Show HN: Quickly scan HN for new articles

[bachmitre]

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.

[smusamashah]

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...

[keyle]

That's neat, I wish it could be a bookmarklet.

[perihelions]

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).

[smusamashah]

This is neat. Can these rules compare the votes on a post or number of comments to intensify the color accordingly?

[gabrielsroka]

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.

[leetrout]

Probably.

Also, even for the repo, it doesnt take much effort to be a good internet citizen and use tinypng for png and jpg images to save a little bandwidth for everyone.

[adolph]

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

[disillusioned]

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

[frfl]

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

[ljoshua]

Same here. Saves me so much time and very reliable. There are also a few settings one can tweak (limit to homepage or top X%, for example) to make it even better.

[giancarlostoro]

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.

[lovegrenoble]

Thank you, very useful

[qingcharles]

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

https://hackernews.betacat.io/

[jedberg]

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...

[gabrielsroka]

I thought Safari and Firefox were supposed to start supporting Chrome's webextensions.

I've had some luck with Firefox although there are differences. I haven't tried Safari.

[smusamashah]

This may sound bad but might actually work. You should give ChatGPT 4 a try. It's a small extension so all source and response might fit in 1 context length.

[pluc]

Or you could just use RSS...

[petercooper]

Indeed: https://hnrss.github.io/

I have my own script that filters the firehose for topics I'm interested in into a new RSS feed and subscribe to that, so I see every single submission that might vaguely interest me.