Comment by chriswarbo

My approach is to gather HN articles via RSS (then convert to maildir) a couple of times a day. That has two effects:

- It reduces the subconscious slot-machine mechanic (compared to refreshing a Web page) since I know there won't be anything new in my feed for the next several hours.

- There are also tangible benefits to using a proper feed reader, like only seeing unread items. That also discourages "cheating", since reading things outside of my feeds will require me to mark them as "read" after the next update.

I receive comment-replies via email, filtered into an IMAP folder that refreshes a bit faster than the RSS feed, to allow conversations.

These don't have notifications, but if I'm in the mail reader I can see their unread count (usually zero; and hence can be dismissed with a glance)