[mej10]

I am a bit late to this thread, so you may not see my response. Regardless...

I have wondered about this as well. I am considering two strategies:

1) Stop checking HN at all, and subscribe to Hacker Monthly (http://hackermonthly.com/), which is the best articles of the month in a nice format.

2) Schedule a time to check it once a week, and only look at the list of posts with over 200 points. http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=200

We have to stop spending time on these sites, even when it seems valuable. Nothing is as valuable as actually building something and interacting with users.