Ask HN: What's the lifespan of posts on HN? Or How often should one check HN?

Stories can be on the front page for 30 minutes or over a day, it depends on how active it is. I've even seen fewer minutes and longer stories.

Downvoting buttons disappears after a day, upvoting never. One can comment for 14 then, after that the 'reply' link disappears.

If you want more/faster stories use the 'active' list https://news.ycombinator.com/lists or 'new'. If you want to check less and not miss good discussion use https://news.ycombinator.com/best

There's twitter account which only tweet stories which got at least 250 upvotes https://github.com/adriel/awesome-hacker-news#social-media

It depends on how the posts are ranked [0]

  How are stories ranked?

  The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.

  Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, and moderator intervention.

I recommend you to check Hacker News Daily [1] because it summarizes top stories on HN daily. It also summarizes Ask HN, but weekly [2].

I think you don't need to check HN frequently. If you miss a day, you can always go back or jump to date using Past page [3]. Other user has mentioned tools, like hckr news and HN Search using Algolia.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[1]: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

[2]: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-ask

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/front

Oh think I check too often and I see mostly the same stories over and over. I frequent the front page and ask.

What I would like is a hide feature that knows what posts I've looked at and removes them from the ui automatically. Bonus if I can "lock" the post and prevent it from being hidden because I want to continue to monitor the thread, or click "hide" on a post I'm done with or uninterested in. Noise reduction allowing me to quickly seep what is new to me.

There are a lot of good posts that never make the front page. Staying up with the "new" section can be time consuming, kinda depends on the day. I usually check in most days.