Show HN: Prune Unwanted Stories from HN Front Page | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Prune Unwanted Stories from HN Front Page

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49 pointslatitude24 comments

Interesting idea. Last month I released a Chrome extension for Hacker News that lets you ban stories by domain name (simply choose the domain names in the options, so you don't have to click Hide every time like you do here). It also shows user profiles in their own popup, including twitter button and photo integration. Again, specific features can be configured or turned off in the options panel. New features coming soon!

http://vlad.github.com/autobahn/

Sounds more useful than this. Clicking on hide seems more work than just ignoring the stories.

First one I banned was TechCrunch. Second was Mashable. Good stuff.

forbes.com for me

I've been using this tweak for a month now, and I converged to hiding maybe a story or two per day. It's a great stress reliever if anything else, especially during the crunch times :-)

I would love something like this for the "new stories" page that only displayed links with 2 or more votes.

There you go -

      items.each(function(){
          var id = getItemId( $(this) );
  -           if (localStorage.getItem(id))
  +           if (localStorage.getItem(id) || ($(this).find('span').html() == '1 point'))
                      hideItem( $(this) );
      });

Apply to this - https://github.com/apankrat/internet-improvement-project/tre...

What's the point of a pre-curated "new stories" page?

What is the point of any information filter? I am not sure if you are being difficult or if its not as obvious as it seems to me. A lot of stories are submitted to HN everyday. I like the variety of the HN inbox but a lot of the "new stories" are redundant or just plain boring. Filtering for links with one or more upvote helps separate the wheat from the chaff.

But what if everybody did that? How would any story get more than 1 vote? Somebody has to dig through the garbage to get the good stuff right?

How is this any different than an argument against the frontpage? What if everybody only read the front page?

Addendum: (It seems tonight is be difficult night on HN. I really did not expect any responses to the rhetorical question above.)

As it is I rarely read more than the first page of new stories. With a filter like this I would help curate the new stories and would contribute more to the curating process than I currently do.

Then new links would start appearing on the front page once the current content got sufficiently old.

(To clarify: I am merely answering your question, not expressing an opinion.)

I suspect going through a page of 1-point stories is a more valuable contribution than going through several pages of 2+-point stories.

Good stuff, it's certainly useful. Consider adding the Hacker News HTTPS version to the included URLs? I've done it manually and it seems to work fine. (Yes, I'm one of those weirdos ;)

As an aside, I really like the click-to-play GIFs too.

I will use this to get rid of all the App.net spam.

Cool. What I'd really like would be a way to hide stories across multiple devices!

It would need to involve a server. I emailed Paul late last year when I first got the idea, heard nothing back, so I guess it will need to be a 3rd party server. Shouldn't be that hard, only a fork away - https://github.com/apankrat/internet-improvement-project/tre...

I agree, I often check on work machine, phone, and home machine. I can't rely on those grayed out links anymore...

Thank you for making it. Chrome now insists that you install extensions and userscripts from their "Web Store" so the extension doesn't work.

The bookmarklet works great but can't retain state over page refreshes. This could be super useful otherwise.

One workaround that I've found around the new restriction is opening the "extensions" page in Chrome and simply dragging the downloaded crx file onto it. This should prompt an installation dialog.

That's what it tells you if you click the "Learn more" link:)

That did the trick, good tip. Between this extension and the hckr news highlight new comments extension one can finally be productive reading hn.

Waitaminute...

I didn't know about the Web Store requirement. I am on Firefox and I have some prehistoric version of Chrome that I use for testing Chrome stuff.

If anyone is willing to repackage the extension and submit to the Chrome Store, it'd be much appreciated.

How about pre-hiding comments from HNers who are well-known shills for tech companies?

If nobody does that project, maybe someday I will.

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