The weird part is, there seems to be enough demand for this that these keep popping up, but not so much that any of them ever hang around.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240221
I built a Chrome extension to solve a problem I kept having: losing track of conversations on HN. The threads page is a firehose. Someone replies to your comment, you miss it, the conversation dies. Or you revisit a thread and can't remember which comments you've already read.
HN Reader does three things:
1. Hides stories you've seen – Checkbox next to each story. Check it to dim. Helps filter the front page to stuff you haven't looked at yet. 2. Collapsible comments that remember – Click the arrow to collapse a comment thread. Come back later and it stays collapsed, unless someone added a new reply, then it auto-expands with a "NEW" badge. 3. Highlights your conversations – On your threads page, badges show "you", "replied to you", and "you replied" so you can instantly spot active conversations.
That last one is what made me build this. I was missing replies buried in long threads. Now I just glance at my threads page and the blue "replied to you" badges jump out.
Everything stays in local storage. No server, no account, no tracking. Auto-cleans old data when storage gets full.
GitHub: https://github.com/adamzwasserman/hnreader
Works in Chrome, Arc, and any Chromium browser. Load it unpacked from the repo.
Feedback welcome – especially on what other HN reading problems you'd want solved.
Here is the proof. [0]
> yes please! i need a "comment to follow" functionality on HN
So I built it. I built this for one user named swyx. I'm going to email him now letting him know I built it.
Here's some discussion of one recent one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21172406
And some more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42814917
And HNChat, which went a little further:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12431724
That said, don't take this as criticism. It's clearly something that some HN users want. If you can make it stick, more power to you!
HN Notifier
https://github.com/meanands/hn-notifier
Hacker New Telegram Bot
https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot
HN Reply Notifier
https://github.com/lotsofnoise/hn-reply-notifier
And there have been Show HNs on them as well.
Show HN: I built an open-source notification inbox widget for Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36373123
Show HN: HN Reader – Track your conversations across Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240221
I (and probably a lot of other HN users) built my own bespoke HN suite that notifies me on replies, stories that I might be interested in, etc. It just sits quietly on a VPS and sends messages to me over Signal. Never open-sourced it because the code is a dire abomination.
Yours is probably the first Chrome side-panel variation that I've seen though.
It is one of these services that just work.
Thank you, Dan Grossman!
Swyx is certainly a taste maker!
Mine is just to track conversations. You can follow a thread and get notified when it is updated. It used to work on Firefox Mobile but some how an automatic android update disabled my extension and I have not spent the time to fix it.