[bluish29]

One of the reasons I learned a lot of css and js was actually inspired by me writing userscript to modify HN webpage to be like I want. That might count as a plus for me. The HN page source makes it easy to customize.

And lack of notifications is a good feature. It does help in many cases where you would go into very heated or not very useful discussions.

[dredmorbius]

My learning tool was Google+ back in the day. I'd already been hacking up various websites' CSS for a while, but that instance was ... special...

Though not notifications, I've included code to annotate YC startup job listings, just so I could clearly distinguish them from regular posts.

I took to increasingly muting the notification such that it now reads:

  /* HN startup job ads */
  
  html[op="news"] .athing td:nth-of-type(2):not(.votelinks) {
      background: #eee;
  }
  
  html[op="news"] .athing td:nth-of-type(2):not(.votelinks):before {
      content: "YC";
      position: relative;
      left: 0.8em;
      top: 0;
      color: #000;
      font-size: 0.6em;
  } 

That's a very faint grey highlight to the text. Anything more is like sand in my eyeballs, and this really does stand out clearly for me.