[HN Gopher] A curated list of FOSS tools to improve the Hacker N...
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       A curated list of FOSS tools to improve the Hacker News experience
        
       Author : bminusl
       Score  : 62 points
       Date   : 2021-03-15 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | nathanwallace wrote:
       | Use SQL to query Hacker News with Steampipe -
       | https://hub.steampipe.io/plugins/turbot/hackernews
       | 
       | It's an open source Postgres FDW using Go -
       | https://github.com/turbot/steampipe-plugin-hackernews
        
       | throwawaysea wrote:
       | Will one of these make grayed out comments easier to read? I
       | often find it very hard to read those even when I intend to,
       | which I feel like is a design flaw. It would be better if there
       | was a toggle button to let me read a specific comment with normal
       | coloring.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | If a comment is faded and you're having trouble reading it, you
         | can click on its timestamp to go to its page, and in that case
         | it should be rendered normally.
         | 
         | I know it's an extra hop, but hopefully better than nothing.
        
         | yesenadam wrote:
         | If you click on the "X minutes ago" it takes you to that
         | comment's page, where it's not greyed out. Or use this
         | bookmarklet to ungrey all comments on a page:
         | javascript:(function(){var
         | i,x=document.querySelectorAll(".commtext");for
         | (i=0;i<x.length;i++) x[i].className='commtext c00'})();
        
       | enobrev wrote:
       | I use an android client for HN, but the _only_ feature I actually
       | want is for the collapse and vote buttons to be big enough for
       | human fingers on mobile. Being able to unvote helps, but one of
       | the only reasons I ever need to unvote is because the vote
       | buttons are microscopic.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | rolls-reus wrote:
       | Lack of a license does not make code FOSS by default.
        
         | bminusl wrote:
         | The lack of a license on small projects is often an oversight.
         | And anyway, when the authors are notified, they choose the
         | first license they see --- often MIT.
        
       | seoguru wrote:
       | also chrome extension to toggle only showing comments that
       | contain links: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-
       | news-show-l...
        
       | tartoran wrote:
       | I would like to be able mark off all the stories I read or am not
       | interested in so at the next visits I can quickly scan whether
       | there's any change. I know I could use the 'hide' for stories but
       | I'd still have to scan a list of 30 (older) stories so that won't
       | work so basically zero inbox isn't working out for me. Also I
       | like seeing the how the rank changes for the top 30 stories, I
       | just want to visually be able to know I checked that off.
        
         | iptrans wrote:
         | Use the front page RSS feed.
        
       | PeterWhittaker wrote:
       | I'm a big fan of https://hckrnews.com
        
       | screamingninja wrote:
       | My favorite FOSS Android HN client is Materialistic-
       | https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic
       | 
       | Available on f-droid-
       | https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.hidroh.materialist...
        
         | interestica wrote:
         | Same. Except for some weird reason it won't let you click on
         | URLs from hacker News when posted in a thread (eg when someone
         | is linking to an older thread). Other than that, it's the best
         | HN client I've come across for Android.
         | 
         | I suspect it's some kind of recursion thing going on where I'm
         | already in the app assigned to HN URLs.?
        
       | hivacruz wrote:
       | I would love to see something to exclude or ignore some patterns
       | in titles or links.
       | 
       | I browse HN every day to read good tech posts and comments but
       | I'm a very anxious person (especially these days of course) and
       | seeing articles about death, cancers and other things make me
       | start the day quite badly.
       | 
       | I know this is not a solution to ignore this, I should fight it,
       | but I would gladly like to see (sub-)categories or tags on HN to
       | browse wisely what I'm interesting in.
        
         | hirundo wrote:
         | I view HN titles via RSS and filter out phrases with Feedly.
         | It's better than a beta blocker for blood pressure control.
        
           | hivacruz wrote:
           | Thanks for the tip! I will check. I'm already on beta
           | blockers, unfortunately.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | invisiblerobot wrote:
       | I would like a sentiment analysis of the comments posted beside
       | each article link. A kind of temperature reading. So you can
       | guage if the comments are generally positive or negative and use
       | that as a proxy for whether the article is considered valuable
       | enough to click on.
       | 
       | It's not perfect as conversations evolve away from the articles.
       | But it would be useful I think.
        
         | minimaxir wrote:
         | In natural language processing and Hacker News in particular,
         | it's often incorrect that a submission with mostly positive
         | comments imply an article is valuable, and conversely a
         | submission with mostly negative comments imply an article is
         | not valuable.
         | 
         | That rationale just leads to even more groupthink than usual
         | for an online community.
        
           | invisiblerobot wrote:
           | That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying an article that is
           | positive sentiment OR negative sentiment is INTERESTING
           | enough to click on. An article with luke warm sentiment
           | either way is less interesting.
        
           | clairity wrote:
           | more pointedly, comment sentiment is a naive and misleading
           | signal of either submission or discussion quality. most
           | simply because it's a poor proxy for _why_ , but also because
           | quality is an amorphous concept that defies direct
           | rationalization (i.e., being numericalized), among other
           | factors.
           | 
           | naive heuristics are also gamed more easily, especially
           | because they have a tenous relationship to the desired signal
           | in the first place.
           | 
           | slightly more interesting would be absolute value of comment
           | sentiment, which would be a (still naive) measure of
           | controversy/engagement. to really get at quality and value,
           | you'd have to consider comment semiotics/semantics (the
           | symbolic meaning and content), which complicates the effort
           | exponentially (perhaps impossibly so).
        
           | creamynebula wrote:
           | Maybe the quality of submission is not what's being judged,
           | but whether or not the discussion itself is valuable. I for
           | one prefer to read discussions in a positive tone...
        
         | asadlionpk wrote:
         | This looks like a good weekend hack, if nobody else is doing
         | this I will do it.
         | 
         | I have developed a similar extension for facebook feed.
        
       | jonplackett wrote:
       | I have an idea for a HN add on that I don't have time to make
       | yet.
       | 
       | I'd like to make a 'social media' version of HN that notifies you
       | every time anyone upvotes your comment or post and generally bugs
       | you in all the ways social media normally does. Just to see what
       | it would be like.
        
         | cyberbanjo wrote:
         | https://hnnotify.xyz/
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-15 23:01 UTC)