from Hacker News

Show HN: Quickly scan HN for new articles

by bachmitre on 6/14/24, 1:03 PM with 23 comments

I have a dedicated HN tab that I come back to and reload multiple times a day to see whats new and hot.

I wrote a Chrome Extension to:

- quickly scan new articles since my last reload - quickly scan highly discussed articles - open actual articles and discussions in a new tab

This links to the source code. The chrome extension is linked at the bottom of the github page.

Note:

- This extension only operates on the HN front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/news) - The first time you reload the HN front page after installing the extension all articles will get highlighted.

  • by smusamashah on 6/18/24, 6:48 PM

    I made this user script that does the same. Uses localstorage, when you come back and refresh, if there were new stories, it adds `(NEW)` in green before the title.

    Also added a comment count change in there recently.

    https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/e7c9ed3936ba69e522f8cb38...

  • by perihelions on 6/18/24, 11:39 PM

    I have a uBlock filter rule that does something like this, but with a plain regex,

        ycombinator.com##:xpath(//span[contains(@class,"age")]/a):has-text(/(\d+) minute(s?) ago/):style(color: Teal !important; font-weight: bold)
    It highlights both comments and posts.

    (I like using this trick, the uBlock regex → CSS matching rule that's so generically useful. I can configure things I'd otherwise be too lazy to configure, if it wasn't for uBlock).

  • by gabrielsroka on 6/18/24, 6:04 PM

    I was wondering why the extension is so large. It includes a 500KB PNG. Perhaps the shell script was supposed to exclude it from the zip file.

  • by adolph on 6/18/24, 8:27 PM

    This is interesting but seeing the same headlines over and over does two things for me:

      * internal opening-HN-too-much alert
  * headline spaced repetition learning

  • by disillusioned on 6/18/24, 9:17 PM

    Slightly unrelated, but I've been using a similar Stylish theme to this one for years and it makes my HN experience much more readable and enjoyable: https://userstyles.org/styles/46180/georgify-for-hacker-news

  • by frfl on 6/18/24, 5:31 PM

    I've defaulted to this https://hckrnews.com/ intead of HN homepage. This is ordered by time rather than rank.

  • by giancarlostoro on 6/18/24, 5:14 PM

    I do this too, sometimes I wonder what all has changed in 24hrs, so this is great. I will even keep a tab open untouched so I can see what was open before, and open a new one. Making "snapshot tabs" if you will.

  • by lovegrenoble on 6/18/24, 6:27 PM

    Thank you, very useful

  • by qingcharles on 6/18/24, 9:50 PM

    Now I just need to rework it for my favorite HN front page viewer:

    https://hackernews.betacat.io/

  • by jedberg on 6/18/24, 6:01 PM

    This is awesome! On an unrelated note, anyone have good resources for converting chrome extensions to Safari?

    I found this and will try it later if no one has a better suggestion:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Safari/comments/10meyn5/how_to_conv...

  • by pluc on 6/18/24, 6:03 PM

    Or you could just use RSS...