Better HN - Google Chrome extension | Hacker News Reader

Better HN - Google Chrome extension

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27 pointsronnier23 comments

Nice work. I've been trying to write something very similar to this for the last couple days so perhaps I won't need to complete it after all.

The one concern i have is that it appears to send up every url I navigate to; I'd much prefer to not have that overhead and instead have a button when I'm interested in a particular url. Having it query searchYC for each page i visit seems overkill, but perhaps not for some people.

In addition to the overhead, this has rather significant privacy implications, since you're sending your complete browsing history to a third party (and in real-time).

And the third party is SearchYC, run by "a couple of guys". They don't even have a privacy policy.

That being said, I don't fault the SearchYC guys for this at all- the extension leverages their site far beyond its original intended purpose.

Something like StumbleUpon has similar privacy implications and yet, people don't seem to have any problem with that.

When I was thinking about my implementation, I didn't think about SearchYC but instead was thinking about scraping the homepage (and its 7 little brothers) for the relevant info and then compare it to the current page. It would remove your concern (besides the initial setup) but would work only for recent stories. (which might be good for some people but not all)

The greasemonkey script and chrome extension parse HN's newest items page in addition to searchYC. You could just disable the call to searchYC in the script.

I'll do a bit of cleanup to the extension. Then I'll post the code, so you can change what you like.

You may be correct. All I did was convert the original script from using GreaseMonkey's proprietary functions to Chrome extensions. I found it very useful that I don't have to check if a site was on HN. I get a many pleasant surprises this way, on sites I never thought were here.

Perhaps just have it send out for comments when a page has been opened from HN. That way I can click a page from HN and see the comments on the underlying page. So have a conditional lookup based on referrer.

Very useful. It would be cool if there was a way to disable it for links that are dead on HN: there's no reason for an HN tab on the Facebook homepage ...

I was just thinking that

or even an ignore button could work

If you use the greasemonkey script you have an option to disable sites (HN itself is disabled by default). Won't work for chrome, though.

http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js

Yeah, I couldn't find a way to exclude pages on Chrome extensions. But I haven't thought about how I may identify dead pages from code. I have an idea I'll try out soon. If it works, the extension will be updated automatically.

Each page now needs to pass the following test of interest: [points>months passed since post].

Pages that are dead/not interesting will stop appearing after a month, but interesting pages will linger on. It was important for me to keep the element of serendipity, so I can still find conversations that were once interesting.

I think it is kind of nice that you can suddenly revive a submission or dive into old commentary.

Perhaps you shouldn't display anything older than 3 months, as after 3 months one can re-submit the page.

Thanks for continuing to improve it.

Funny, following a recent HN discussion about another Chrome extension for HN, I had added something similar to my list of things to do. But my goal was to have something more like this: http://www.reddit.com/tb/b9yyc (from said-discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171106)

Is there more to your extension than embedding the linked GreaseMonkey script?

Just a bit. There are a few GreaseMonkey functions that are not supported by Chrome (which can run some GreaseMonkey scripts natively, unless they use them). I had to replace them with something chrome understands. It isn't that difficult. In fact, I think I can make a more general ChromeMonkey to support all GeaseMonkey scripts, but I won't be sure before I try.

+1 The FireFox greasemonkey script tevolutionized my HN experience. Guess now I can finally switch to Chrome.

Exactly my thought. I moved to Chrome a few weeks back, and this was the only thing I was missing.

Nice extension. I wish the sidebar-slider was smaller, though; the "Y" logo would suffice.

Nice, I downloaded it and I will blog about it if it works well for me this week.

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