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.

[smusamashah]

I think simply copy pasting the script like a bookmarklet should work the same

[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?

[perihelions]

If you mean new comments relative to previous visits, then I believe no; uBlock is stateless as far as I know.

If you mean absolute numbers, then, uBlock filters don't have a Turing-complete programming language (by intentional design), so there's nothing idiomatic for that. If you're categorizing integers by range, you can technically do that in regular expression languages (this is really an anti-pattern),

    ycombinator.com##:xpath(//span[contains(@class,"score")]):has-text(/\b[5-9]\d points/):style(color: Orange !important; font-weight: bold)
    ycombinator.com##:xpath(//span[contains(@class,"score")]):has-text(/\d{3} points/):style(color: Red !important; font-weight: bold)

That's 50-99 and 100+ score points.

    ycombinator.com##:xpath(//span[contains(@class,"subline")]/a):has-text(/\b[5-9]\d\s+comments/):style(color: Orange !important; font-weight: bold)
    ycombinator.com##:xpath(//span[contains(@class,"subline")]/a):has-text(/\d{3}\s+comments/):style(color: Red !important; font-weight: bold)

Same for comment counts.

[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.

[jedberg]

I don't see a way to install an extension that isn't in the Safari store, other than that link I found on reddit. But I could definitely be missing something.

[gabrielsroka]

I meant they support the standard. If you have the source code. I didn't mean that Safari can install them directly from Chrome's store.

[bluish29]

You will need to build it using xcode and install it like ordinary app (On MacOS at least)

[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.