hackernews-button VS refined-hacker-news

It's worth noting that my extension is far from perfect – it turns out that determining whether a specific page has been submitted to Hacker News is far from a trivial problem to solve. In general, this is because multiple URLs can map to the same page.

Direct string comparison of the current URL to previously submitted ones doesn't work because there are many ways for two identical web pages to have different URLs. For example, the URL fragments can differ (the part after the "#" that may or may not be present). Also there can be tracking parameters (often—but not necessarily—prefixed with "utm_"), which don't change anything about the page. But the URL parameters can't be entirely disregarded because sometimes sites, forums in particular, rely on them – consider pages that use an "?id=..." parameter for different pages. Thus some parameters should be removed, but some shouldn't. The same website having different domains (or domains that change over time) further complicates the situation.

My solution was to "canonicalize" URLs by transforming them into a simplified form using some pretty rough heuristics for common sources of noise. The Python code to do that is here: https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/blob/master/can...

All of this to say that even though I've used my extension for months and have been quite happy, there will inevitably be false negatives.

Thanks for clearing that up, yes I'm not that familiar with Bloom filters, seems like an interesting and useful concept. It could probably (pun intended) be applied to many applications to increase privacy.

I like the [1] Workflow file you've made, the comments really help with reading shell code. I'm also amazed you can query 4M entries everyday with BigQuery, I thought that might be fairly expensive to do right? Or is this below a free tier?

[1] https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/actions/runs/61...

You can checkout this repo and see if something is more appealing to you: https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news

I personally just use Stylus and have a custom css for making things a but more readable and user friendly.

There's also this extension that just refines a couple things: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

Speaking of checking people's profiles, on mouseover with Refined Hacker News [1] installed, I see you don't have a bio set up.

[1]: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

I also have HackerSmacker [2] and Momento for Hacker News [3] user tagging. I've only really used Hacker Smacker to make a note to self about propensity for great contributions, and probably installed Momento with expanding that intent in mind.

[2]: https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker

[3]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/momento-for-hacker-...

It seems that HN has a lot of anti-user features for the sake of it. Perhaps the rationale for graying out self posts is to make them not stand out (so that the post from OP doesn't get any undue advantage over the comments), but it's just an accessibility nightmare. It's as if people with poor eyesight were not welcome here.

I use Refined Hacker News https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news which alleviates some pain points, but unfortunately it doesn't fix this issue.

Sequoia: Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex–and Maybe You Should Too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33527047 (November 8, 2022 — 18 points, 7 comments)

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[0] https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news/blob/main/...

I find https://hw.leftium.com/ much more readable, but it's read-only (can't vote/comment/submit). And due to caching some recent comments are missing.

So for those rare occasions I use news.ycombinator.com. https://hw.leftium.com/ has links to the original HN page. Plus I have a bookmarklet that toggles between the two.

Refined Hacker News[1] makes the original HN site a little nicer to use.

[1]: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#readme

Not that this should be the answer, but there are a lot of HN browser plugins. Most have at least some level of theming and inline commenting. I'm currently a fan of Refined Hacker News (no affiliation) - https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news - but I'm sure there are others just as good out there.

Hacker news on y Combinator seems like an OK option, at least for those who are tech focused and prefer the old interface. There's the Refined Hacker News which, while not as good as Reddit Enhancement Suite, does make it a lot more bearable. But I don't think Hacker news will really appeal to the masses. There's no communities or subbreddits or any other grouping of users/posts.

Great extension. I use it heavily. The problem is that the developer seems to have given up on it.

You'll need this PR to use it without errors: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news/pull/125

I just go to my profile -> comments page and take a few seconds to check my most recent comments.

I have this extension that highlights any new comments, which makes it a lot easier. https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

Note the Refined Hacker News browser extension does this automatically, and more: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

This bookmarklet might be a nice option on mobile. I prefer to view via my own HckrNews web app, which also highlights the OP: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/35076225