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Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsPersonally, I, as a programmer, read the news in the same way as my grandad who was a farmer. I read a printed weekly publication (in my case The Economist) on Sunday morning. Outside of Sunday morning I don't read the news at all.
I prefer printed news to media-supported news, because I think the imagery (I acknowledge The Economist still has images) and presentation of news, especially on TV detracts from the message it's trying to convey a lot of the time. After reading some of Neil Postman's books (notably Amusing Ourselves to Death), I find it strange to watch televised news whereby one minute I'm watching footage of a disaster, then the next minute I'm seeing sports news updates or an advert. Just like normal learning, I think news demands longer form content for proper understanding.
Reading the news on a low frequency basis also gives time for news stories to properly develop. Breaking news can be filled with speculation and incorrect details, which even if you keep up with, you can miss later corrections or crucial details. Not to mention the stress involved in it. Chances are if some real breaking news happens, like a natural disaster or war, I'll hear somebody else tell me.
The web has destroyed that business model, because the news industry now controls far less advertising space, so there is no longer enough advertising revenue to support quality journalism. The broadsheets are in real financial trouble, and most have turned to tabloid-style articles (albeit ones that promote more sophisticated worldviews) in order to pull in those social-media clicks.
I find myself increasingly interested in publications like The Economist and The Financial Times, simply because their readerships have financial interest in actually knowing what's going on in the world, and so they can charge a subscription price that supports quality journalism.
Sure, do what you want, ignore news if that makes you feel better, but do realise for many, they are not afforded this kind of luxury.
More than a decade ago, I stopped following general news and learn about things asynchronously. However, I had picked up a few topics that I like to follow and do follow them. Since the Pandemic, I had settled on just a few niche areas of Tech and Science to follow — which, of course, quite a few of them land on Hacker News when I submit them.
Around the end of 2025, I picked up the actual printed Physical Newspaper again. A lot of the news seems like yesterday’s Jam to me. I’m going to continue reading the newspaper, Slow and Smooth, picking the ones I want to read and ignoring everything else.
I really dislike the notion that events outside of your country are somehow not important.
If you go on reddit, unless you've curated your subreddits and never touch /all or /popular, it's very heavy with 'news'. The Google app, a left-swipe by default on your Android phone is all 'news'. Twxtter/Bluesky/etc. are full of news. Avoiding news entirely is almost impossible on today's internet.
I have had success with this approach too, but key to all this is being careful about where you go online to minimise exposure. These days I don't use any 'social media' platforms, but I do visit HN and BBC news (both of which are of higher quality than most places, and crucially only have a few stories on a typical day - the rate of new content is low). This way I stay informed without falling down rabbit holes about every twist and turn of every (mostly awful/depressing) thing happening in the World.
1) Financial news, specifically the Financial Times - middle, Bloomberg - slightly left leaning, and the Economist, slightly right leaning. I've found that they have incentives to keep their news as close to just presenting the pure information as possible, as their readers are often making investment decisions based on the quality of the information, resulting in wanting zero "spin". This isn't the case for the NYT or WSJ, which have an incentive misalignment.
2) Anything that shows up on Hacker News. I trust that if something is important enough to get posted here (and make the front page), then I should probably be aware of it. The comments are for the most part measured, analytical, and thought-provoking.
Same when it comes to staying on top of tech news -- almost everything is a flash in the pan. I used to bookmark cool new products, never revisit them, and then a year later realise half of the links are now dead.
One thing I realised though is I still need to mindlessly browse an endless feed every once in a while for some downtime. One way or another I'll want to fill that time with something, so it's a question of being mindful what goes in it. So my drugs of choice are Hacker News, and carefully curated YouTube subscriptions.
So we shouldn't do the same with things we read on the internet and our brain.
They used to show news channels.
He said clients would come in all stressed out. So they changed to a home improvement channel.
I find I will hear about the relevant things from people and events around me, whether or not I follow the news. The news doesn't have any actual bearing on my life but the news does have a few stories that do have bearing.
So theres no downside of not following the news. I will hear what I need to and want to hear about from people around me or other sources.
Some think that in not consuming what they think I should consume, that this is a morally wrong thing to do. They will be personally offended, how can they ignore my story? There is a case that if we all stopped following the news then how can the other sources inform us, so there would still be a benefit to reporting...
Consider two anthropologists examining a culture. One only has remote access to every news source the culture produces for itself, the other can only talk face to face with people. Which one will understand the people more?
Smart guy.
I still want to be informed and be involved especially in matters that do impact me and the country I live in; I feel strongly about democracy and that rests on an educated and participatory citizenship. But I don't need to wade through shit every day to have enough of an understanding of it.
I like tech and I'm curious, but just today before reading this article I was thinking about how much do I really gain from this cursory reading on so many subjects (as one might find on HN), instead of using the time to more deeply dive into certain ones. At some point it can become a bunch of clutter that has little value.
(I already stopped watching TV news many years ago, and dropped Facebook and Reddit a few years ago as well. I'm mostly down to Instagram and HN, plus the NYT and a few magazines (MIT Tech Review, that one is excellent; Wired, was planning on dropped anyway; Atlantic, good but I don't need that much of it; The New Yorker has great longform every once in a while.)
That said, you do notice it when the currency crashes.
My approach:
* world: weekly Economist coverage of world/biz/general topics (audio via app) - keeps me generally up to date
* local: daily digest mail of notable news from yesterday from my country (which is too insignificant to appear in the Economist); scraped from multiple sources, digest by an LLM
* Hacker News digest mail, top 50 posts from the previous day (drawback is I'm often late to the discussion, like with this one, but can also be a blessing)
* ArsTechnica digest - used to be a subscriber but nowadays just grab new article links once a day
I read the digests as my "morning paper", and skip most of the links there (from ~100 in total I end up reading ~10), but am still "in the loop"
I also find about stuff in conversations with friends and social media (x/bsky/li for me). I also try to minimize the latter, but that's for another comment :)
In particular LLM summaries are great for this. Introduces risk of hallucinations which is not awesome, but it does tend to neutralise the rage bait tone and tricks that are pervasive these days. Tradeoff but one that has been working for me
I used to do this for maybe two to six weeks at a stretch. It's become more of a default state, now. I don't know if or when that will change, but I'm extremely cynical so…
I'd recommend anyone who is distressed about the state of things and, (this is key) fortunate enough not to be at risk by not paying attention, unplug and see how it goes. I only read tech news and blogs and it's improved my state of mind. It might work for you, too.
This is by a bash script in a cron job that reads RSS feeds and grabs the headlines and links to articles, so I can get a flurry of tech news and general news headlines without having to go into detail on each topic (which in news terms is typically slanted with some sort of bias).
So I can stay up to date on general happenings, speedily. It is fairly simple to set up - a LLM will write a suitable bash script to parse RSS XML and grab links and headlines in moments.
To me it's just a long bitch fest now. They show stories about people bitchin' about somebody else or suggest that you should be bitchin' about it. If I want to hear people bitch at me I'll turn to my wife.
But today I read them differently. I read news site, with some curation (e.g., settings for threshold for articles that comes up in various fields) together with a few favorite sites (e.g., HN)
I've posted the same message so many time I could get banned but if you live in the UK then Private Eye is what you want here. It's every fortnight, very funny and a bastion of genuine journalism (see the Paul Foot Award they give out each year)
Personally, I see no reason that the active page shouldn't be added to the navigation menu above.
And these days, you're misinformed with a good dose of dramatic Hans-Zimmer-like soundtrack and visuals designed to evoke fear and outrage.
It's been discussed several times on HN[2]. I had periods I go through without news. It's been harder to do that lately.
I realised that if I exclusively read business news I can avoid a good amount of the fluff and sensationalism. I made a browser extension which pushes the headlines from Bloomberg, Financial times Euronews Business and a few others on to my new tab from their RSS, and it's more than enough to give me a nugget of what's going on in the world without being overloaded. 1 item per new tab.
End result is: I don't read the news, but I still know what's going on without the need for Social Media's hot take.
I note that the complaint "I can't do anything about it" throws doubt on "it doesn't affect me". But both of those seem to me to miss the point, which is to get new ideas.
1) a large number of people are dissatisfied with the current product
2) but aren’t willing to pay for an alternative which solves the problem in the ideal way (for them)
There have been dozens of attempts at weekly news summary newsletters, minimal news sites, etc. over the years. None ever seem to go anywhere because no one wants to pay for something they are deliberately deciding has little value.
It makes me think of budget airlines: constantly critiqued for being uncomfortable and using dark patterns to get every last dollar - yet people consistently just book the cheapest flight possible.
Even more tiring is to see how useful idiots [1] happily take the propaganda pushed by the media and trumpet it as if it were pure gospel, often with dire consequences. Should I just quit following the legacy media and the more recent anti-dotes and try to live here in quiet and solitude on the farm? Well, no, I don't think I should. I will be confronted with te results of the media poisoning the minds of their victims the next time I go to a city and find the roads blocked by a crowd of people shouting inane slogans. Where did they get those from, what are they blathering about, why does this crowd of screechy weasels hollering about some supposed misdeed performed by some government somewhere far from here occupy the station? Almost invariably it comes down to the propaganda pushed by the media - nowadays usually some on-line version which is amplified up by the legacy dinosaurs and trumpeted by the other titles which are more often than not owned by the same conglomerate - which the useful idiots uncritically pick up and use as their guide star. I read this stuff because I want to know what ideas the media is trying to amplify and which they are attempting to suppress. I read it because I sometimes have to quench whatever fuse has been lit by them in the heads of my children. So, tiring as it is I'll keep the feeds running and try to follow my way through the mire of deceptions, half-truths, outright lies and other propaganda which is what goes for 'news'.
It is not hard to filter out AI slop, stick with channels known for being true and unbiased, specially stick with independent journalists channel and known podcast.
Everything else is a lost cause, main stream media?? Suuuuuure
Social media, the more time spent at it, the more depressed and brain washed you get, just bad news after bad news. Ditch those and follow YouTube to notice a positive response, you keep up to date without feeling like WW3 is happening tomorrow.