Hacker News Reader

Comment by gitgud | Hacker News Reader

Hey Guys,

This is my first Chrome extension. I made it because, I always find my self searching for older discussions about popular webpages, like when popular technologies are first released.

This extension checks if the current webpage has a posting on Hacker News or Reddit. If a post exists, a button will be created which displays the number of comments and links to the discussion.

The idea stems from this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16647565

Hope you find it as useful as I do, and greatly appreciate any feedback you have.

Cheers!

View on HN

I love the idea because these days often a large chunk of the value comes from good comments from readers. Especially with HN but also to some degree with reddit.

Two questions:

First, will you tell us how it works? My guess is that you have scrapped these dicussions from reddit and HN and your extension contacts a server asking "show me reddit and HNs for this news". Is this correct?

Second, will you kindly stop contributing to Google's eco-system? Time and time again Google has shown the world the complete disregard they have for everything but their bottom line. By comparison Mozilla's behavior has been impeccable.

Does it means that each url I visit with this addons enabled are send to a foreign server?

That's exactly what I was trying to discover.

Yes the add-on needs to query the public APIs of Reddit and Hacker News in order to check if the article has been posted already. Clicking the icon disables it though if its annoying.

Could you add a mode in which it only queries the APIs if I click the extension icon? Like that it would allow me to instantly search for comments without submitting all my browsing history to reddit/HN

That's a great idea actually, then its only working when you want it to. I'll add that as soon as I can!

Thanks! And good questions, firstly no scraping involved. The api's are much easier to work with.

For Hacker News it uses the official JSON api https://github.com/HackerNews/API/blob/master/README.md

And for Redit, it simply queries the url directly eg: https://reddit.com/example.com/article.html

As for your second question, go easy on me it's my first extension ;) But yes I plan to port it to Firefox too, as the extension APIs are amazingly similar!

Hey, so I refactored and made a Firefox addon! it's pretty cool that firefox allows addons on mobile, so it works there too!

Here's the link:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/newsit-hnews-...

Let me know what you think, or if there's any issues

Indeed a great idea, do you plan to port it to Firefox too? :)

Thanks, yes I've just had a look at the Firefox api and its very similar to Chrome's, so it shouldn't take much work!

In case you weren't already aware, there is almost a cross-browser standard for doing that: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions and https://browserext.github.io/browserext/ is the draft standard

Thanks!

I've tried to use as little browser-"specific" api's as I could, the main problem was the manifest.json file, which vary a bit between Chrome and Firefox

Anyway here's the link to the Firefox version if you're interested:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/newsit-hnews-...

Let me know what you think, or if there's any issues

Hey, so I refactored and made a Firefox addon! it's pretty cool that firefox allows addons on mobile, so it works there too!

Here's the link:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/newsit-hnews-...

Let me know what you think, or if there's any issues

wow that's fast :) Thank you very much. Will test it right away.

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