A Chrome Extension for HN | Hacker News Reader

A Chrome Extension for HN

chrome.google.com

34 pointsbkudria11 comments

Not to be a downer or anything, but do you think this would encourage voting cabals? If I noticed every post my friends added, I'd probably end up upvoting them quite a bit more, and perhaps quite artificially.

It is kinda against the spirit of HN, technically. But I wrote this to scratch my own itch, because I personally know a number of users here, and I am a fan of quite a few others. I just want to make sure I see when they post.

But if you've ever met me you would know that I don't hesitate to disagree with anyone. So, I don't think this is a problem for me, I', quite prepared to downvote inanity when I see it, highlighted or not. Neither am I the type to just scroll down a page clicking upvote after upvote.

You mileage, of course, may vary.

Source code here: http://github.com/bkudria/hackerfriends I'm still working on cleaning it up and refining it - this is my first ever Chrome extension, so go easy on me. Suggestions and patches/pull requests of course are super welcome.

(BTW I highly recommend anyone wondering about writing Chrome extensions to give it a go. The API and docs are stellar, and it's super-easy to get started.

Nice, you could provide stats for users as to how many and who are following. Check out Shareaholic and the way the plugin options are set on a website.

This was kinda a weekend project (in the middle of the week, for #Chirp), so, I don't really have grand plans for it. A server-side component might be cool, to let me synchronize user lists, but at the moment I don't have any plans to do that.

Have you ever done extensions for Firefox? If so, how does the experience compare?

Either way, this looks great. Thanks for making it.

I haven't done any Firefox development, alas, so I can't compare.

Thanks, I've been wanting this feature. It's good I like it.

I'd rather the color of the friends names be the same orange as around the Y in the logo; it looks brighter on my monitor. And, I wish friends posts on the main page weren't quite as dark, and possibly not bolded. There, but more subtle.

Thanks again.

I spent some time playing with the styles, and I didn't really bother to match the orange. In a future version I plan to make the colors configurable.

In the mean time, there is a CSS stylesheet you can edit!

Oh damn... I thought it might be an extension to remove ipad and apple stories from the front page... although that could leave it pretty empty.

very cool. I like it.

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