Since everyone is pitching their HN alternative frontends, I'll throw mine in the ring - https://hn.zip - which precaches all the frontpage posts on load, so you can continue to browse comments in flaky network conditions. I use it every day to browse on the subway. It's not perfect, but it does the job it needs to.
What I really want is an extension to strip out all the political/social stuff and rule breaking content. Could probably just use basic AI sentiment analysis for most of this.
When loading a comment thread, dump the last X comments a user has made through the sentiment analysis pipeline. More than Y% percent of their posts are classified as either political/emotional/social commentary? Strip all their comments out of the HTML before displaying to me, I don't want to even see it.
Same with submissions. If the author submits >= X% political/social commentary links, don't trust those users at all, just strip their submissions out of my results, I don't want to see them. Maybe also just auto strip out the career posters who post a dozen links every day for karma farming or propaganda purposes or whatever they're doing. It's not natural traffic, strip it out.
Same with emotional/irrational debate. Could possibly classify any given comment on a scale of rational to emotional and strip out the comments that are just people ranting and raving about their political/social topic of choice.
Same with the rule around "if it's on mainstream news it probably doesn't belong on HN". Should be insanely easy to just auto-strip out all the submissions that link to mainstream news sites. I don't want to see them.
Maybe also be able to specify keywords of topics that you DO want to see, "engineering", "technology", "science", etc., stuff that actually belongs on HN, and again auto-filter out everything else.
Quite simply, I just want an extension that will strip out all the insane people and political/social content. I just want to see HN content on HN.
Around 2024 November 5-6, one HN posting got so many comments, trying to keep up with the incoming rush of everyone's comments felt like trying to drink from a just-opened fire hydrant - the deluge was enormous and continuous.
Along with a change in HN behaviour - posts with many, many comments didn't spill over to sub-pages - I realized I could add some javascript to subtly highlight new comments by changing their background colour when I refreshed the page.
Once that was done, I needed a way to efficiently visit the new comments - j,k - "That is the way".
Then I had to unhighlight the recently-visited comments since they weren't of much interest now.
Also added in-page, in-flow comments rather than switching to a new page to write the comment and then get discombobulated when HN switched back, to hopefully the same place in the discussion that I had been just before the comment.
Then I got distracted by something new and shiny...
I would just have 1 improvement for HN: add category tags to each post. The reasoning is that what typically piques my interest may not always be the most voted or most commented posts.
I also want this improvement via a Chrome Extension - so I don't need to remember a new site. (most of my HN experience is via Desktop)
My yearning for the "good ol days" got me thinking of repurposing HN as a Usenet clone. New HN posts would be categorized into one of the old Usenet newsgroups via AI. You'd only see posts for your subscribed newsgroups.
Add some keyboard navigation - spacebar for the win - and maybe tweak the UI for a more monochrome monitor vibe.
The feed gets updated once a day and will contain the top posts of the past 24 hours with the first paragraph of the linked website (if any) and the top 3 comments. It’s great to gauge whether the website and/or HN discussion is interesting to me or not. And if I’m short on time, I can mark it for later consumption in my RSS reader.
I made a browser extension that hides stories based on user supplied keywords. So far, it's been working great! I even got a 5 star review the other day!
I'm not a zillions of tabs person (my browsers are all configured to lose them on close) but I'm definitely a "comment threads are impossible to follow on repeat visits" person, which is why I made this extension (also on GreasyFork as a user script) which shows which stories have new comments on list pages and can automatically highlight new comments and collapse trees without new comments:
It also improves HN on mobile somewhat: header links go under the top bar, slightly larger hit targets for voting and collapsing, confirmation for hiding/flagging so you don't accidentally do it on scroll... also, you can mute people, just saying.
Lots more planned, but I'm busy writing my own settings sync backend because there's currently no good way to do that for extensions across all devices and browsers.
I wouldn't recommend it over the official version, but pretty sure I was one of the first to put out an alternative UI when the Firebase feed was released - it has the same new comment highlighting features as my extension, but in "real" time thanks to Firebase - you might have seen Addy Osmani using it for PWA experimentation at Google I/O 2016 o_O:
" then open up the links having a high number of comments or sometimes, the ones whose titles intrigue me. Roughly, this would lead to opening about 5-6 web links per HN visit. For 3-4 of those, I’d return to their respective HN posts to read the comments. I usually browse up to the 2nd, and sometimes 3rd page of HN per visit"
I have used hn like this for last 10years - is this a thing that I'm not aware of?
Readit News
When loading a comment thread, dump the last X comments a user has made through the sentiment analysis pipeline. More than Y% percent of their posts are classified as either political/emotional/social commentary? Strip all their comments out of the HTML before displaying to me, I don't want to even see it.
Same with submissions. If the author submits >= X% political/social commentary links, don't trust those users at all, just strip their submissions out of my results, I don't want to see them. Maybe also just auto strip out the career posters who post a dozen links every day for karma farming or propaganda purposes or whatever they're doing. It's not natural traffic, strip it out.
Same with emotional/irrational debate. Could possibly classify any given comment on a scale of rational to emotional and strip out the comments that are just people ranting and raving about their political/social topic of choice.
Same with the rule around "if it's on mainstream news it probably doesn't belong on HN". Should be insanely easy to just auto-strip out all the submissions that link to mainstream news sites. I don't want to see them.
Maybe also be able to specify keywords of topics that you DO want to see, "engineering", "technology", "science", etc., stuff that actually belongs on HN, and again auto-filter out everything else.
Quite simply, I just want an extension that will strip out all the insane people and political/social content. I just want to see HN content on HN.
You do see the irony here, right?
Not everything has to be new front end framework debates and internal Google politics and name calling. That's way more noisy to me.
Along with a change in HN behaviour - posts with many, many comments didn't spill over to sub-pages - I realized I could add some javascript to subtly highlight new comments by changing their background colour when I refreshed the page.
Once that was done, I needed a way to efficiently visit the new comments - j,k - "That is the way".
Then I had to unhighlight the recently-visited comments since they weren't of much interest now.
Also added in-page, in-flow comments rather than switching to a new page to write the comment and then get discombobulated when HN switched back, to hopefully the same place in the discussion that I had been just before the comment.
Then I got distracted by something new and shiny...
IT does have a New tag comment feature built-in pretty neat
I also want this improvement via a Chrome Extension - so I don't need to remember a new site. (most of my HN experience is via Desktop)
A lot of times I wish it had the equivalent of subreddits, but then I remember that's sorta why reddit sucks.
To keep it simple, it has to be up to the poster to pick category tags.
Add some keyboard navigation - spacebar for the win - and maybe tweak the UI for a more monochrome monitor vibe.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988
https://feeds.leonid.codes/hacker_news.html
The feed gets updated once a day and will contain the top posts of the past 24 hours with the first paragraph of the linked website (if any) and the top 3 comments. It’s great to gauge whether the website and/or HN discussion is interesting to me or not. And if I’m short on time, I can mark it for later consumption in my RSS reader.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-mute/
https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news
It also improves HN on mobile somewhat: header links go under the top bar, slightly larger hit targets for voting and collapsing, confirmation for hiding/flagging so you don't accidentally do it on scroll... also, you can mute people, just saying.
Lots more planned, but I'm busy writing my own settings sync backend because there's currently no good way to do that for extensions across all devices and browsers.
I wouldn't recommend it over the official version, but pretty sure I was one of the first to put out an alternative UI when the Firebase feed was released - it has the same new comment highlighting features as my extension, but in "real" time thanks to Firebase - you might have seen Addy Osmani using it for PWA experimentation at Google I/O 2016 o_O:
https://insin.github.io/react-hn
I have used hn like this for last 10years - is this a thing that I'm not aware of?