| For domains, I block the presence of: - 'nytimes', 'theverge', 'theguardian' or 'npr' (politics, pop news and US business); - 'bbc' for all those reasons and their inaccurate reporting on tech and science for the sake of accessibility; - 'femfosec' (can we not?); and - 'krebsonsecurity' (for dramatising and clickbaiting fairly mundane stories). I'm fortunate enough that I hardly have to deal with FAANG where I live and work, so I also block 'fb.com' and any Google brand TLDs since I have trusted circles that act as a human filter on the interesting parts. I also previously blocked '.dev' because it's unavailable from the networks I'm usually working on, and they were usually vapourware email farms or CV padding. For titles: - /sexual|lgbt|pedo|culture war/ (unfortunate combo, I know) hides most US politics; - /america|united states|\busa\b|u\.s\.|senat(?:e|or)|biden|trump/ hides the rest; - /cov(?:id|-2)|corona(?:virus)?/ isn't what I'm interested in; - /\w+js/ hides the JS (framework|library) of the (week|month); - /in mice/ to hide the deadend studies. I've also started filtering titles beginning in /^how\b/, since these are almost always advertisements ('How to do X with $product') or political essays. /\(\d{4}\)/ also hides links to past articles, since the graverobbers are usually just trying to make a statement by invoking the wisdom of old. The hidden gems make their way to me through other channels. I use this exact same filter on several other aggregators with similar success, so I don't think it's specifically an HN issue. For example: when applied to entertainment aggregators, I only get the entertainment news I came for. HN is my best place for a general feel of the industry's pulse, it just has some fluff in the way. |