Show HN: Autobahn - Save Time on Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Autobahn - Save Time on Hacker News

vlad.github.com

95 pointsvlad44 comments

For the past three weeks, I've worked on a Google Chrome extension called Autobahn that makes Hacker News even more awesome:

  - Ban stories by domain name
  - View user profiles in a popover
  - Links to comments and submissions in the popover
  - E-mails and urls in profiles are clickable
  - Twitter profile links and usernames
  - Follow button shown for twitter users
  - Photo shown for twitter users

Visit the web site: http://vlad.github.com/autobahn

See the screenshots and YouTube videos in the Google Chrome Store to get it or learn more:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dfpgenhhdldjhafbbk...

Your feedback is appreciated!

This is awesome, you should consider adding a DONATE button somewhere on your page so that users can give back :)

Why did you turn off the Youtube full screen option??

This isn't life-changing, but very convenient and unobtrusive in a good way. Well done, vlad! :)

Thank you very much. That's what I wanted to release for version 0.1. :) Stay tuned!

I made a dumb HN link/article blocker based on the article title or URL too: http://diff.biz/

The interface is the query string. It's useful when the front page gets too enthusiastic about meaningless things.

Cool chrome extension, dude! You might want to reconsider the music on your "save time on hacker news" video. It feels... like a sad foreign film about a mime. It's entirely possible that you meant it to be a parody of an obvious cultural reference that I'm missing, but I'm not sure this is the feeling you want associated with your project.

I couldn't tell if it was serious or not, I got the feeling that it was a joke. It was far too dramatic.

EDIT: I've now removed the slow version of the screencast.

Thanks. My girlfriend picked the slow music but then said the same thing so I made a fast, supercharged version. However, she advised me to go with the slow one anyway because she liked seeing my face. So I decided to choose one randomly!

Short, fast, upbeat version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jl7AW5gXIo

Slow & dramatic version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8X80_038lU (no longer on the web site, though)

Great! That one is much more reasonable =)

Note: it's this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c...) not this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jl7AW5gXIo&feature=relmf...). For me, the second video popped up first, so I was quite confused by your comment.

Also, excellent job on the extension, vlad!

Thank you! It was over three weeks of work (mostly UI/visual/product design, narrowing down features to launch with, testing, etc.) and I was freaking out because it had no upvotes on the new page. :)

Does it support a view where you only see new posts since the last visit? Or alternatively sort by the most recent posts?

This is something that bothers me. Say, there is an interesting discussion with ~100 comments and I read all of them. Then I come back later to ~110 comments, I have to find the new comments manually.

This is pretty cool extension. I can finally block forbes.com :)

Though unfortunately it's not working for me on Lubuntu 11.10, Chromium. ("Lu15.0.874.106 (Developer Build 107270 Linux) Ubuntu 11.10"). Saving preferences doesn't work - all choices just disappear after clicking 'save'...

Also feature request: I'd love to be able to highlight domains like I'm not able to ban them.

My use-case is that there is a certain type of article by arstechnica, NYT (and a few other sites) that have quality investigative/in-depth reporting that I particular enjoy. Unfortunately, only small subset of those publications total output is that kind of reporting, so I use HN as a filter. This would allow me to quickly figure out what I want to read :-)

like I'm NOW* able to ban them

1) Are you using http://news.ycombinator.com or a forwarder like hackrnews.com ?

2) Are you using the http version of news.yc ? Support for https://news.ycombinator.com is coming in the next version (last time I checked, only http was supported.)

Thanks!

Yep, using http://news.ycombinator.com

I can't seem to save any changes from the extension options (all unchecked. Checking then saving just unticks everything).

I'll test on another setup in a few hours after work

Updated Lubuntu to 12.04 from 11.10. Extension works now. (Not exactly sure what was going on..)

Support for https://news.ycombinator.com is coming

Just wanted to give you heads up about https, but it seems you already know what you're doing. ;) Thanks.

A feature that I've wanted would be to add a link to hide articles you choose to ignore. That way when you come back to the site a the second, third, forth, Nth time of the day, you don't need to rescan the same links you have already looked at.

You could find this useful: http://blog.hashtagify.me/2012/05/27/save-time-on-hacker-new...

Very nice! I'd prefer to see the user's karma on the little popup though, rather than beside the link I clicked.

Same here. Please show karma in the popup. Left lower corner (orange bar of the popup where you have submissions and comments) seems perfect for this.

Edit: Only now I see that karma is shown next to user name (thought you were not showing karma at all).

Why an extension and not a greasemonkey userscript?

Suggestion: you should let me go to the actual HN user page.

Thanks! You can do the following:

1) Click Options under Autobahn in the list of installed extensions, and turn the instant profile feature off (each feature has its own checkbox).

2) You can right-click a username and select Open Link in New Tab.

I'd like to have the instant profile but also have the ability to go to the user's hn profile.

I built something like this:

https://github.com/fractastical/Hacker-News-Filter

Filters by domain, keyword, and karma points.

On the friends branch you can also create your groups of friends and the main page will show how many of your friends have commented on any given story.

Thanks. Autobahn does not make extra calls to Hacker News because Paul Graham has voiced complaints about such behavior (e.g. scrapers). I've avoided requesting additional pages beyond what the user normally navigates to. However, new features are definitely coming!

I launched with many super-polished features in 0.1 and I will try to keep the same standard. I'll check yours out!

Yep, I avoided scraping with the first version but with the friends feature it was unavoidable -- that's why i've left it on a branch and haven't merged to head yet; no easy solution there and I was in fact temporarily ip banned while testing the features.

Looks interesting, but I don't get the profiles in the latest Chromium nightly, 22.0.1195.0 (145429).

Same here, I'm running 20.0.1132 on Win7. (I also have Adblock, Ghostery, and FB Disconnect installed, in case those are somehow creating some interference.)

Edit: Nevermind. Figured out you have to click on the username. But, it also intercepts middle-mouse clicks, so I can't quickly open in a new tab.

Ah, bingo, got it, thanks.

To connect some dots that were not clear to me: The user photos, are from twitter, and are collected from links listed in your profile's about box.

Simple - but it took me a minute to connect all the dots...

I installed it but it doesn't seem to be working. No errors in the background html page for it either.

EDIT: nvm, I have to click on the username for the pop up thing.

Interesting.

However, more than filtering out the bad stuff I would love to see content highlighted by one of the people whose opinions I am more interested in.

nice extension - the ban function is cool (now I can ban all that parse spam). Popover function is great. There is one popover chrome addon called ezlinkpreview that I use which is cool too(for bigger monitors) shows windows side by side.

Are you planning to add support for Firefox?

This is great!

Thank you!

Can it be modified for Firefox too?

also could add "slow" update option which do not refresh stories for a long time...

This is a parody, right?

A parody of what? I'm not sure what you mean.

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