Hacker Hues: Color Code your HN by Article Quality
As my first Javascript project, I've decided to write a greasemonkey script that color codes Hacker News stories according to story quality. You can find it here:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/82390
The quality metric I have chosen is points/comments. I find that popular stories with few comments are usually very meaty articles, such as this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1441801
However, popular articles with tons of comments are stories that everybody has an opinion on, such as articles about politics. Even if you haven't studied a particular area of political policy, you can repeat your tribe's official stance on that policy. And many people do.
This metric isn't perfect as "review my startup" and "Ask HN" threads tend to get a lot of comments without necessarily being of low quality. But it is a decent approximation.
This script allows you to save time by drawing your eye to the "good" (2-5x points/comments) and "great" (5x+ points/comments) articles, while avoiding the editor flamewars, discussions on atheism, and why America should be more/less like Europe.
Please let me know what you think! Like I said, this is my first Javascript program and I am open to criticism and ideas for future projects.