Do you use any tools to improve your HN experience?

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

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.

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

I use HN enhancement suite

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

The “Refined Hacker News” extension for Chromium-based browsers.

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.

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; }

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

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-c...

This addon keeps track of which comments you've seen in a given Hacker News thread, and then highlights the new comments when you return to the page.

http://www.hnreplies.com/ This is pretty much the only tool I use.

https://hn.cns.wtf/#31503987 - my HN reader, kinda weird

https://github.com/python273/hn-index - CLI tool to search stories via regex, I use it to explore topics

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/

I use Octal for iOS.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1308885491?mt=8

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.

I built https://hw.leftium.com, a mashup of https://hackerweb.app and https://hckrnews.com.

I also have a bookmarklet to quickly toggle between https://hw.leftium.com and the original version.

Then I installed the Refined Hacker News extension: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

I use two services to get notified about replies to my posts/comments:

- https://hnnotify.xyz/

- https://hnreplies.com/

I just browse from iPhone with the Octal app. The website is terrible!

Sometimes I use https://hn.algolia.com/ for search.

Dark Reader on desktop, the HACK app on iOS.

Dark Reader and a bunch of lines of CSS via Stylus, functionally I'm fine with it.

The "close tab" button

tags

I use https://hckrnews.com a lot