[HN Gopher] Optimizing My Hacker News Experience
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Optimizing My Hacker News Experience
Author : fiveleavesleft
Score : 43 points
Date : 2025-05-08 16:26 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (reorientinglife.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reorientinglife.substack.com)
| fiveleavesleft wrote:
| Tools I developed to make my HN browsing more efficient and
| customised to my HN browsing patterns.
| 0x008 wrote:
| wait till you try this one: https://github.com/simonw/llm-hacker-
| news
| randmeerkat wrote:
| I don't understand why people want to so aggressively distance
| themselves from the source of truth. I'm not sure folks
| appreciate what they're giving up, when they're willingly
| summarizing and wholeheartedly consuming content that may or
| may not be entirely fabricated...
| anonu wrote:
| * saves time sorting, filtering
|
| * covers more ground: surfaces items you might miss in the
| torrent.
| Yizahi wrote:
| You can also try https://hckrnews.com/
| jt-hill wrote:
| I highly recommend this one too. It completely solved my issues
| with FOMO/compulsive refreshing
| Suppafly wrote:
| does it just remove some of the vowels from comments?
| anonu wrote:
| 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)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This is a genuinely good idea, it also seems fairly simple to
| implement.
|
| To keep it simple, it has to be up to the poster to pick
| category tags.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| 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.
| T0Bi wrote:
| Something like this?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988
| Suppafly wrote:
| >I would just have 1 improvement for HN: add category tags to
| each post.
|
| A lot of times I wish it had the equivalent of subreddits, but
| then I remember that's sorta why reddit sucks.
| smusamashah wrote:
| I made this userscript[1] that solves the 3rd point of "Missed
| listings". When you visit HN, new stories show up with a green
| "(NEW)", you will also see change in rank. Its done using
| localstorage.
|
| If you missed a few days, just keep doom scrolling to next pages
| and checkout only the NEW stories.
|
| You can set a var to only show the new stories or stories with
| many new comments. The filter logic can use some work but it
| works just fine.
|
| [1]:
| https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/e7c9ed3936ba69e522f8cb38...
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| 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!
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-mute/
| yathern wrote:
| 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.
| adityamwagh wrote:
| Cool stuff man. I like this UI more than the default!
| thegrim33 wrote:
| 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.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Perhaps this might help:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988
| tobr wrote:
| > strip out the comments that are just people ranting and
| raving about their political/social topic of choice
|
| You do see the irony here, right?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| There won't be much left after all that.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| I identify myself with this problem too. Namely, accumulating a
| lot of browser windows to sit and read plethora of interesting
| articles and follow them back to HN comments section to gain
| insights. These windows stay open for days and rot in my double-
| digit open tabs on mobile or Mac.
|
| However, I completely disagree that the solution should be a
| push-based notification system (through Telegram). As is
| notifications are annoying, especially when you're in the middle
| of deep work. Many a times, random email notifications from
| irrelevant entities push me off the concentration ladder. What's
| more, I often put my phone in DND mode, so these kind of
| notifications are thus useless.
|
| What's probably helpful is to be mindful of how much time can I
| legitimately spend on reading interesting things across internet.
| All so that I can produce interesting content some day.
| halkony wrote:
| If you want to make the most of your reading time, some sparse
| journaling is very helpful. I started journaling with logseq
| two years ago. I started by pasting in an HN link, marking it
| with the #interesting tag, then writing down a few surface
| level thoughts/questions. It's nice to know that I can revisit
| the memories or parse my notes with AI when I'm writing or
| designing.
| DerCommodore wrote:
| Greeting fellow disappointed UX user. Still can recommend this to
| you I build a while back. https://www.hn-reader.com
|
| + AI Summary included :). + Push Notifications + Save to lists +
| Swipe Actions + ...
| wltr wrote:
| I'm finding all these awesome attempts at making hacker news
| better as destined to fail. Just as you're making a reader for
| things not worth reading.
|
| Actually, I enjoy this mediocre UX, it reminds me to not waste
| too much of my precious time in here. That helps me visit only
| once in a while. To me, there's some wisdom in this.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| 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...
| tough wrote:
| Modern for Hacker News might be one of the few chrome
| extensions I've ever felt the need to have a premium paid
| version of.
|
| IT does have a New tag comment feature built-in pretty neat
| Suppafly wrote:
| Are you guys all using alternative frontends? Is that why the
| base experience never gets any improvements, or is it just to
| keep the uninitiated out?
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(page generated 2025-05-12 23:01 UTC)