Hacker News Reader

Comment by cobbman | Hacker News Reader

I want hacker news UX to stay as it is, mostly, but these are features I'd welcome.

What features would you welcome?

It would be nice to flag who the OP is in the story comments. Provides helpful context, esp. if they posted their own project.

Here's one potential implementation:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-maker-badge/khod...

Implemented.

- Better formatting for text: (1) bullet points (2) markdown-like links (3) Slightly different background for code.

- More "sub-reddits". We already have Ask/Show HN. We probably can add a couple more to keep everything organized.

- Option to auto-collapse comments threads deeper than X levels by default. When they are all open by default like today, only the top comment and its children get more of the eyeballs.

The formatting of text is a pain that I haven't figured out a good solution to. To do it right, I'd have to convert the existing HTML to markdown, then convert back to HTML.

It would be nice if HN just put the unstyled text in the page and then used JS to render it, but I'm sure there would be complaints about that too.

Also "unread comment highlighting" would be so good to have.

That’s coming to stock HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47670008

That was actually kind of a pain to implement. Refined didn't do it fully, mine covers a lot more edge cases.

Can imagine!

> What features would you welcome?

1. Dark mode

2. (Now that i'm seeing it in action for the first time) inline responding. That said: this increases the weight of the page considerably (in JS code), so delegating it to the various third-party apps is arguably the better approach for this specific platform. (But now that i've seen it in use here i'll have to add this to the Fossil SCM's forum at some point, as this is sooooo much more comfortable.)

I like how on Reddit you can click to the right of a comment header (username, timestamp, etc) to collapse that subthread. Gives you a much bigger hit target than just [-]. Also saves putting [-] over near the up/down arrows for consistency of positioning, a decision which could otherwise just create trouble on mobile.

Ooh, I'm having that feature for the next version of Comments Owl for Hacker News (which already moves the [-] to the left and increases the size of it on mobile), but does that not lead to accidental collapsing while scrolling on mobile?

I've already added using a confirm() for flagging and hiding in list pages on mobile to it because it's so easy to accidentally hit while scrolling.

All the features I've added to this extension.

But if you want to pick one: Inline replies.

Right now, I have to do a ton of magic to make that happen in order to work around your auth flow. Namely, pulling the auth token out of the other page and then having to keep track of it in session storage.

I could delete a whole lot of code if that was just built in.

By inline replies do you mean you click 'reply' and then a textbox opens in place?

The browser extension I wrote years ago, and which tomhow and I use for moderation, does this. I feel guilty about not having shared it a long time ago, but there just has never been time. Now that LLMs are starting to let me do things I've wanted to do for years, there's a chance I'll actually get to it before the sun dies.

Yes. Here is the implementation I've got... note that I also added links to the rules/guidelines in an attempt to help with that issue too, heh.

And yes... AI enables so many things.

https://oj-hn.com/assets/inline-reply-light.png

>Now that LLMs are starting to let me do things I've wanted to do for years, there's a chance I'll actually get to it before the sun dies.

Please tell us you're not going to start vibe-coding HN.

Thanks. My feeling as well.

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