A window into novel technology, commented on by knowledgeable people from around the world. Also, proof that some online communities can survive and thrive for decades while staying largely the same (no big redesigns etc).

A place to see content that is actually relevant to my field with as little algorithmic intervention as possible. There is still a presence within the readership here that verges on philosophical despite being grounded in the technological, and that is why I keep coming back.

My latest job and anxiety, mostly.

HN is my main news aggregator. The other site is both political and social, and heavily moderated as well.

"I skim" and save a subset of daily articles as PDF's, as well as some referenced articles, so that my saved articles all look like HN posts or LaTEX-ish, readable articles less the tiny type, ads and usual web page clutter. The Firefox print styles and extensions are really helpful in this regard.

I also share really valuable links with a friend who refuses to retire.

And to keep things manageable, auto-pager works on "latest", so I save a daily digest of HN pages. I copy 24 hours worth of scroll into good old SeaMonkey composer, and end get nice HTML.

This somewhat assuages my info-vore nature. Some personal projects will benefit from the saved material when I ramp them up, sans capital. It's not that desktop search is any faster than web/Algolia search. It's just that it's pre-filtered (by me).

Tech News and a window into the world of smart bitter men who are far less accomplished and respected than they really want to be.

I primarily come to hackernews to get mad while reading the comments.

So, entertainment I suppose.