HACKER Q&A
📣 anbardoi

Is there a way to customize the stories on Hacker News?


I just want to remove stories that link to sites like bloomberg, New York Times, Wired, etc. because they are paywalled/account-walled articles.


  👤 kazinator Accepted Answer ✓
You can use uBlock Origin for this!

Go to My Filters, and add:

  news.ycombinator.com##a[href*="UNWANTED.DOMAIN.COM"]:upward(3)
  news.ycombinator.com##a[href*="UNWANTED.DOMAIN.COM"]:upward(3) + tr
Maybe someone can come up with a better solution, avoiding the hacky upward selection and avoiding repetition of the domain match.

The idea here is that we match an element whose href contains the unwanted domain. Then upward(3) selects the great-grandparent element: we are assuming that the is buried three levels within a element, and we nuke that element.

Even if a nicer rule is found, it's still not great UX to have to go into the filter panel and copy-paste rules.

Then we repeat the entire rule and add "+ tr" to nuke the successor also. The successor row has the small print: the story's points, who submitted it, number of comments, flag/hide buttons.



👤 mtmail
There's some tools to filter in the browser https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts?q=hacker+news+filter

👤 karmakaze
I made hackerer.news[0] that filters all stories for the day into groups. I should add a paywalled group since I usually skip them too.

Sometimes I'll just google part of the title and read a different article on the topic. It's rare for a story to only be reported by one source and I usually only care about deep details for tech which tends not to be paywalled much as business or politics.

Edit: I just wanted to make an issue for this and realized this is still on GitLab[1]--should move it too.

[0] https://hackerer.news/ [1] https://gitlab.com/karmakaze/hackerer-news


👤 jpl56
I'm still using an old extension called "Hacker News: Mark All Read" from 2015, it marks all articles on the page as read once I click on the button (at the bottom of the page), it's very convenient.

It was updated un 2023 to keep on with new HTML formatting. Thanks to the authors (Guillaume Mouron, based on Daniele Mazzini code)! <3


👤 gabrielsroka

👤 gtirloni

👤 andrew_zhong
If you are looking for broader less heuristic based filter, you can try LightFeed (full disclosure, I am the creator of LightFeed)

It filters and summarizes stories using LLM and your prompt on any site including HN!


👤 DevNinjaS
There's probably not such a feature now. But if HN could provide such a function, I would wholeheartedly support it.

👤 axiologist
Wouldn't it be a more useful customization to have paywalled sites automatically redirected for being opened via https://archive.{is,ph}, instead?

👤 48864w6ui
Hnrss.org and filter in your favorite way?

👤 unraveller
many user scripts for filtering sites on hn on greasyfork. search the url or site name there.

👤 chrisjj
> paywalled/account-walled articles

Most soon receive a comment having a bypassing link e.g. to archive.ph.


👤 uraura
I thought people here bypassed the paywall to read.