uBlock Filter for HN Ads | Hacker News Reader

uBlock Filter for HN Ads

30 pointsperihelions7 comments

     news.ycombinator.com##:xpath(//td[contains(@class,"subtext")]):not(:has-text(/\b(comment|comments|discuss)\b/i)):xpath(.. | ../following-sibling::tr[1] | ../preceding-sibling::tr[1]):style(display: none)

HN ads, AFAIK, are sponsored things that look like posts on the front page, but don't allow comments. Hence this filter rule targets "posts lacking a comments section".

View on HN

Thank you so much for this, I am constantly hiding the job posts because I have no interest in joining another YC venture. On average, the workers tend to lose out on the lion's share.

I still appreciate YCombinator, but it's not a winning game for workers. The exception and major caveat being companies that actually make the world significantly better and align with ones own interests, absolutely go for it!.

Anyhow, once Firefox on mobile supports uBlock, this is going to be absolutely perfect for me!

p.s. thank you HN community and mods for consistently being there for me. Happy holidays.

Late comment because I can't edit my post: I've discovered a serious defect with this rule—it incorrectly blocks old, archived HN threads which had 0 comments. That's because you can't write new comments on threads beyond a certain age, so this rule will apply to them if they don't already have comments. (Neither the string [discuss] nor [<N> comments] will appear—it doesn't default to "0 comments", it defaults to empty-string). This is an edge case that applies, for example, if you're browsing on Algolia search and are trying to click through to a submission's URL—that UX takes you into the empty HN thread first, which immediately hides the URL.

Leaving this warning for future archive delvers (hello there!)

I really wish HN would just allow comments on those posts...

They would basically turn into a discussion of the company under every single post.

Exactly. It'd be nice to know which ones are actually worth working for.

That’s not what the discussion would be about. It’d be about hyper-specific grievances customers had with the company and rarely about actually working there.

Is this really a bad thing, in a "there's no such thing as bad press" sense? I've never heard of most of these companies, and it would help to understand some of their daily work, common pain points, or just plain interesting discussions about them while considering them as a potential employer.

Most of these posts link straight to a job description and it's up to the reader to guess how the company is. Maybe that information asymmetry is purposeful (to avoid negative comments?), but it gives off a "has something to hide" vibe inadvertently, especially compared to the openness of the rest of HN.

As an example, we get both positive and negative stories about Cloudflare, Vercel, OpenAI, etc. all the time, but they have no trouble recruiting people. And it's much clearer what they do and how they do it, vs all these new startups that nobody's heard of yet.

Shrug. Just a thought.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com