Do you read the /new submissions for particular topics?

HN is a nice tidy list of top things, is there an equivalent for ArXiv?

You can use things like arxivsorter and benty-fields for this. You give them a list of papers you've published, or authors you are interested in and then get recommendations. The recommendations can be up and down voted to improve future recommendations.

Yup, I read the daily abstracts of Representation Theory (math.RT), Number Theory (math.NT) and Programming Languages (cs.PL)

arXiv advanced search is great.

I just have a few bookmarked searches for what I am interested in.

I don't see how you could generalize things though across all papers. Like randomly clicking on what was submitted to High Energy Physics - Lattice yesterday. I don't have the first clue what any of that is and that would be the same for most topics for most people I imagine.

same

Why have you never submitted an article you've found on Arxiv to HN? Are you not finding anything interesting there? (Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=henrydark ... I guess you could use a different account?)

I do a similar thing, but the papers I'm interested in are usually a bit too niche for a general audience. That's one of the things I don't like about academic papers, particularly in my field (astro), we don't tailor our abstracts and introductions to a wider audience.