Show HN: Chrome Extension for the one thing I miss on HN | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Chrome Extension for the one thing I miss on HN

chrome.google.com

59 pointsdalys27 comments

+1. I also recommend Hacked Hacker News [1] for unread comment counts on the homepage, highlighting unread comments and inline commenting/editing. I also use Hacker News Collapse [2] to make comment threads collapsible.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacked-hacker-news...

2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...

My favorite is Hacker News Enhancement Suite [1], for unread comment counts, voting on front page, highlight unread, inline comment, collapsible thread, etc.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

Just trying this out now - looks great so far.

Seconded, been using it for a while with no issues.

It has color coded upvote counts too! http://i.imgur.com/6NQyhPI.png

I take pull requests at https://github.com/etcet/HNES but I only have a few hours a week to work on it.

Using these two plus the OPs link color one, working pretty nicely!

Hacker News Enhancement suite changes the look and feel too significantly for me to use it.

Thanks for these. Now what we need is something like Reddit Companion [1], which injects a toolbar to visited pages so that you can just click on a story and then go to the comments.

If that sounds un-noteworthy: Ordinarily, if you open a story link, it's somewhat cumbersome to get to the HN comments. I typically open the HN comments first, then follow the link to the story, so that I can always use the back button to get the comments. Or I open the HN comments in a separate tab, then the story. If I'm less than careful, I'll open the story, go to lunch, come back and not find the HN comments because it's dropped off the front page and the HN title is so different from the story headline that it's impossible except by brute force.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-companion/a...

Thanks for the second link. Been very keen to get collapsible threads.

I realise that the extension is released in good faith, but am I the only person who thinks that this is probably the best way to xss users and gain upvotes for your stories and "show hn" due to the nature of these extensions they can bypass same origin policy since they can do anything on news.yc and hence get the upvote token and send an upvote request. Since the extensions are updated automatically, we wouldn't even know it happened.

Same could be said about extensions that require access to all websites. If the extension dev gets compromised you could potentially get compromised

    Attacker hijacks developer account
                ↓     
                ↓
    XSS cookie stealer or some 0-day payloads are dropped
                ↓
                ↓
    Your computer/accounts get owned. (paypal,mtgox,hsbc,gmail,yahoo etc)

Maybe there should be some sort of feature that blacklists websites that no extension is allowed to access.

Why not write a userscript for this kind of thing and publish it on userscripts.org?

1) It's cross-browser: Firefox (Greasemonkey), Chrome (Tampermonkey), Opera users can install it

2) Users can easily read the source code before installation to assure it doesn't do anything malicious

If it changes DOM, but doesn't interact with the browser itself, it should be a userscript.

A small introductory presentation about userscripts and GM_ API that I've recently done: https://speakerdeck.com/jakubg/userscripts-augmenting-and-au...

For people (like me) who didn't know what this was due to lack of a Chrome browser - here's the description:

  Hacker News Colors

  Makes Hacker News easier to read by adding a bit of color 
  next to the upvote button besides every story, where the 
  color is based on the number of points.

The link showed a screenshot and that description for me (in Firefox), so I really don't get what you mean about Chrome being needed to find out.

This is what it looks like on an iPad at least https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BKaxeNfCQAAp678.jpg

please don't force people to click your link to find out what the "one thing" is. mention it right in your title.

Yeah, can we get some moderator title editing here?

That's true. I wish I would've come up with a more describing title. Spent a couple of minutes trying to compress what I wanted to convey in a couple of words and this was the result.

It's even worse for people not using Chrome at the time. I just got to a generic "fuck you" page when I clicked the link on an iPad. I still have no idea what this thing does.

I have two small quirks with this, aside from them, I like it.

The row spacing is too much now and the vote icon is now offsetting the title slightly. I feel that this simple idea can be executed without any other alterations to the interface.

Also, it only works for the front page and I'm a person that likes to check out the first 2 pages and the discrepancy is getting annoying.

I use this:

https://github.com/wuzhe/social-hotness https://raw.github.com/wuzhe/social-hotness/master/screensho...

This thread happened again, and this time i'm ready - here's my HN extension!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hnhance/ddidnigndc...

Also compatible with greasemonkey for FF users.

All tweaks are optional with a discreet menu: two custom themes, hover user to view profile, hover parent link to see parent, option to confirm accidental downvotes, show submissions link in header, link to additional commentary on other sites

This is really great! Exactly what I missed too.

Without getting in to feature bloat, I would like an indicator for the amount of comments too.

Thanks! I suspect this would be somthing others miss as well. I've thought about the comments too and I will have to come up with a good simple indicator for those as well I think. The feature creep begins... :)

Well If I were you, I would color the points themselves. And follow the coloring scheme HN already uses (lighter grey for weaker and darker grey for stronger) If the points become unreadable due to very low score, user can always double click on it and it will highlight in blue background.

I'd love to see it incorporate points over time too. You've got the post age right on the page, you should be able to factor that in.

Although, perhaps 'hot' stories are just the ones towards the top of the page anyway.

They are, factored in with the karma of the upvoters, as far as i know. And that's why I like this addon that much: It gives a feel for the age and the weight of a submission, when a red story is on the bottom of the page compared to when a bright yellow story is at the top.

Hey HN, slightly off-topic question: is it possible to have a "login to our website with HN" capability? similar to facebook and twitter connect.

Have it now enabled since I saw that submission three days ago. Still like the effect, thanks for your work.

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