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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

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Causality1·

HN could really use some kind of tag for when a submission goes to a file instead of a web page.

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There is: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

It seems that the submitter hasn't applied it

There's no option for that when submitting. I think it's probably moderator-applied.

It's just text as part of the title. The submitter can do it (until the edit time runs out).

It usually happens automatically, but obviously not this time. That makes it very hard to think about it, because it mostly works.

My hypothesis is that HN's detection only looks for file extension, not content type headers, because it doesn't fetch the submission itself.

grzm is correct, it does not happen automatically. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Why?

It would be useful for many. I have several computers that can browse the web but can't render PDF files (or run PDF.js).

Things don't have to be useful for everyone to be a good idea.

So my phone does what I expect it to do. When I open a link I might be opening it in another tab to read later, or switching to a different app while it loads, or something else. If it's a file I'm going to get a pop-up asking me what I want to do with it. Depending on where my finger was I might open the file with the wrong app or dismiss the pop-up making me either download it again or go find the file in a file manager. It also clutters up my Downloads folder with things I'm going to read or skim once and never look at again.

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