Hacker News Reader

Comment by JimiofEden | Hacker News Reader

It's convenient, but I've developed muscle memory to just type news.ycombinator over the last 10 years, so I guess it doesn't matter much for me.

When I first discovered the site, I definitely had to google 'hacker news' in order to find it consistently, however, so maybe someone else can get good use out of it.

View on HN

You mean type 'n' and hit enter.

This trick does not work anymore since I visited netflix :(

If you're using Google Chrome, shift+delete offenders.

works in firefox as well.

Using Firefox or Chrome solves this problem as you don't get full quality for Netflix on them, hence there's no address collision as you resort to using Edge (or else?) for Netflix.

Huh? You don't get full quality on Netflix in some browsers?

That’s correct: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444

> Netflix is available in Ultra HD on Windows and Mac computers with:

> - Microsoft Edge for Windows

> - Windows 10 App

> - Safari for MacOS 11.0 or later

I believe this is for DRM reasons — Firefox is open-source, so they don’t want you modifying your copy of Firefox to bypass DRM or whatever.

Does spoofing your user-agent bypass that?

You probably can't spoof the DRM.

I think that is because there is actually DRM technology in the browser that communicates with Netflix when on their site. So it's definitely a lot more than just checking a UA. But it would be nice if it were that easy.

I just configure the New Tab to go directly here, Ctrl+N for News

The ultimate productivity hack

I'm a Neuralink alpha tester. I configured it to open an HN tab on every device when I wink my left eye.

Do I win?

I have a dedicated monitor - so no.

when does neuralink hit beta? i can't wait to train myself into a new facial tic whenever i'm feeling slightly bored

Or, to be honest, a "more productive procrastination hack".

I just reroute all of my outgoing traffic to HN. Whatever I try to do I end up here. /s

I just glue hn to my face. I see it when I open my eyes.

I have hn CRISPRed into my genes, programmed carefully in multi-core OCaml backed by Postgres.

Sorry, but if you check your so-called junk DNA you’ll find I Base64-encoded it there already

You mean Base4?

NICE

yes as tragic as it is for over a decade already

Newegg is the worst collision for me.

I black-holed news.ycombinator.com on my work computer by adding it to my /etc/hosts file, but my subconscious compensated by going to news.google.com often enough that now ‘n’ + enter takes me there.

In my case, it is 'n' + '↓' + enter

At some point in time I drilled this sequence into my fingers:

ctrl-t, ne, ctrl-w

i.e. new tab, start typing news.ycombinator.com, immediately interrupt myself and close the tab.

These days I have hn mapped to 0.0.0.0 in my hosts file.

And yet both if you are here.

starts closing his 42 open HN tabs

yep, but less during work hours I hope.

That hits me where I live. I too have taught firefox that `n` means "please autofill to news.ycombinator.com".

command+l,n,enter

At least once a day firefox lags out, doesn't autofill and instead takes me to search?q=n

My new tab has 3 buttons: HN, Google search, Wiki

Sometimes I think I am the only person left in the world who still uses the "Bookmarks" feature of my web browser.

It's because the UX for them is awful and takes up valuable real-estate unless you put them in a folder that's nowhere near your toolbar in which case you will never see them again, especially after a Mozilla update corrupts them, leaving you without the URLs you so carefully curated and with a vague sense of regret that you trusted one of the most important things (your memory) to a company that gets the largest majority of its revenue from search engine deals and the other tenth for a half-thought out proprietary bookmarks replacement they force you to waste hard drive space with.

I use the bookmark bar in Chrome but edit all bookmarks to remove their title… so I have a bar full of favicons, which is enough to have one click access to most sites I use.

In Firefox, you can "keyword" your bookmarks so that typing a specific string goes to your bookmark

It's definitely more convenient. I have mine set to 'hn' in Vivaldi browser to take me there.

In firefox, you can configure the bookmarks toolbar to only show on the new tab page, which is super useful because it doesn't steal screen space on your normal tabs.

I'm aware (that's how I have it configured), but that doesn't solve many of the problems with bookmarks.

> unless you put them in a folder that's nowhere near your toolbar

Hum? My bookmarks toolbar is full of folders. Some are of the "open all and close each when there's nothing interesting" kind, others are of the "will probably be useful later" kind.

I only really use the bookmarks in the toolbar. Anything that gets bookmarked away from that is in the "will read it eventually but not really" territory.

Same, and I edit all my toolbar bookmarks to have no text, so it's just a row of favicons.

Same, it would be cool to color the favicons differently (looking at my multiple Grafana bookmarks...)

Think some of my bookmarks date back to mosaic. About once a year I sweep them and purge a good amount of them as I have hundreds nicely organized into categories. They 'rot' so not worth keeping. Sometimes I will point them at archive but usually I can not even remember why I bookmarked them in the first place.

I was just away from the Internet for 8 years. When I checked my bookmarks 99% of them were dead links. I wonder how many from Mosaic days would still be valid?

Serious question: were you in prison? If not, how/why did you take an 8 year break?

Maybe they had a friend named Wilson on a long vacation on an island? Maybe they were the star in a day time soap where they were in a coma for 8 years.

Close enough! County jail waiting for a trial.

Yikes, eight years waiting for a trial? Whatever happened to the 6th amendment?

There were people with me who are about to pass into their 12th year.

See here: https://www.cookcountysheriff.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09...

saw this charge in there:

> POSSESS BURGLARY TOOLS

You can go to jail for that? I've had to break into my own home several times since living here because I've accidentally locked myself out.

Yes, in Illinois. Things like bump keys are illegal.

Here's the full list.. most of it centers on intent, but intent can be inferred in some cases: https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/documents/072000050K19...

not many. Also many times even if the site is still around the content may not have been updated in years.

I think I stopped using them when the browsers inexplicably lost their menus.

I don't really understand why the menus went away from the top of web browser, since desktop screen space hasn't been an issue since the late '90s, even on laptops.

Firefox has menus on the top, unless the user hides them.

Isn’t it hidden by default? I installed Firefox on a new machine a few months ago and I could swear I had to unhide it.

It's hidden but it shows up if you press Alt.

I've never hidden anything, yet my Firefox only has an out-of-place mobile style menu.

You can put a bookmark folder with no title in the toolbar next to the addressbar, into which you put whatever you want. In Firefox, that works out of the box. Recently I switched to Vivaldi, and I had to use some css tweak to do it:

https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/24849/bookmarks-in-address-b...

Same reason as many other design problems:

- prioritizing graphical design over usability

- and prioritizing copying Chrome and Mac OS over following "local" OS guidelines

Who would want a lifetime searchable, contextually indexed, history of all the sites you've ever been to and perhaps a couple of sub-pages automatically scraped, all stored locally to be shared at your discretion, I'm sure Google would love to add that asap.

Bookmarks is where interesting links go to die and resolve to dead sites when you try and visit one 5 years later.

I've always liked hackerne.ws :)

I have bookmarked HN and added it to my iPhone Home Screen so does not matter to me either. It shows up just like a normal app on my iPhone :)

Muscle memory is big with this one. But Chrome now has an icon right at the start page to go here.

I just type “new” enter

Then I must be the worst person in the world because I still Google HN to get here.

seems that hn.com is unused..

i google hacker news and click the first link

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