Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Hello everyone, OP/developer here!

If you are already using the extension, you can see the "[op]" beside my username too! ;)

There are many extensions out there that add quite a few features to Hacker News, but they also always do one thing, which I have realised, is a slippery slope: changing the minimalistic design and style of Hacker News.

I created this extension with one thing in mind: I am NOT going to mess around with the overall design or style of Hacker News. It's sacrosanct.

There are quite a few feature additions and interface tweaks that are implemented, a few of the important ones being:

* Reply to a comment or edit/delete your comment without leaving the page (do it inline)

* Navigate through items and comments using your keyboard (vim keybindings)

* Sort/hide stories and auto-refresh periodically

...and many, many more. The GitHub README details all of them.

The extension is available on both Chrome and Firefox. Hope you all enjoy it!



> I created this extension with one thing in mind: I am NOT going to mess around with the overall design or style of Hacker News. It's sacrosanct.

I wish you would do something about the voting buttons and the expand/collapse buttons. They're way too tiny and way too close to other elements in the default scheme used by HN. This is a big deficiency I see with the default HN interface, which makes it less usable as well as less accessible.

Edit: I also see a 3/28 counter and a spinning icon on the top left of the page that doesn't change regardless of which post I'm browsing. Sometimes it disappears if I navigate to another post or page, but it looks like it starts with 0/28 for every post. [This is on Brave right now; no issues with connectivity or connection speed; dropdown menu from the username works.]


Ha, I made an extension with the same idea as OP to solve just the problem you mention - at least on devices with touch screens (I'm using it on Firefox for Android).

If you're using Firefox, you can install it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sihn/


For expand/collapse, one of the very few things I've liked about "new" Reddit is being able to click the indent bar alongside comments to show/collapse. Something like that in this for HN would be helpful.


Hey! I think what you want is already implemented in the feature "click-comment-indent-to-toggle".


The “click on the indent bar to show/collapse” on reddit was something unintuitive for me initially. Moving from desktop where there is a clear arrow icon for that, I searched online on how to do this in the interface without the triangles. :)


Hi! The feature "click-rank-to-vote-unvote" increases the hit-area of the upvote button, so you can click the "rank" of the item to upvote the item.


Seconding this, the buttons are way too tiny. On mobile they are almost impossible to hit on smaller text settings.


Hey, regarding your update, could you create an issue on GitHub? It'll be easier to discuss it there.

The counter "counts" the feature that have been loaded. It looks like you are stuck on the "highlight-unread-comments" feature. Could you open the console and check for error messages there?


This is excellent. I appreciate that you've made Firefox a first-class citizen and even added instructions for Opera users. Very nice!


Thank you very much!


Unfortunately for whatever reason firebaseio.com (which gets called by your extension) is blocked in my country[0]. As a result, this extension doesn't work on my end. But bravo for this! I personally very much liked the highlighted unread comments and being able to reply without living the page. The hovering thing bothers a bit tho[1].

[0]: Then again, CloudFlare gives me an access denied upon opening hn.algolia.com as well.

[1]: Interestingly, the extension suggests "show-user-info-on-hover" to be disabled!


This is rather strange. Which country are you in, may I ask? Also, doesn't this hamper with many other websites you might visit that depend on Firebase?


Currently I'm located in Iran, and yes, many websites that depend on Firebase get automatically blocked (the same goes for medium.com). On top of that, many other websites decide not to provide service to Iran in the first place, so...


That's unfortunate. Also just a small clarification: I don't recommend disabling the "show-user-info-on-hover" feature, it's just there as an example :P


Maybe a stupid question, but why is the extension even talking to Firebase? Skimming the feature list, all of these look like something that should work without connecting anywhere else but HN itself.


The HN API is on Firebase, which is used to fetch details of users and items. It is used, as of now, in the following features:

  comments-ui-tweaks
  show-item-info-on-hover
  show-top-leaders-karma
  show-user-info-on-hover


Thesis: discussion software evolves towards replicating the feature set of slrn reading Usenet, only with better page design.

This is no exception.


Cool, I made one with the exact same principles to scratch a personal itch - inline reply is something I was hoping to add some time.

Anyway, I'd love to be able to just use someone else's extension :) Mine makes up/downvote and collapsing buttons easier to hit on mobile, links to parent/root comments, and rewrites Google AMP links to regular links. It's open source, so feel free to incorporate those features in yours: https://gitlab.com/vincenttunru/sihn


Thanks a lot for this! I'll sure look into it :)


Good work( using this comment to test out the inline reply and while typing i noticed , that , hey this works " )


Editing the same comment however goes to new page but, Good Work.. coffee on me


testing the reply feature


Thank you! The #1 feature that is getting me to install is 'Next comment with same indentation and parent'. I like to skip a lot of the nested replies on un-interesting top level comments.


Isn't that achieved by minimising too?


Yup, that was my motivation to build that feature too!


Would you consider adding "remove all integer counts" (karma, vote, comment, all of it)?


Interesting, since this is one of the feature that I had abandoned. I thought that such a feature would needlessly be a bit too aggressive if you get what I am saying.

Nevertheless, in the "custom styles" input in the popup, you enter the following to blur out all points, comments etc:

  span.score,
  td.subtext a:last-child {
   filter: blur(3px)
  }


I don't get what you're saying, unfortunately.


He is saying you can already do what you want to do. His plug-ins let you add custom styles. The place where the custom styles go is inside a text box that appears when you click on the plug-in's icon.

Just copy the style he provides above, paste it in the custom style field, and it will blur the "integer counts" just like you asked!


Thanks for explaining :)


To clarify the actual question asked:

What did you mean when you said it would be too “aggressive, if I get what you’re saying” - which I do not.

(Also, that CSS exposes a coding bug in the HN site re: counts, at least as of a month ago when I last tested something like it.)


I know you don't want to mess with interface, but have you considered a minimal dark theme? Think it might be nice.


For Firefox, there is DarkReader [1] A small sub-set of websites will be slowed down or break, but you can enable/disable per domain.

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/?s...


I certainly have! I've tried a few color combinations and themes, but nothing ever fits right. You can create an feature request on GitHub so others can contribute on this idea too :)



Thanks, I like the 'highlight new comments' bit, I hope HN will bake that in someday.


Did you ever use "Hacker News Enhancement Suite" otherwise known as HNES? That extension had a few of these same features.


I use HNES and love it. But sadly it seems to be abandoned and hasn't kept up with a few changes HN have made along the way.

I'll give this new add-on a spin to see how things go.


Yup, I've used that extension briefly in the past. It certainly provided nice features, but as with other similar extensions, it also altered the style quite a bit, which I wasn't too fond of.


I use HNES, but the only feature in it I care about is tagging users. I very much wish I could turn off all of the other features, especially its custom styles. If you were to add the ability to tag users to RHN, I'd be one happy camper!


Hey, thanks for the suggestion! Can you create a feature request on GitHub regarding this, it'll help me track the issues better. Thanks!


Tagging users would be a very useful feature to me.


Hey, thanks for the suggestion! Can you create a feature request on GitHub regarding this, it'll help me track the issues better. Thanks!


I have not installed yet, but may I suggest one feature, assuming it does not exist yet?

Hide Posts Above

It hides all posts in the feed above the selected post.

This is a feature in the reddit iOS Apollo app. This not only makes the site less stale, but also might help alleviate “frontpage upvote bias” where great items that are not on the first couple pages don’t get many views and upvotes.


Hi! It be great if you could elaborate on the implementation of this feature. I don't currently have an iOS device to see the feature in the. Better still, it'd be also great if you could submit a feature request on GitHub so it helps me to track the issues.


Awesome! Thanks for giving instructions for Opera, I've been using it for my daily work for a few weeks now.


The extension is available on both Chrome and Firefox

Slightly off-topic, but why not Safari? Is it harder to program plug-ins than the others? Not enough market share? Just don't have the hardware?


This is fairly common for extensions to be on Chrome/Firefox but not Safari, unfortunately. Firefox's WebExtension APIs are mostly code-compatible with the extension API supported by Google Chrome and Opera, with a few exceptions [1].

Safari uses its own Safari Extensions JS, so while it may be possible to share some resources (e.g. images, HTML content), the js work needs to be undertaken as a separate development project, unless you use/build a polyfill.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...


The JavaScript Safari Extension API is deprecated and extensions using it do not work in Safari 13.


Safari has traditionally used a different extension API, which coupled with this smaller adoption has hindered the progress of extensions in the platform. A recent change to an app extension model has hurt the ecosystem even more, as it killed a significant portion of the already few extensions that used to exist.


Just installed. Thanks, this is an excellent addition. Good job!


This is neat, thank you!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: