How can we hide the "Top News" section?
Being bombarded with a constant drip of news on a short cycle is pretty bad for people—bad in terms of the effects on their anxiety, their attention span and their productivity.
The vast majority of "news" doesn't matter after a few years (or weeks) and looking at a bigger time frame, many of the important positive trends never hit the news because they aren't sudden enough.
My way of dealing with this is to read less news and more long-from content. I really try (with only partial success) to limit visiting sites or following people focused on the news. As a result, I'm not thrilled to see that the main screen on IH (on my 1080p desktop) consists of 5 "top news" links and 3 of everything else?
How can I remove it from my homepage?
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Not possible to hide (nor will it be), although you can do it pretty easily with a browser extension.
What resolution are you at where IH's homepage is a single column on your desktop? That shouldn't happen unless your screen is narrower than about 800px.
Point noted about news, although in this regard I don't any difference between the news section and the main feed, which is also a constant cycle of news that rarely includes long-form pieces (and was intentionally designed to be such 2+ years ago).
Novel posts are arguably the only mechanism by which any successful feeds work on the internet, with the exception of personal messaging feeds (e.g. email, chats, phone notifications), which work because you feel obligated to not miss messages intended for you. The point on IH is to make these posts useful and informative to people building businesses, rather than full of cat photos, memes, spicy takes, and cryptic thought leadership quotes. I all the items in the news section at the moment pass that test with flying colors, although if you disagree about any in particular (now or in the future), please let me know!
It's at 750px at the moment, though usually it's at 1920/2.
I've long wanted a way to block specific groups and news was one of them. Ideally, I just want a feed of stuff that I'm interested in i.e. stuff posted by people I follow or in groups I follow.
Higher density of information is good. On this screen, I can read 24 items on HN without scrolling.
Yeah, I wasn't exactly cheering that either 😅
Novel posts are great! They don't have to be about the news, though. A great example is PG's blog. Almost none of it was "news", but it was almost all novel, at least for me. I suspect much of it will still be interesting decades from now, whereas almost nothing on the front page of today's news will be.
Edit: Do you have an API? Maybe if I write my own client that would be the best fix.
@levid has done some good work reverse engineering the API, perhaps worth getting in touch to see if he has a client to share?
IH is already dense enough to scare away lots of curious people, but apparently not dense enough for some. I think that's the goldilocks zone? Browsing in single column mode is really quite a shame though.
True!
Also true, and I don't plan for it to be monotonous. "News" is just a fancy word for "what's new," and that includes all sorts of things, including stand-out blog posts. "PG writes a new blog post" would count, assuming the blog post was particularly relevant to and helpful for IHers.
Thanks, the last bit is really reassuring. I'll ping @levid and keep an eye on the section. It's a broader definition of news than I'd thought and ironically, by being pinned longer, it means less impetus to check it as often.
Maybe it will even be a net plus that it pushes what I've been coming to the site for off the bottom of the screen.