Tom (the moderator) said he was looking into getting it appended to the HN's CSS. I haven't asked them about it since ages ago, wonder if they dropped the idea.
Aside from all of this AI hype, This is the feature I am most excited about xD!
Dang, genuine question but when you moderate/view Hackernews yourself, I suppose that you must yourself be using dark mode too correct? or do you view hackernews in light-mode?
I would at least interact with the new content if it was on the page. Vs almost never now. I assume people that are active on the new page must be 1% of users or mostly those directly involved with the story.
Anyway, thanks for the response and keep the place sane.
It was mixed in, which probably made it worse.
Installed, opened the raw view in the GitHub link to the dark mode style linked to above to copy it into the clipboard, and was pleasently surprised that it opened in the extension with syntax highlighting and a button to install.
Clicked "Install", back back to HN, reload, dark mode.
I’m always leery of installing new extensions (nothing against Orange Juice) because of all the high-profile cases where they get bought out by unscrupulous companies and basically turn into malware payload delivery systems.
It’s nice to be able to reduce the attack surface down to just these two extensions, which have been around for a long time.
The code is all open source and people can do with it what they want. It is GPLv3, but I'd special license it to them as MIT without question.
Nice work, nevertheless, and useful!
What I found out is that I'm never going back to a world where I don't integrate AI into my entire coding workflow. All the way from writing documentation to committing code. It makes things way more enjoyable.
I truly enjoyed creating this whole project, it scratches my itch, and I hope that it continues to grow and be maintained over many years. I have another web project that's going on 7 years now and gets 88k downloads a month [0]. This is my passion, I'm here until I die, and even that project is now benefitting from AI.
It would also be nice to be able to hide the checkbox it adds to the homepage. also disabling show focus box doesnt actually seem to work?
This is fixed and being pushed now. Thanks!
https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#highlights
It might be beneficial to tell me what the difference between these two can be? A lot of the features from my first glance (I can be totally wrong though) are within HN refined.
I would really appreciate a short summary of differences. Personally I am really happy by HN refined though so kudos to @plibither8
https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news/issues/135...
I used refined for years as well. Great product, but the underlying code was meh, and the author abandoned it. If you're using refined today, you're experiencing a lot of bugs as the HN DOM has changed over time.
I maintained my own fork for a long time but finally motivated myself to try out AI assisted coding and this is what came out of it. It isn't a port, it is a clean rewrite from the ground up.
I took every feature that I enjoyed from refined, re-implemented it from scratch, with a totally different architecture that allows much more control over the DOM and runs a whole lot faster.
I had AI write hundreds of of unit tests, so that we can make sure that bugs don't appear in the future. I also fixed a whole ton of edge cases along the way.
The entire deployment, all the way to the browser stores, is fully automated with CI/CD, so that we know that the supply chain is safe.
In other words, you might as well migrate. If there is something missing that you enjoyed, file an issue, or even better... a PR.
*Edit: Whoops! I was confusing refinedHN with modernHN (https://www.modernhn.com)
It's MIT-licensed open source.
I've been using a fork (also MIT): https://github.com/alexferrari88/refined-hacker-news
One thing I miss is the orange mark identifying the OP of a post.
https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/blob/b84...
There was no [OP] label when I first reloaded this page, and now after replying, I am marked as the [OP].
edit: it seems the [OP] relies on a URL hash with the ID of the OP. However, this doesn't work for me because I don't navigate to HN posts from the HN site.
I usually come from https://hn.leftium.com. (Or a page like https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/47694036)
https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news/blob/ee7ef...
https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/pull/18
Fixed and closed (all with AI).
Here's one potential implementation:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-maker-badge/khod...
- More "sub-reddits". We already have Ask/Show HN. We probably can add a couple more to keep everything organized.
- Option to auto-collapse comments threads deeper than X levels by default. When they are all open by default like today, only the top comment and its children get more of the eyeballs.
It would be nice if HN just put the unstyled text in the page and then used JS to render it, but I'm sure there would be complaints about that too.
1. Dark mode
2. (Now that i'm seeing it in action for the first time) inline responding. That said: this increases the weight of the page considerably (in JS code), so delegating it to the various third-party apps is arguably the better approach for this specific platform. (But now that i've seen it in use here i'll have to add this to the Fossil SCM's forum at some point, as this is sooooo much more comfortable.)
I've already added using a confirm() for flagging and hiding in list pages on mobile to it because it's so easy to accidentally hit while scrolling.
But if you want to pick one: Inline replies.
Right now, I have to do a ton of magic to make that happen in order to work around your auth flow. Namely, pulling the auth token out of the other page and then having to keep track of it in session storage.
I could delete a whole lot of code if that was just built in.
The browser extension I wrote years ago, and which tomhow and I use for moderation, does this. I feel guilty about not having shared it a long time ago, but there just has never been time. Now that LLMs are starting to let me do things I've wanted to do for years, there's a chance I'll actually get to it before the sun dies.
And yes... AI enables so many things.
Please tell us you're not going to start vibe-coding HN.
Out of curiosity, why did you make a new Github account for the extension instead of developing it on your own account?
Because I see this becoming bigger than me and a separate organization made sense. There is a super thin backend component right now too. There is the potential to also add in some extra features that require a server/db. I'm kind of inspired by the atuin model of things.
I've got a LONG list of features I'd like to implement over time.
[1] https://gist.github.com/mhitza/0956d7e2c11d3102cbd4cba7f6d06...
as a personal project to make HN better for you, i guess it's cool. but making every link open in a new tab so my back button never works is definitely not for me.
UPDATE: implemented as a preference that you can turn off. just click the app icon in the extensions list.
https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/releases...
I also use this extension HNRelevant (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hnrelevant) which shows a list of similar posts, you might want to add that as an optional feature as well.
What's the tech stack, pure TS? You also might want to migrate from Biome to oxc, I did recently and it plays well with Vite+ (or just move to Vite+) directly.
Noticed a bug, once I edit my own comment and go back to the main post, I show up as [op] not you. Also I should be able to edit my post inline not be moved to a separate page.
See the thread below about refined, which hasn't received an update in 4 years.
I have HNRelevant on my list of features that I've been collecting.
I tried oxc and didn't like it as much as biome. They admittedly aren't as good at formatting yet. The real winner here is ultracite.
Also add ctrl/cmd-enter support to submit the reply.
Also this orange border when clicking a comment or link on the front page is a bit annoying, especially when it doesn't seem to actually do anything (it's not a tab select style, that shows up as the browser's normal style), and it seems to persist.
This has been fixed and is making its way out now.
* personal ability to mute/block any account
* BONUS: and/or delegate above decision to list-providing service at given externally-hosted URL
* intelligently autowrap text of long lines, like its 2026 (heck like 1997)
Plenty of browser plugins that do this. I like HN Comments Owl.
Some screenshots:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mon-jai/modern-hacker-news...
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mon-jai/modern-hacker-news...
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mon-jai/modern-hacker-news...
Repo:
just shedding feedbin & reeder (paid)
it's 'hide read stories' for me & darkmode
There’s an extension that I loved called “Proven” (now archived) which uses keybase.io proofs to show other proven accounts next to hn users
https://github.com/dschep/proven
Also about this:
> Mermaid Diagram Rendering
Honest question, how often are people posting raw mermaid diagrams in comments here?… I’ve never seen one
Nobody uses it because it wasn't supported. I had started off doing images, but their CSP policies prevent an extension from embedding images into the dom. SVG is still game on though. That said, I've seen a bunch of people try to create their own ascii art diagrams and wouldn't it be nice to have them just rendered as svg?
pnpm wxt build -b safari xcrun safari-web-extension-converter .output/safari-mv2
And that’s it? Or is there some hidden extra work involved.
Just doing that for Chrome and Firefox took a huge amount of effort to get fully set up and approved. Thankfully, it is now at the point where every PR goes live automatically.
That's the bundle size, not the amount of code in the project.
I've done nothing to try to optimize the bundle size, but I suspect that a lot of it has to do with some of the third party dependencies like mermaid.
The amount of abstraction alone for the project of this scope makes me cringe. You introduce unnecessary complexity.
30+ years in web development is what you say at the support group to explain why you're there, not to convince people you've developed good taste and reasonable sensibilities.
Edit: Zed Shaw didn't know it at the time, but "Rails is a ghetto" wasn't describing even a local minimum in web development, it was the start of an incredible valley we've yet to see the bottom of. A sea of unskilled morons unable and unwilling to learn even the basics of just about everything came in droves and never left. Now they have bullshit generators that'll generate the shit code they probably were going to ship anyway, except faster.
Webdevs nowadays blindly follow "trends" that phase out every couple of years, without really bringing anything of the value to the ecosystem.
I'm happy to share my projects and contributions privately, if you're interested.
Now, you're talking about bringing value to the ecosystem, and I'm not sure how 10 year old github accounts, and private repositories fulfill that.
Let's see what you've got that is so amazing.
No, I just used a phrasing that reminded you of LLMs and that's it. Funnily enough it also has no real bearing on my argument; your 30+ years of web development didn't stop you from shipping more than a MB of JS to add some basic features to HackerNews [because LLMs wrote everything for you].
"Every accusation is a confession" and all that...
> Because Hacker News is great, but repetitive UI friction adds up. Orange Juice keeps the original feel while removing the things that cost you time every day.
That does not convince me to use your app? This is like calling someone's Kia shit and instead telling them to buy a Tesla, but just stating that it's better.
I'll stick to HN, thanks.
UPDATE: I've changed the copy, it is pushing right now.