Hacker News Reader

Comment by ljoshua | Hacker News Reader

Side question: does anyone know of a browser extension or anything that would hide/gray out HN headlines that I've already seen on previous visits so I know only what stories are actually new on the front page? Would make scanning quicker.

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I assume you mean seen but not visited, since as the other reply says, the browser tracks :visited for you.

I have a more aggressive greasemonkey script that hides lots of non-technical links on HN

    var links = document.links;

    var boring = [ "adage.com", "arstechnica", "bbc", "discovermagazine", "bloomberg", 
               "bloombergview", "buzzfeed", "businessinsider", 
              "californiasunday","cnn","csmonitor","dailymail",
              "digg", "economist","esquire", "fastcompany",
              "forbes", "ft.com", "fortune", "fusion", "geekwire",
              "gizmodo", "harvard.edu", "huffingtonpost", "inc.com",
              "longreads", "medium", "mondaynote",
              "nature", "nautil.us", "newscientist", "newstatesman",
              "newyorker", "npr.org", "nybooks", "nymag", "nytimes", "pando",
              "psychologytoday", "qz.com", "reddit", "reuters", "sciencedaily",
              "scientificamerican", "slate", "techcrunch", "telegraph",
              "theatlantic", "theguardian", "thenation","theparisreview",
              "theverge", "theregister", "time", "usatoday", "vancouversun",
              "vice", "vimeo",
              "vogue", "washingtonpost", "wired", "wsj", "yahoo",
              "youtube", "zdnet" ];
     matcher = new RegExp("\\b("+(boring.join("|").replace(/\./g,"\\."))+")\\b");
     for (i=0; i<links.length; i++) {
       hostname = links[i].hostname.replace(/^www\./,"");
       if (hostname.match(matcher)) {
         links[i].style.setProperty("display", "none");
  
         links[i].parentNode.insertBefore(document.createTextNode("[removed]"), links[i]);

      }
    }

Just to be clear, I read a lot of those sites - I'm just not interested in seeing them on HN, where I'm looking for technical news.

Anyway, you could adapt this by parsing the age field and making judgements based on how old the article is and your time of day (ie you'll have seen a 6 hour old article at the end of the day, but at the start of the day, it first appeared overnight)

Accessing HN with Firefox (if your web history is turned on) does exactly that[1]. No extension is necessary. The same is true for every other browser since the CSS file it clearly says:

    a:link    { color:#000000; text-decoration:none; }
    a:visited { color:#828282; text-decoration:none; }

[1] http://i.imgur.com/CqKW1yK.png

Sorry, didn't mean just visited links. I want unvisited (but seen) links to be treated differently.

Example: I visit once, scan 30 links, click 2, and leave. Come back 2 hours later, there are 5 new links, 5 have dropped off, and my attention is drawn to just the five new links, regardless of whether I visited the other 25 or not.