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top.hn

59 pointsniico47 comments

"Read and change all your data on the websites you visit"

No thanks.

The reason we use this permission is that we request an image from the source url to show you in each notification, but see my earlier comment about the mvp-ness of this project (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=9612790) – in future iterations, we’d create our own api and just require access to http://top.hn/.

While I understand that, there have been many extensions that have been sold and turned to malware, so I do not trust Chrome extensions any more than I trust executables downloaded from ThePirateBay, unless the extension demands reasonable permissions. I know that Chrome doesn't have a good permission model or a review process, but I still won't install your extension though.

We’re not going to sell this extension to be turned into malware! I suspect I’m not going to be able to convince you with a comment, though. :-)

You could open source it

Yeah, we probably will. We seem to be getting enough installs already to justify putting more dev cycles in. :-)

Chrome extensions already are open source (so to speak). They're simply .zip bundles, which run HTML, CSS and JS in the context of the page/browser [0]. The location depends on OS, but its pretty easy to find [1].

[0] https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/overview

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/14544700/2078412

This extension will help you find the source for any extension you encounter on the Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-extension-s...

That's not enough, as the behavior can be updated by Chrome to a new version without noticing me the user.

I'm with bad_user. In the interest of mvp-ness, not showing this image at all (and not requesting these permissions) would have resulted in me installing the extension with no extra effort on your part (presumably.) As it is, I won't install this :/

This is not a valid reason. Having access to all my private data, my banking website, my gmail, and anything else you want is unacceptable. I'm shocked that anyone at all would install your extension.

It's no wonder so much private data is leaked all the time when people make our these sorts of permissions are acceptable and defend them when questioned.

I don't care about your reasons. Just don't ask for this permission. I'd like to use your app (I really don't care about the image), but this is a deal breaker. I just can't take the risk.

Obfuscated code plus these permissions isn't helping me trust you. As a Chrome extension developer, I can tell at a glance that many of these permissions are not necessary to implement the functionality as described.

    "permissions": [
        "<all_urls>",
        "activeTab",
        "alarms",
        "background",
        "browsingData",
        "chrome://favicon/",
        "clipboardWrite",
        "contextMenus",
        "cookies",
        "declarativeContent",
        "fontSettings",
        "gcm",
        "identity",
        "idle",
        "notifications",
        "pageCapture",
        "power",
        "proxy",
        "sessions",
        "storage",
        "system.cpu",
        "system.display",
        "system.memory",
        "system.storage",
        "tabCapture",
        "tabs",
        "topSites",
        "tts",
        "unlimitedStorage",
        "webNavigation",
        "webRequest",
        "webRequestBlocking"
    ]

Definitely not taking any chances installing this.

Asking full privileges is a way of avoiding changing them on a update.

If you change permissions on a update, chrome will ask for user interaction.

That being said, if you don't plan to broad the scope of an app or extension in the future, there is no point.

This technique is applied on a lot of android apps too.

Yeah, it's okay to do this as long as the developer explains in the app/extension overview that the permissions are for planned features.

I would love a script that shows me posts with exactly 2 upvotes. There's a lot of interesting links on the new page that is mixed in with spam.

Totally agree. We're just testing a concept here. If people like the product, we'll keep adding more and more filters and features like that

Except if everyone started using that, nobody would upvote anything except maybe spammer sockpuppets.

There are various "Hacker News N" Twitter accounts, where n == number of upvotes.

I really like "Hacker News 20" it's just high enough of a number that it's not a constant drip, but a little more diverse than the front page. https://twitter.com/newsyc20

Personally I think just the front page has too much noise. I'd love to be able to filter out topics and submitters.

Actually the #1 spot (the one you get a notification from) has very little movement. I was surprised by that

Considering how much time I already spend on Hacker News, I certainly wouldn't want any notifications popping up.

You should give the extension a whirl – you only get a few notifications per day. Perhaps you’ll even end up spending less time here. :-)

nice!

any plans to open source the extension?

Here's how it's working on the page, not sure if the extension works the same, but seems poll based:

1. they grab the top stories from https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json which is a huge json array of ids .. then they take the one in the head and ..

2. load: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/9611829.json which is a json object with the post's metadata

I think we will: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9613213

This is a one-day, mvp-type project that our team made, mostly to scratch our own Hacker News–junkie itch, but we’re also inclined to do more if the project gains some traction, so please let us know any feedback/ideas/meditations!

Nice! You can also join the channel ##hackernews on freenode and see top stories in IRC! (That's how I saw this one!)

Sounds like something #hackernews should be used for.

Last I heard, #startups was the official channel, and I didn't want to spam that.

Are there any services out there that do this by email, and in particular that have domain filters? I'd love to get a notification when any domain I'm associated with gets posted to HN.

That's a good idea, we have many plans for this if we get users, I will write you if we do this. Thanks.

You could modify this service to email you instead of send you a text message (this is a tutorial to text you anytime a certain URL shows up on HN) https://www.twilio.com/blog/2015/04/get-notified-when-someon...

Interesting idea.

I wonder what it would take to get an HN article source added to services like ifttt or zapier?

I have one, actually!

Check out the top Zap listed here: http://mikeknoop.com/my-zaps/

(it uses the Algolia search engine as a feed of posts to trigger on)

Perfect, thanks!

For what it's worth, and for people with iOS (not sure if Android has a similar app), I use Hooks[1]. I set it to 500 karma threshold to notify me and that seems to have been working out fine so far.

[1]: Hooks - Alerts for Everything by Oleg Kozynenko https://appsto.re/us/teuc3.i

+1 for having the real top story on their site

Also check out Hacker News 300 and Hacker News 100 on twitter

https://twitter.com/newsyc100

https://twitter.com/newsyc300

Consider using ServiceWorker notifications for an extension-free way to do this.

I prefer sockets over Service Worker, no installation, no warnings. But definitely I will read in depth about this. Thanks.

The advantage of ServiceWorker is that it can show notifications even when the website isn't open. Browser support is limited for that, though.

Nice one. What about Mozilla?

We'd love to, if the project gains some traction we'll definitely do it.

Or maybe open source it and let us do it for you?

Out of curiosity, what registrar did you use for the hn TLD?

Gandi. Credit to niico for discovering that Hacker News has their own tld. :-P

It's technically for Honduras. [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.hn

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