sites like HN has stayed with me.

I've been thinking about this since I read the blog post, and it might be time to take it up another notch. Instead of focusing on important articles, maybe I should focus on important _topics_ , and do more of my own research, rather than just reading whatever comes up here. For example, I might read an article here about weird Javascript tricks, find the topic interesting, then read whatever I can find about the Javascript type system, closures, prototype- based programming, until I feel that I have a solid understanding of the topic, or my interest has been satiated. Maybe this takes a few days and I skip HN entirely in the meantime.

I think some people probably do this naturally but I've found that I tend toward zombie-mode.

<comment><USER22> Fantastic idea!

I've recently taken to discarding my bookmarks and relying on other methods to save interesting links. If I want to save something for later use, I'll tweet about it, write a tiny blog post about it, or jot it down in a notebook. I'm not terribly diligent about it, but it's made a huge impact towards helping me filter what is truly important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How do you responsibly participate in a democracy when you ignore world news?

For example, how can you judge two presidential candidates' positions on foreign policy when you don't know what other nations have been up to?

The OP doesn't discriminate between junk news, entertainment news, and knowing what is going on in the world.

<comment><USER24> Argument #1: Presidential candidates _are_ noise. Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone. If you want to be a good citizen, your time is probably best spent on convincing your friends to vote in local races. Or doing not-explicitly-political work that contributes to justice, peace and prosperity. A small career choice can do a lot more than the most forceful checkmark on a ballot.

Argument #2: You probably need something like ten kilobytes of information to make a reasonable decision about which presidential candidate to vote for. This is way less than the amount of information that news-oriented people spend their time and attention to absorb on a single day.

(If you want to overkill, on November 1st you could read the election issue of _The Economist_ cover to cover, whatever political posts are on the front page of HN, and the Wikipedia pages for the major issues. Then sit and think carefully for an hour. This would take about five hours, and I'll bet $1 you'd vote for the same candidate you would have if you'd read five hours of political news per day for the last year.)

<comment><USER25> >Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone.

One could make a good argument that this kind of faulty thinking is the reason third party candidates can never get any footing, and also the reason that we get such downright evil people elected.

Your vote is not "foregone" unless you choose not to vote. Period.

<comment><USER24> Oh? What's the fault in the thinking?

I think it's not a problem in the utility equation for an individual voter, it's a problem in the system. By definition, a vote in a non-swing state is insignificant.

Empirically, a good showing for a third-party candidate has no significant effect on the political discourse, and your individual share of giving that candidate a strong showing is negligible.

Voting in the US is badly broken. I strongly favor equal representation, a multiparty system, and other reforms. Part of getting to them is admitting things like my vote, for one, being foregone.

<comment><USER26> _By definition, a vote in a non-swing state is insignificant._

This is only true in the context of a single election. Over multiple election cycles, small movements in voting patterns can announce the start of a trend. Saying your vote doesn't count is an abdication of responsibility - 'somebody ought to do something about it, but 'they' would never allow it, hurf durf.'

<comment><USER24> As I said, empirically, those announcements are not important. Look at Perot, Nader, Paul – those votes might have been half an epsilon further from wasted than a vote for Obama or McCain, but they were still vastly less effective than any of a dozen other political actions using equal time and effort. And your importance to any trend is inversely proportional to its importance.

As prodigal_erik points out in a sibling comment, this is a systemic problem with our electoral system. It has nothing to do with hurf durf.

Seriously, saying the median American's vote doesn't count is a statistically founded observation, not an ethical action. In terms of ethical actions, I'm advocating for the _opposite_ of laziness-posing-as-cynicism. I want a kind of intellectual vigor about politics where we care enough to spend our resources where they'll do the most good. We should care about school boards and our own jobs, not the essentially symbolic presidential vote.

Voting is like buying a spatula with a pink handle. Refusing to work with a company that donates to an irresponsible county commissioner is like convincing a bright student to work in cancer research. It's way less cool and way more important.

The best way out of this is the (virtual) abolition of the Electoral College or the adoption of true electoral reform. These are more realistic goals than they might seem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What helps me get off the news pipeline:

 _No one is remembered for being well read._ \- some blog post I've lost, but the quote is still written on my chalkboard, luckily.

 _when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create._ _why

EDIT: I know it's ironic that these came from online sources. I guess the point is about balance and focused, purposeful consumption you later use.

<comment><USER28> lots of people are remembered for being well read. Take someone like Noam Chomsky. He has written many books based on facts he has read, remembered, and used to support his point of view. his opinion is included, but it is always supported by countless examples and recitation of facts. I have friends that read everything and know a lot on most subjects that intrest me. I admire that a lot, and it is always refreshing to converse with them and learn new things. Some people have the skill of great memory and ability to conjure up information at the right time to create powerful statements.

<comment><USER29> First of all Chomsky is still alive, and secondly, I'm almost certain that he won't be remembered for his poltical writings, but for his scientific contributions.

People don't even read his very early political works much anymore. His new material is what gets most consumed and keeps his name in people's minds.

<comment><USER30> Chomsky's writings are still standard reading for people in various activist communities. He will most likely be remembered for both, and for the fact that he contributed both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I changed my habits a few months ago after reading <http://www.marco.org/2011/09/04/sane-rss-usage>. I'm _really_ happy I did that.

        "RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites"

I have 6-7 feeds in my Reeder.app and check them weekly.

(Edit) related HN submission and comments: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959928

<comment><USER32> I don't read newspapers, or watch news, or follow current events at all, except for hn, and I agree that most if not all news is of completely no consequence to my life but I do have ~130 feeds in my rss reader and derive a lot of value from them.

From 10 or so comics that are pure distraction (but great to steal jokes from), through blogs on fashion and style (at least I now know when I'm terribly dressed) to life-changing, paradigm-shifting feeds like Overcoming Bias (it's about signalling), The Last Psychiatrist (we're all narcissists) or Barking up the wrong tree (science delivered in tabloid style).

So instead of turning the noise down, this advice allows you to pick your kind of noise.

<comment><USER31> I think you're using RSS very well (unlike what I used to do).

I like Apple products and use/write for them. I used to have MacRumors, 9to5mac, Cult of Mac, TUAW, The Apple Blog, TC, and a dozen more Apple-related feeds in my RSS (among other feeds). When there was a keynote or a new product announcement, all those websites would publish essentially the same thing over and over again, and I had to 'mark all as read'. I was using RSS wrong, and I'm glad I changed my bad habit. You're using it right and I'm sure you derive value from such a diverse collection of blogs!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Let me be the contrarian here. If you limit yourself to a few content sources, you won't be able to make the leaps that come out of having access to information outside those sources and will eventually fall prey to group- think.

Might work for you for a bit but if you want to change the world, you have to be aware of it.

<comment><USER34> In my experience, a good book about the _past_ is worth a thousand news articles. (And then some.)

History repeats itself more often than we think.

Prime example:

One of the first hacks for the TX-0 was Peter Samson's music compiler, even though the TX-0 was not designed to have such capabilities and to most people the thought was ridiculous.

The first hack for the Altair was Steve Dompier's rendition of "Fool on the hill" using the Altairs radio interference. The Altair wasn't designed for this purpose either.

For some reason, two different people from different decades looking at similar (But very different) machines decided to do the same thing with them, without any prompting.

There are universal concepts that humans try to implement, improve, and expand upon. Keeping these in mind while trying to do cool stuff will go further than most news pieces. (Even the ones about other people doing cool stuff.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> If you have zero interest in the news I think there is something wrong with you not the news. If you don't educate yourself about the issues going on in the world you're contributing to the ignorance of the American (and global) public. Would your life be virtually unchanged if you didn't know about SOPA? Saying that politics doesn't interest you is like saying you don't care about your society and those around you. Imagine if people hadn't watched/read/listened to some form of "the news" during Arab spring, during Prop 8, during the Civil Rights movement, during the height of the fight for women's rights, during apartheid? I guess you would just go on living right? This really reeks of a super young person (which the author outed himself as). I'm all for finding alternative sources of information rather than traditional media (which is biased no matter what source you use). In UG I took a course called "making the news" and learned some very valuable information, namely don't trust what you read--you've got to dig deeper and find several sources in order to truly understand an issue and the various bias of content producers--authors, publications and even geographic regions.

</comment><comment><USER36> That's why I love <http://daytome.com>

About 4 paragraphs of international news every day, saving you both your time and social dignity.

</comment><comment><USER37> I agree that removing noise and consumption for the sake of distraction is a fine goal, but we cannot pretend there are no consequences from going to one extreme to the other. It's tempting to look at an isolated event like Osama Bin Laden's death and think "who cares? doesn't affect me" but these events form the fabric of the world.

Democracy requires and educated and informed electorate [Jefferson], and if you don't know what the dots are, you can't connect them. Sure, willful ignorance will give you more time to be productive, but when society at large chooses this route, don't be surprised when things go downhill.

</comment><comment><USER38> "But this post isn't about politics, it's about noise."

No! It _is_ about politics. Note that most of the examples given are related to political events.

The OP does have a great point (I waste too much time on HN, perhaps); however, the kind of political aloofness desc/prescribed in the post is what, I think, is the root of the biggest political problem (not just in the US, everywhere): the best people who should be involved in politics are not. It is a common adage that the word _idiot_ was used in Ancient Greek for a person who was not interested in politics (unless of course you were a woman, slave, or farmer).

</comment><comment><USER39> I fundamentally disagree with the author, and yet agree with him at the same time. I don't have MPD, but he makes two different points.

On the one hand: no, my life would be considerably less richer if I did not pay attention to the world around me. This includes knowing who the President is and understanding why that matters, particularly in the case of the US's first black President. I grew up in Texas, and it matters to me to know that he and my father (or his predecessor) would not have even been allowed to attend school together. Regardless of one's political affiliation or outlook, the issues at that level matter, and our opinion matters. To 'embrace embraced not knowing anything about current events and the world at large' is _willful ignorance_ , and that's a value I find distasteful.

That said: of course one should manage one's intake of information. Of course one should counterbalance that with productivity. Of course one should be a source of value and not merely a sink for the news-as-entertainment complex that has gripped our society. RSS and other technologies should enable us to get control of those things for ourselves rather than watch Walter Cronkite for half an hour every night along with the rest of the nation and then go off and do whatever the party bosses say.

I agree with the problem, but the proposed solution makes things worse. Education - formal _and_ informal - has value in making better citizens of all nations.

<comment><USER40> "I grew up in Texas, and it matters to me to know that he and my father (or his predecessor) would not have even been allowed to attend school together."

Brown v. Board was in 1954. Obama didn't start school until 1967.

<comment><USER39> You may want to look into the school segregation lawsuits of the 70s, not to mention much of the civil rights movement of the 60s with a particular focus on education. The Supreme Court decision didn't automatically mean integrated schools, which is why my daughter (in an inner-ring suburb of Dallas) attends a magnet school created as part of our desegregation court order. Come to think of it, so did I (though it's, erm, been a while).

<comment><USER40> "You may want to look into the school segregation lawsuits of the 70s"

I'm quite familiar with the subject, thanks.

Those lawsuits dealt with de facto segregation based on neighborhoods, not de jure segregation based on race. It had a similar effect on the large scale, hence the lawsuits, but that doesn't mean that Obama himself wouldn't have been allowed to attend. Obama didn't live in the 'hood. His grandparents, with whom he lived in Hawaii, were white and well-to-do, and he attended an expensive private school (current tuition: $18,450/year, not including fees).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> To me this is the crux of the breadth/depth issue. Matt Might deftly distills the problem in his visual description of a PhD program [1]. The SEALs getting Osama, or knowing what the company Path does, or seeing Christopher Hitchens and William F. Buckley sit down together [2] won't affect most people's daily lives, but for someone working in the intelligence, startup, or political criticism arenas, respectively, missing these events could potentially be career suicide.

I struggle with this a lot, as active filtering takes work [3] (and I'm clearly not the only one [4]). Curated news aggregators and preferential browsing suggestion (StumbleUpon) try to address the problem. Mostly I think it's a matter of dedication and of degrees. To what extent do you maintain a laser focus (but are boring to hang out with) versus being a worldly-wise life-of-the-party type (but spread to thin to innovate on any one thing)?

[1]: <http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/> [2]: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0LR2mxqMNM> [3]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3470282> [4]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602407>

</comment><comment><USER42> Isn't not caring about current political issues the basis for the dystopia that underlies Brave New World?

</comment><comment><USER43> Not only does too much information create boredom but it can also interfere with your day to day life if you're not careful.

This habit of information snacking totally screwed up my sleeping schedule as well. It got so bad that sometimes I used to stay up till 5:00 in the morning checking one board after another and then sleeping till 12:00 pm next day.

While it did not affect my business, it did take a toll on my health (my lower back) and also because of this I used to find nothing of interest any longer because my brain had started picking up patterns in stories, funnies, and everything else i could find online. Worst part was I could see that what I was doing was not good for me but like every addiction I really didn't have enough motivation to stop it on my own.

Anyway, last year I had to shift my house. And for some reason the only ISP in that area took over a month and a half to install the damn internet connection (some legal issues over digging with the gas pipeline company). On top of that the 3G sucked so bad that even opening Gmail took 3-4 minutes to open.

Long story short, call it a forced rehab but because of that one month of life without internet my life totally got back on track. My sleeping schedule was fixed. I found my old guitar again, and now I spend time on a tonne of other interesting stuff instead of hitting F5 one random sites.

</comment><comment><USER44> News might entertain us but its chief goal is to sell advertising space. Advertising ultimately pays for almost all news* (esp. newspapers) and so news media focus on getting your attention today, and tomorrow, and using whatever techniques they can to achieve this. Entertainment is just one of these techniques. Disquiet (some might say fear) is another - the sense that things aren't quite right and the associated need to know what isn't quite right.

*BBC (UK taxpayer) and Economist (subscription) are among the exceptions.

Here's a 2008 article pointing out that news' focus on the moment is also a significant failing: <http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/against-news.html>

This 2008 article also points out the social function of news: as a common topic for discussion, particularly for determining compatibility with others (whether of belief, intellectual interest, etc)

The HN article makes a great point about how much this info effects you. If news media let their audience know that nothing happening right now was likely to effect their lives in any way for at least a week (at best, more likely never), then audience would only tune in once a week, which drops viewing figures by 86%. Also, only checking news once a week lets the information settle, and often key details emerge which negate previous reports.

Another useful trick, if cold turkey is too much, is to put a one-day or one- week delay on all incoming news (ie waiting a week to read newspapers). If nothing much is lost by a weeks delay, then its easier to go cold turkey.

</comment><comment><USER45> I find myself venturing off to all my favorite online outlets when I'm doing a task I'm not particularly interested in. I guess I should step back and ask myself why I'm really doing something. If it plays an important part in helping my start up be succeed, then I should be stoked that I get to make my company better. If I can't find a good reason to be doing it, then I should move on to something of value and importance.

</comment><comment><USER46> I use a combination of IRC(active) and Twitter/Tweetdeck(passive) for most of my online "reading" these days. It tracks the most social things: people, global topics, and "meeting places," rather than "bloggers", "pop news", or "discussion forums", which have a service/task-oriented feel to them. It is addictive, of course, so I do have to turn it off occasionally, but on balance, I get a lot of benefit out of it, since it's low-maintenance and fairly high-signal, albeit a bit prone to "what i ate for dinner" type spam.

I still go on web sites, obviously, but increasingly I see them as less relevant. Forum-style discussion in particular, whether it uses flat or hierarchical threads, encourages a combination of pedantry and the lowest- common-denominator. OTOH real time - or near real time - communication tends to motivate a link to useful long form content instead of a bad attempt to replicate it in context. This post is a great example of such. It should be done up as a full article and then linked around. As a comment, it'll probably be "lost" forever within a few days.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think a balance is necessary ...

I budget between one and two hours of my self-directed workday to skimming various tech and business blogs. I save HN for last and scan every new title line. I usually read about 15 - 30 articles during this period.

Furthermore, while I'm waiting for a build, or for a test to reach the point where my interaction is required, I go back to HN and check the page or two of new title lines.

I consider myself a productive Java programmer, writing about 30K lines of code per year for my startup project. I could create more LOC if I did not read the tech news, but I would face two issues: (1) burnout, and (2) the need to stay current with the technology.

My project is heavily leveraged with open source Java /JavaScript libraries, nearly all discovered from tech blogs. For example: Jenkins, JQuery, JSON, JavaCV, OpenChord, Netty, Sesame, the Chrome web browser, Lubuntu, etc. I build my own development & server machines so I need to keep up with hardware.

Additionally, I have steered away from possible infrastructure dead ends by observing trends, such as the move to mobile HTML5 apps.

</comment><comment><USER48> I don't know. I guess this is like swimming in a lake. Your head is down in the water most of the time, but every once in a while you lift your head to see what's around you and if you're swimming in the right direction. Swimming with your head down is like doing your work and being productive. Lifting your head up is like reading the news and know what's happening around you. I only read about 10 minutes of news each day, but that's enough to avoid trying to go through a wall blindly while not being aware of the door 2m away.

For example, I changed career because I read about how Banks screw people over and how Big Data is becoming important. Also, I decided not to work for a company, because I read it in the news how it's basically slave work and how the owners have it exceptionally good. So now I'm starting my own company, doing machine learning in finance.

</comment><comment><USER49> I can relate, i've been on both extremes of the news comsumption spectrum at various phases in my life. As a political writer, i try to read the op ed of a national paper every day. After that, i like to skim the wsj fro t page, the nyt biz section on mondays ("media mondays"), nyt science section on tuesdays, and the nyt magazine on sundays. I am from a family of newspaper editors so i look at it somewhat critically, but i save online reading & gossip mags for certain days/moments when i want to zone out and not read critically. The la times is a fantastic paper these days, website still a tad wonky on mobile but no paywall & amazing writers/content on every level. If i read nothing else i read their op ed. Also for entrepenuers i have heard anecdotally that reading a financial paper daily is a must.

</comment><comment><USER50> My own personal primary source for news has become twitter. I've realized I don't need to always the know the full details of what has happened. I just need to know that it has in fact happened. Let's say I follow different personalities: tech journalist, celebrity, personal friend, random person living in my town, CNN or NYTimes or WSJ - just by quickly scrolling through my feed I get a pretty good idea about what is going on. And I also get a sense of how important it is: if all the people I follow, who come from different career paths, are reporting on the same piece of news, it's probably something fairly important.

It's relatively quick and keeps me informed. I don't watch any of the cable news channels and don't listen to talk radio. And since I've stopped watching CNBC, my stock portfolio has been doing better as well.

</comment><comment><USER51> well, what do you want to be? a narrow-minded, ignorant human or civilized man?

seriously.

the world, life, is much more than work, work, work. understanding broader contexts, understanding where we are going and why is important. even as a founder, to come back to this extremely narrow narrative within these halls.

how do you understand you market, your consumers, your customers? a contracting economy bears different potential than an expanding one. how will you know where we are if you do not inform yourself?

how about reading a book or two, not the daily babble? you mention you've read the news but didn't understand anything. if you do not inform yourself, you will repeat the mistakes of others.

you sound like one of those pretentious fucks that don't watch tv, don't listen to current music and are proud of it. it bears of ignorance, of disregard of the output of other human beings.

</comment><comment><USER52> Sure, knowing that Osama was killed isn't a life or death piece of information but staying informed is important to many people. It doesn't have to be binary - read it all or read nothing. You can quickly stay informed if you pick news sources that respect your time.

IMO, reading several short summaries of current events is a better solution than limiting yourself to 1 or 2 stories a day. That's exactly why I created a website[1] that crowd sources summaries of news articles. People come in, read the news, and get on with their day.

[1] <http://skimthat.com> \- Crowd sourced news summaries.

Another source for news summaries is <http://www.newser.com> and if you like videos you can try <http://www.newsy.com/>

</comment><comment><USER53> He didn't seem that much addicted. He seems to read a short amount of RSS compared to, well people like me, didn't even vote. And now he's reading 2 posts/day on HN? I don't think it's even possible, if you were really addicted to RSS to shrug it down to that small amount.

Back in the days I was writing for a news blog so I used to subscribe to 100+ blogs and news website, in french or english, I was alerted of a post more than twice a minute.

My day was, literally, to sit in front of my computer and read, filter, subscribe, unsubscribe.

The only way I found to stop this addiction after a year of up and down was just to stop using NetNewsWire and Google Reader (don't ask me why I was using two of them, more filters...).

3-4 years after, I just check reddit, HN, couple of french websites and know more about american politic than my country's politic.

</comment><comment><USER54> This echoes a lot of the ideas from Clay Johnson's book "Information Diet: a case for conscious consumption". That book has a few good actionable ideas about how to modify your sources and methods of getting news so you get better information and learn to identify bias.

</comment><comment> dorian-graph I lived in the Philippines for two years and aside from emailing my family once a week, usually, I was completely ignorant of the outside world.

Someone mentioned in passing that Michael Jackson had died and I thought they were just teasing our lack of worldly knowledge.

I liked this post and I think a concept at play here is that people are afraid of the quiet as they're afraid of themselves. I experimented with different teaching methods and that while I was over in the Philippines and using silence and good questions were the most effective methods I came across outside of having genuine understanding of the person/group.

Silence.

</comment><comment><USER55> In "The Four Hour Work Week", Timothy Ferriss claims to not have read a newspaper for years. It's all about maximum output. Minimizing input is one great way to free up time and energy to drastically increase output.

</comment><comment><USER56> I disagree with your fundamental point that all news sources are not trying to educate or inform you, but are instead trying to entertain you in some bias way. Of course nearly all of them are in order to make a profit (Fox News for instance), but I'm frustrated that you don't see the value that organizations like The Associated Press offer to a free society. The AP is a non-profit, un- biased organization that provides a service that our constitution guarantees. I hope see this is powerful and important and try out AP Mobile.

<comment><AUTHOR> installed AP Mobile. I think there's still gems out there, for example I _love_ Planet Money.

I'll give AP Mobile a try, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Once you've generally sussed out how all of the different perspectives view issues, and thereby understand the patterns by which the world operates, the news starts seeming repetitious.

</comment><comment><USER58> While I agree with the idea that, "consuming has a more immediate reward than creating," the need to be distracted isn't the only reason. We do want to be informed and reputable media outlets, for the most part, do want to inform. It is our inability to effective process the ever increasing amount of information out there. Maybe we need to take on less interests or maybe we need better filters (Google isn't cutting it?).

</comment><comment><USER59> This reminds me of that Bill Nguyen article, where he revealed he had never even used Facebook until recently, claiming he doesn't keep up with tech. If you're a startup founder, you can't afford to be uninformed about your competition and the industry. The answer is not reading less, but reading smarter. I don't know what the solution is, but it sure isn't limiting my consumption to 1 or 2 articles.

</comment><comment><USER60> You actually treats the social shame as small piece into this huge puzzle, but it's wrong.

Almost everything we do in adult life is to make social life easier. We go to college, learn new language, we read news, we buy things. All this has an small practical value but huge social impact. Knowing what's going on the news is a HUGE part of our relationship with others.

</comment><comment><USER61> Hmmm, some of the ideas to get rid of noise could be: 1\. to have some good, fun books that you can pick and read (not a laptop book) when you need a break. 2\. to have some real sport / game thing going - could be as simple as a table tennis game or a brisk walk. 3\. to have a musical instrument around (of course you should know how to use it).

More ideas?

</comment><comment><USER62> I've had quite a few e-mails expressing similar thoughts in regards to programming news and my e-mail newsletters. Some people are getting sick of the trawl around Reddit, HN, Twitter, and the various sites, and instead prefer a curated, once weekly e-mail. It's not for everyone, of course, but it seems some people love trimming back!

</comment><comment><USER63> Like everything, it's all about moderation. It's very useful to have something to say in social and work situations.

Spending 10-minutes a week reading pop culture or sports news, or keeping up on what concerts, events etc are coming to your area payoff huge in meeting new friends, dating, building relationships at work and so forth.

Nothing is frivolous except excess.

</comment><comment><USER64> I've found a great way reduce the amount of news and media that you consume is to travel.

Travel forces you to be offline most the time. You don't watch tv or see "news" much at all. After a while you don't even miss it and actually prefer life without it.

At least that;s what I've been doing for the last three years. Works pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER65> Borges once commented that newspapers should be printed once in 100 years, and should only have articles about the "real" news like "Christopfer Columbus disovered America". I couldn't agree more, but still I read them every day and always with a feeling that I'm about to discover something new :).

</comment><comment><USER66> I've been thinking about this issue for a while now. The term I like for what we are experiencing is "information obesity" (and I've written about it here: <http://andrewoneverything.com/information-obesity> )

</comment><comment><USER67> I agree that the so-called "news" is entertainment, but being completely uninformed about current events will make you non-discerning in addition to more productive. Perhaps it would be better to consume better information as opposed to less information.

</comment><comment><USER68> I had this same insight about a year ago, and while I didn't completely remove all my news, I made a point of reducing my RSS feed count to under 100 (it had been over 600.) I was indeed more productive, yet found myself missing knowing what, say, the latest Apple rumors were. But, it also didn't matter what the latest Apple rumors were. (Such rumors were wrong most of the time anyway..)

But I didn't write this comment just to agree with the OP. I wanted to add..

<i>Say that you somehow didn't know we found and killed Osama Bin Laden last year, I claim that your life would be virtually the same if you did.</i>

That is probably true, but let me add something that takes even more of people's (or at the typical american male's) thought capacity and the knowledge of it is DEFINITELY meaningless: The fact that the Giants won the Super Bowl two weeks ago.

With the disclaimer that I am formerly a pretty big sports fan, it astounds me how much detail people know about pro sports. They can talk endlessly, for hours. The amount of time they spend just attaining that knowledge each season - it's gotta be comparable to the amount of time it takes to learn and become proficient in a new programming language. It's the same amount of time to perhaps take and do all the work for not one but several MIT/Stanford online learning courses. It's the same amount of time that, devoted to exercise, would transform an overweight person into shape. Every year! Yet they spend that time watching and reading about the NFL.. - and to what end? So they can be knowledgeable enough about the second-string tight end on the Packers that they can have a locker-room conversation about it?

Of course, the same can be said about entertainment in general - indeed, the OP's point was that news, while claiming to be important, is just entertainment. And while I didn't watch any news or football games this year, I'd be a hypocrite not to point out that I did watch a lot of Star Trek with my son. The consequence of this became clear to me this week - we punished him this week for something he did by disallowing all screens - which meant the TV didn't go on all week (and my wife and I didn't watch TV either.) Without thinking about it, by the end of the week I had come up with an idea and was hacking away at a whole new side-project. I haven't done that in a long time. Feels good. Any my son? He's reading. Got into a whole new series of books he found at the library and has set himself a goal to read every one of them.

tl;dr: if news is a waste of time, what about sports and other idle entertainment?

</comment><comment><USER69> I tend to agree but offer this quote from CNBC / Becky Quick:

"Buffett generally reads five newspapers a day -- the Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, USA Today and the Omaha World-Herald. Make that six -- he reads the American Banker every day too."

</comment><comment><USER70> "Hey my name's Roshan, I'm the Cofounder and CTO of Bloc."

You got a high ranking hacker news story. I visited <http://www.trybloc.com/> just now as a result of your story.

I am wondering what it is. The page didn't tell me.

</comment><comment><USER71> The image in this post was stolen from "Rejected" - a short animated film by Don Hertzfeldt.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJYxCSXjhLI#t=4m45s>

<comment><AUTHOR> ok, added. I wasn't thinking, thanks for calling me out :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I can't tell you how many times I've explained this to friends. You hit this spot on. Catchy title too, I clicked it probably as a result :)

</comment><comment><USER73> The fact that I read your post means I've lost 50% of my daily news quota. Damn.

Good advice nonetheless.

<comment><AUTHOR> this made me chuckle :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I think this is the very definition of "ignorance is bliss".

</comment><comment><USER75> Let me see... At first I agreed, then I said no. Even last week, I was lamenting my 14 hour days on HN[1][2]. If I think only for that day, I lost that day, but if I think over my time here, I'm net positive.

What I was failing to realize was I had the ability, just not the opportunity. Your ability can only be exercise only at max. 8 hrs if you have a job, and for the most parts it plateaus out, ie your first 100 hrs of programming provides more benefit than your second and so on[but not a excuse not to practice, I leave for another comment]. Your first hour of observing opportunity is good as your 10000th.

The thing about opportunities is that they don't appear to have any meaning at first, only when you go back and connect the dots. For instance, someone ask me how my resume looks so good. I would say I was helping a friend with their programming assignment who introduced me to their flat mate. Said flat mate studied philosophy. I knew a little because I hanged with a guy[while doing my undergrad] who had multiple degrees and he used to talk about guys like Hume and so on. Based on that commonality, we became friends. And what do you know, she was an expert at doing resumes, and helped me finish mines in no time flat.

I know it just a resume, but other bigger gains follow the same pattern. You only notice them in retrospect. Each time, I think I was goofing off, helping people out with their assignments, sitting with some guy talking philosophy and so on.

Sometimes, I see people and they ask for help. Why am I so different than them. They think I'm working with a bigger brain. I tell them you need to relax; get your head out of the book. It's non-intuitive. They tend to respond with you don't need to study, you have an in built advantage since birth. But, really is that the truth? If you get your head out of the book, you start doing things you want to do. You become curious, a positive pulling emotion.

You guys know how it's done. You find something new and interesting on HN, you research it. Then you find something from that new and interesting, and you research it. By the time you would have finished, you would have covered something you needed to study for, all the while remaining curious and looking particularly like a lazy bum. The other way around, things are a drag.

You add on that, the community has common themes coming through[eg. meditation, stoicism]. Raise your hand if you read "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy." through solid recommendations on HN. And by God, it was a good book. It provides a perspective on life most would never get. With these common themes you can connect with members here, who might not be able to help you directly but indirectly opportunities might come their way that they might not be able to exploit and pass them onto you.

Also, it is not only about taking. It is about giving. How many times have you read a comment that refined your perspective or perhaps you gave an insight. What about when people ask for help on HN. Even if you just gave an up click, that is a massive contribution if you did it in the first few minutes of a post. If you think hard enough you will know these up clicks save/change lives.

What I'm basically saying drinking from the firehose can seem like a waste of time, but over the long hall it works out. Working on your ability alone means that you are trying to create an opportunity, and in a weeks period you can only create one opportunity if you work really hard, and it might not pan out. On the other hand, reading one hour of HN provides you with hundreds of opportunity, most you will not explore, but still you know they are there and can share with friends who can thus building strong relationships.

For instance, you heard it mentioned that one of the ways to create value is to see what opportunities can be exploit from delivering old technology in a knew way. Before, publishing use to take longer. Now, it is short with kindle, people can exploit that. Instead of giving their book one title they can create the same book with different titles and layouts[is this against Amazon policy], maybe even different content to match a different audience to scope a bigger payout. They can now use stuff like A/B testing[looking at paraschopra.] You see what I just did there.

It's either that or you need to tell me Chester go finish up my weekend project and stop procrastinating. But my thoughts are I'm winning so far for the most parts, and I never change a winning team. We observe it in basketball, there is this one guy who doesn't seem to contribute anything, but you are winning and when he is not there you are not winning[HN/News is that one guy]. Some smartass might look at it and say we can do better; lets cut this loser out, he is not contributing, then you start losing. You got too smart for your own good, never change a winner. Some things might be so complicated that you don't even know what is contributing to your success.

If you are on HN, and everything is going fine for the most part, don't change it, don't lose your competitive edge you lazy bastard.[Sorry if I sound incoherent]

[1] <https://twitter.com/#!/chegra/status/168805385447284736>

[2] <https://twitter.com/#!/chegra/status/168805177523048448>

</comment><comment><USER76> I've been there, over consumed, then shut everything out for a while. The truth is, the author still has a bit to learn, I think. Seems like he went through a phase and is now on the complete opposite end of the spectrum he was once on. It's definitely a good idea not to get so engrossed by all the noise but I've actually gained a lot by reading news. I've tried and learned things I wouldn't have had I not chose to read a bit of news each morning. The real trick is to find balance in your life. The ancient Greeks had it right: life is all about balance. Going too far in one direction or the other is never good.

So I must disagree with this post. The trick is to strike a healthy balance between consumption and creation, not to cut one or the other out almost completely.

</comment><comment><USER77> "What followed were three of the most productive years of my life."

Well, normally college years are the most productive years of anyone's life up to that point. If they're not you're doing it wrong.

Plus, if all you used RSS for is to keep up with "Bush's latest folly", then of course you'll be more productive giving it up.

</comment><comment><USER78> I would add that the media's job isn't only to entertain you, it's also to keep you worried. Read/watch the news, and ask yourself "what are they trying to make me worry about today?" You'll be surprised.

</comment><comment><USER79> Osama who?

<comment><USER80> Wait.. wasn't the article talking about Obama?... huh? Man, you got me all confused

<comment><USER81> You have to read the whole article again...</comment></comment></comment>


Feedless: A non-addictive social network - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@_rchaves_/a-non-addictive-social-network-d0ad3a2204d <comment><USER2> > Some, like TikTok, don't even need any explicit signal from you, they can > decide whether you like something or not based on how long you pay attention > to a video.

omg, can we stop doing that? i seldom open youtube on my phone now because of that! i want a more or less accurate recommendation feed and yet that feature messes up my near perfect watch history every time.</comment>