HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is there some way for using Hacker News with a “mark as read” function?

6 points by wiki_me ↗ HN
basically in Reddit enhancement suite you can filter comments to only show comments that are “unread”, you click on a comment to mark it as read (or with email when clicking on a message marks it as read and you can even mark it as unread).

Is there something like that for hacker news? (a browser addon or some custom client).

17 comments

[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
jmercouris
You can use a bookmarklet that blocks out already clicked URLs. You can use the 'hide visited' bookmarklet on this page https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/pagelinks.html
wiki_me
I don't want to hide URL's i want to hide comments.

if there is a huge thread with lots of comments that you are really interested in, you read 50 comments and then come back and there is another 20 new comments, how do you easily find these comments?

readonthegoapp
How much would you pay for this?
wiki_me
IDK, why do you ask? probably not enough to fund someone to work on this.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
DoreenMichele
You can click on the minus sign in the comment to collapse it and all replies to it. You won't see new replies to old comments but you will see only new top level comments for that discussion (assuming you've collapsed all comments so far).

The minus sign is in brackets like this: [ - ]

After you click it, it says "x number of replies" basically (in the form of the number of replies and the word more).

gabrielsroka
Yes, I emailed the mods and got added to the alpha program for this in April 2020 [0]. When I visit a page a second time, any new comments have an orange bar next to them. I don't find it very useful, but I'm sure the team would take your feedback. Eg, I visit a page for the first time and it has 100 comments. I come back later and it has 103 comments. I have to scroll through the entire page to find the 3 new comments and re-grok their context.

From dang (mod) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788678

[0] Email from April 2020:

> New feature: when you visit a thread, the software now highlights comments that are new since you last viewed the page. These are displayed with an orange (or whatever your topcolor is) bar to the left of the new comment. Refreshing the page will reset these.

> This will only work when you're logged in with your account that has this email address (and which we've marked as an alpha tester.)

wiki_me
Is the alpha stable? can i opted in and out easily like the reddit beta?

tildes.net and some firefox extention (for reddit) implements it this way.

It can still be problematic, if i go to a thread with 100 comments and read it, come back and there are another 100 comments i might not want to read them all in one sit (e.g. because it is late at night).

It's interesting that all these "modern" platforms still don't have some of the usability benefits of email (while having their own benefits ofcourse) , I also wonder if this is part of the reason the linux kernal still uses email for communication.

gabrielsroka
> Is the alpha stable?

I think so.

> can i opted in and out easily like the reddit beta?

I'm not sure. Why don't you email the mods and ask them?

Leparamour
I never understood why HN didn't have a simple "sort by new" function for comments.

It would even help keeping the conversation alive when you can easily find a relevant reply nested 5 levels deep.

DonCopal
Yes, there is a way. Bookmark the thread, leave it a week or so, and then read the thread normally because there won't be any new comments anymore. Certainly it's not the end of the world if you leave a thread to mature.