HN Explorer

Ask HN: Do you use any tools to improve your HN experience?

13 points by 8organicbits ↗ HN
I'm aware of some alternate web front-ends, and I've seen some tools on Show HN.

What are you using? What have you built? What would you like to use?

25 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 63.9 ms ] thread
memorable
Favicons for HN[0] is a userscript that I use to add favicons next to the link. I used the improved one though.[1]

I am using Lipu[2], my in-house alternative HN interface, with the official HN interface for surfing.

I also made an userscript called `Unthirst Numbers` that removes karma points and user's karma to make it less addictive. I have not make this one public though.

[0]:https://gist.github.com/frabert/48b12088441f6195ea9292c2a5a7...

[1]:https://gist.github.com/frabert/48b12088441f6195ea9292c2a5a7...

[2]: https://lipu-flax.vercel.app

riidom
Dark Reader and a bunch of lines of CSS via Stylus, functionally I'm fine with it.
Havoc
I don’t see much of a need - hn is pretty clean and lightweight.

A orangered envelope like Reddit would be convenient though if one gets a response

leephillips
The “Refined Hacker News” extension for Chromium-based browsers.
julianeon
Kind of.

I set up Shortcuts on iOS to respond to the following voice commands:

“Hacker News” opens up the main page in Safari.

“Hacker Ask” opens Ask HN.

“Hacker Show” opens up Show HN.

“Hacker Hack” opens up all new submissions (surprisingly interesting & high quality).

I use these regularly, daily.

corobo
I use HN RSS in my feed reader to see replies to my comments. I prefer RSS over email alerts because a) get out of my inbox lol b) I don't get the urge to respond in real-time as I don't use the feed reader as frequently as email

https://hnrss.org/

lapcat
A little CSS to support dark mode and increase the text size. It's pretty basic and could be improved.

:root { color-scheme: light dark; }

* { background-color: revert !important; color: revert !important; font-size: revert !important; }

center { text-align: left !important; }

table#hnmain { width: 100% !important; }

michaericalribo
A different take, but I use Freedom.io to block social media sites except for short periods during the day...it helps me both reclaim time that I would otherwise spend endlessly scrolling through garbage, and it makes the less frequent visits to HN more fruitful because everything is new.
acheron
Dark Reader on desktop, the HACK app on iOS.
bromuro
I just browse from iPhone with the Octal app. The website is terrible!
memorable
Yeah, surfing HN on mobile can be difficult since buttons are small and the website isn't optimized for mobile.
karmakaze
https://hackerer.news viewer that shows stories by day so I don't see yesterday's stories today interleaved with today's and avoid the slot machine dopamine hits.

It was originally written so that I could load all the titles and open tabs in the subway that would render when there was service at stops. Now wfh but still useful.

[0] https://gitlab.com/karmakaze/hackerer-news

u2077
Every time I try to leave HN for some other front-end, there are subtle design features I miss. Every button on HN has a purpose, is easily accessible, and works as expected.

There’s a quote that good design is not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing to take away. HN follows this perfectly. Sure, I could have dark mode, previews, and notifications, but I’d lose elsewhere unless I built my own front-end.

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