Post your HN tricks. | Hacker News Reader

Post your HN tricks.

88 pointsvaksel47 comments

Seems like there are a whole bunch of features that a lot of people don't know about. So I'd like to get a list of everything in one place.

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1. Absolutely love http://ask.searchyc.com/ to check if I missed any AskHNs

2. In my personal wiki, I have a list links to people whose comment threads I follow closely. [http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=*username*]

3. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive has not been updated recently, but still a good resource

4. http://news.ycombinator.com/classic and http://news.ycombinator.com/lists of course

5. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039 modified to help me not visit one aggravating unethical "blog" (you know which). I don't hide it altogether as I value the discussion here.

FWIW, the new version of #5 allows you to apply arbitrary styles to each item, rather than just hiding them.

I put a blue background on all the Ask threads for instance.

To do so, the 'banlist' is now a textbox. Each line is in the format:

  *regex*->*style*

The default style is to hide anything that matches. Both titles and urls are matched. So:

  valleywag.com
  Ask HN->background-color:red;

Would hide anything from valleywag.com and put red backgrounds on all the Ask threads. The styling is pretty rough, so not sure what else works beside background colors... feel free to complain if something needs fixed. ;)

Cool! background-color works but color does not.

text-decoration:line-through; works and that is what I use for marking the websites to avoid. Thanks for the cool tool.

If you want to catch up on the last ~week, then you'll want: http://news.ycombinator.com/best

ok thank you! http://www.newsguide.us/art-entertainment/movies/Todd-DiRobe...

To start off:

Search: http://www.searchyc.com

Submissions by new members: http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

I know there is one to only see submissions by old users but I don't remember the url

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

And comments by new members: http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

The [X] button in the top right corner does wonders for one's productivity. As a bonus, use a different browser for work than you usually do for "surfing". My Firefox is crawling with gadgets that each light up and pulsate with every "must see" action that happens in my extended family of RSS feeds, contacts, and bookmarks. My work browser is a light, crisp little Opera thing that has 10 tabs open all set to to various sub-URLs of http://localhost:8080 :-)

I don't have an [X] button in the top right corner. I do have 3 brightly coloured pill buttons in the top left though.

I think that means there's something wrong with your computer. It could be serious. Is your mouse also missing two buttons?

I don't have any buttons at all. I dont even have window borders or a title bar. Yeah, I use a tiling window manager.

I have a yellow tab in the top left corner. Go figure :)

Be?

You're pretty close :)

http://haiku-os.org

One general writing trick I learned - after writing a long comment, I'll usually go back and edit it so in the first sentence people know what they're going to read. Some of the best comments I've seen on here are detailed, long ones, but if it jumps right into the middle of presenting the argument and evidence and statistics, a lot of people will glaze over it. So the short intro that lets people know what you're writing about helps a lot.

You can use this "trick" successfully for any form of writing.

As the rule goes: tell'em what you're going to tell'em, tell'em, and then tell'em what you told'em.

I've heard that rule before, and like it a lot. Do you know anything about its origins or who said it?

Nope, no idea, sorry.

This reply will let you know that I don't know anything about its origins or who said it.

Sorry, I don't know.

We've just learned that Jim doesn't know anything about the origins of that writing advice, or who said it.

I highly recommend a slightly modified version: tell them what you're going to show them, show them, then tell them what you showed them

GM Script that enables foldable comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=747786

PG's microblog:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

PG's other microblog:

http://ycombinator.posterous.com/

Not really a 'trick', but here are two cool bookmarklets for for visualizing polls:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700669

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528172

Don't forget the bookmarklet, makes posting stories a piece of cake: http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html

If your an iPhone user this works well on your homescreen: http://www.icombinator.net

The HN Onepage Greasemonkey script. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512

Allows me to load pages in a separate frame and then vote and/or comment on them. Saves me the trouble of loading up 15 tabs and forgetting to vote up the stories that I like.

To get italics, use asterisks (*).

To bypass the anti flame-war controls click 'link' when the 'reply' link isn't visible yet.

Noob question: What anti flame-war controls?

The idea was to make it impossible to reply quickly to deeply-nested threads in order to let the flames settle (the assumption being that deeply-nested threads are generally just flame wars). It appears it was only made less convenient.

If you want more than just the link in your RSS feed there was http://nirmalpatel.com/fcgi/hn_feed.fcgi

It looks like it is now just a redirect to http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http%3A... which if you de-construct the url leads to a more generic solution.

The content from there can also be fed into Yahoo Pipes for any filtering you want to do. Given the plethora of HN related pipes it seems like everybody just creates their own. Having said that if you want somewhere to start I use http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=c0d729843a9b9e8de...

What is the trick for getting active URIs on profile pages?

Examples:

* active: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mqt

* inactive: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iamelgringo

Autopager: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925

Ajaxy loading of next pages

RSS feed that includes HN's comments:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=23159aed1a913917f8...

While working I use this strategy to limit my HN reading to compile cycles: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447077

I dunno, I kinda like the idea that people learn about it as they participate and lurk on the site--kind of like leveling up in an informal way, instead of getting it all at once.

They'll have to learn to search for this, once it falls off the homepage.

http://hackerne.ws -> http://news.ycombinator.com

While I guess the folks who registered this name have nothing but legitimate intent, this is pretty much text book man-in-the-middle attack technique. It would take one change to the DNS record and a simple sniffing proxy, and every user to use that address would be compromised.

As long as it is not owned by pg and rtm, I would strongly suggest you use news.ycombinator.com

Actually looking at the registration data, I'm extremely suspicious of this name. If I had ever used it, I would be changing my authentication details.

whois for hackerne.ws:

1234567 lemesos, lemesos 12345 Cyprus

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com) Domain Name: HACKERNE.WS Created on: 27-Nov-07 Expires on: 27-Nov-09 Last Updated on: 28-Nov-08

Administrative Contact: man, europe iloveinternetalot@gmail.com none 1234567 lemesos, lemesos 12345 Cyprus 35799123456

Technical Contact: man, europe iloveinternetalot@gmail.com none 1234567 lemesos, lemesos 12345 Cyprus 35799123456

yep.

And even if the folks who registered it are 'legit', if they let the domain lapse who knows where it will end up and it's not as though you'll get a warning the next time you point your browser to that address.

noprocrast: on maxvisit: 20 minaway: 700

IRC channel: #startups on irc.freenode.net

I'll just pretend I didn't see that, HN is a large enough timesink as it is.

Was about to post the same thing... <plugs ears and says "la la la la la">

NOTE: #startups is about 30% startup/hacker stuff and 70% utter nonsense. I contribute mostly to the nonsense portion, but a few of us regulars were/are in YC and frequently answer YC-related questions.

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