How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first | Hacker News Reader

How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first

til.simonwillison.net

130 pointssebg25 comments

I also maintain a website/client that flatly displays HN comments, at https://ditzes.com Here is the comments for this very submission on Ditzes: https://ditzes.com/item/35282815

I wanted something that allow me to read HN with oldest comments first (without being "manipulated" by the karma ranking), offline on my own machine, only updates the frontpage max once per hour and making it easy to follow along submission comments I'm really interested in to read everything in, so that's the goal with the client over. Using Tauri + ClojureScript (https://codeberg.org/ditzes/ditzes)

It's far from done, but felt relevant to this submission so figured I'd share it. To get the latest comments, go to the bottom and scroll up :)

Edit: A more exciting example as this submission doesn't have a lot of comments as of writing this comment, the "ChatGPT Plugins" story (730 comments), might take a bit longer to load the comments so you might have to be patient: https://ditzes.com/item/35277677

Username is apropos

I like what you're making.

Nice feature! I'm often annoyed by the ordering of comments. The default sometimes places new comments far down the listing.

It'd be nice to have a hexchat script to insert your URLs into the ##hntop IRC channel, instead of the ycombinator links...

I'm a simple guy, and I just do Ctrl-F "minutes ago".

Don't forget to check "minute ago", for those sneaky 1-minute-old comments.

Hahahaha! Nice. Your comment just happened to be tagged as "1 minute ago" at the moment I read it… Could not have driven the point home for me more thoroughly than that.

Please note that dang also has a feature in the works which adds an orange border on the left side of the new comments since your last visit of the thread. I've been using it for months and it is amazing! Email him and he might turn it on for you.

Yeah but the tricky part as always is: what counts as a "visit"?

If I accidentally hit reload in my browser? Or Firefox unloads the tab and then I switch to it briefly before quitting the browser (which probably causes a re-fetch)?

Real newsreaders and mailreaders maintain their own "read-ness" bits and give you nice tools for manipulating them effortlessly. Stuff like "catch up" (mark everything read) or "mark subtree as read" or "mark subtree as ignored". Anybody who has used GNUS knows how nice this is.

Trying to shoehorn this into a browser worldview is a losing battle.

FWIW the https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#readme extension does a good job of marking new comment items with a little indicator, although it does lose its mind when dang merges submissions (meaning I'm guessing the "last seen" is per `/item?id=` and not actually last seen by the commentId)

I then have a UserScript to make them more obvious:

    window.setTimeout(() => document.querySelectorAll('.__rhn__new-comment-indent').forEach(it => it.style.backgroundColor='orange'), 1000)

Prior to that I had a UserScript that would actually parse the `document.querySelectorAll('.age[title]')` to highlight the "newer than what"

If I want to watch a thread, I simply favorite or upvote it, so I can always come back quickly using my account. It’s all built-in, no need for other techs :)

Yes, even with that, sometimes a thread is so convoluted and so long, that is hard to follow. But we have “fold” and “next”, too ;)

I used to want to do this, but now I don't. I'm content to read older comments again, because I realize sometimes I glean new insight or things I want to reply with on the second or third pass. On the other hand, if I decided you were an asshole on the first read, while I'd like to say I'm more reflected upon repetition, that's probably not well-aligned with reality.

Here's a bookmarklet to take you directly to the algolia page from a thread:

  javascript: (() => {
    const id = window.location.href.match(/\d+$/g)[0];
    window.open(`https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=story:${id}&sort=byDate&type=comment`)
  })();

what is algolia page?

Algolia is the search that HN uses when you use the search bar at the bottom of the page.

algolia is the search provider for HN. If you use the search bar at the bottom of HN, it will take you to algolia.

The article explains three ways to get new comments in a thread. One way is to go to Algolia (Search provider for HN) and type in the thread id in a specific format. This bookmarklet will open that page directly with all the options pre-selected instead of having to open a new tab, copy and type in the id in the search box, etc.

This is good to know.

What is a harder challenge is how to read the comments that are on topic whilst skipping those that derail the topic with a ranty tangent or bikeshedding, usually generating a mass of less valuable comments in reply.

(I'm aware there could be irony in me posting this at a tangent but I hope it's at least close enough and not ranting or arguing about an obscure aspect)

I enjoy HN enormously, both the articles and the comments but it does seem increasingly prone to derailing that often masks a load of interesting/valuable comments.

Of course one person's side issues is another person's central issue, so this may be somewhat intractable.

The best way I've seen see far is simply to close an entire branch of comments as soon as it's clear someone is derailing and then move down, hoping that the next set stay on topic.

Interesting.

As someone mentioned, one could also use the HN plugin on Steampipe[1] to query among other things, threads with comments sorted reverse chronologically. (Disclaimer: I work on a cloud-version of Steampipe)

[1]: https://hub.steampipe.io/plugins/turbot/hackernews

I made a Telegram bot for receiving all kinds of alerts from Hacker News. One related feature is the ability to subscribe to a specific thread, which enables you to receive new comments directly in telegram.

[1] https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot

Just run

        lynx gopher://hngopher.com :p

Impressive effort.

Another option would be to improve the UX, with VS Code inspired vertical lines that make it easier to track indentation. Not as fancy though!

This is a handy way to search for things in the monthly "Who's Hiring" threads

Nice write up. Another way would be to use Steampipe.

Super cool stuff

What? You don’t pipe HN to tail?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com