Lots of nice tweaks, but the most important is missing: the ability to move the collapse comment buttons ([-]) to the left of commenters' usernames. Doing this makes the collapse buttons all aligned with each other, making them far easier to click in succession. "Comments Owl for Hacker News" extension does this I believe.
The grey bar on the left that the extension adds also collapses the comments. They are aligned vertically and they have a bigger clickable area than [-].
but then the upvote button is too close to the collapse thread, plus, why make it easier to hide discussion? => makes it easier for scripts to automate by visual/x,y placement
Latchkey, would you be comfortable with HN adopting your dark mode styling as a user choice someday, if they came around to liking it? I really like it and I think it’s in the spirit of the site.
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.
Dang your comment excites me to think that Hackernews can have dark mode in future.
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?
Although I did just confess* to enjoying accoutrements which for years have been selfishly withheld from others (bare-bones UI for thee but not for me), dark mode is not one of them.
Oh, I had thought that when dang said somethings took 15 years and pow they happened, maybe my interpretation was that dark mode is definitely something which can occur within the future in a similar fashion.
dang, i pitched this on reddit like 20 years ago. I've always wanted to know what putting the new page on the front page would do to content quality. Something like this https://keizo.github.io/hackernews/
We tried a variant of that once and it failed hard, because people have strongly different emotional responses to the front page vs. the newest page. Mixing the two produced a strong aversion.
Interesting! Like less overall engagement? Was it fully mixed or in distinct columns. I feel like it makes a difference.
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.
Thanks for this! I've been using it for less than a minute, and it has already exceeded my expectations:
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.
Cheers! I feel like the vast majority of extensions could be rewritten as either TamperMonkey or Stylus scripts.
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.
I agree, though I use Violentmonkey instead of Tampermonkey because open source, and uBlock Origin because rewriting it as a *monkey script is somewhere between "Implement a MIDI Machine Control interface to my turntable" and "Rewrite FreeBSD in Rust" on my project list.
Haha yeah - same I only run three extensions (uBlock Origin, Stylus, and Tampermonkey) but I'll be swapping over to violentmonkey [1]. Thanks for the recommendation - didn't realize there was a FOSS equivalent.
Not bad I do like the transparency on AI usage. So many projects omit this completely and its difficult not to assume someone just claude coded it in an evening to farm clicks. But this looks nice I'll probably check it out
All day long, I read about people vibe coding, so I decided to open my mind and try it out myself and see if I could do some sort of mix between my own skills as a life long web developer and whatever the kids are doing these days. Mostly because I have a strong belief that AI itself won't take our jobs away, but people who know AI will.
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.
This is super nice, thank you for including an AI disclosure. I would probably normally avoid something like this bc I would be considered by how much code oversight there is. Very nice to know that it's overseen properly by a human. Installed it and it's quite nice!!! great work :)
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?
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
This is pretty darn cool. i've not yet seen any mention of one particular quirk so will point it out: on Firefox it flashes between "normal" and "upgraded" mode pretty starkly (A) when switching pages and (B) when tapping "add comment" (which is apparently done via page reload rather than the HN API). i've no clue whether an extension/app has any influence over the timing of that so cannot suggest how it might be resolved, but will say that it's particularly jarring.
I can't figure out how to toggle to Light Mode (maybe it uses the system setting?). HN is something I prefer to be in Light Mode but everything else in dark. Gonna remove until this is configurable.
Pretty cool. This is the glitchy userscript I use on Firefox mobile[1] (with screenshot) to make tap targets bigger and move navigation at the bottom of the page + collapsed.
i like some of the things this does, but pretty much all of this is not UX improvements, it's UX opinions.
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.
"Tested, not vibe coded" yet you mention the AI has written all the tests. This extension may not be vibe coded but it's close to that, it seems. Regardless it seems to work well, I replaced the older Refined Hacker News extension with this, which seems like where you initially sourced the code from as the features are very similar, 1:1 even for some.
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.
The improvements are nice, that's for sure. But i checked out github and it looks like overengineered ai slop, you could implement all the features with 1/10 of the code. But again, nobody cares nowadays which makes me sad. You even generated chrome/firefox logos using ai...
> 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.
158 comments
[-]) to the left of commenters' usernames. Doing this makes the collapse buttons all aligned with each other, making them far easier to click in succession. "Comments Owl for Hacker News" extension does this I believe.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?
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47696183
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.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
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.
https://github.com/violentmonkey/violentmonkey
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.
[0] https://github.com/lookfirst/mui-rff
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?
> 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
Out of curiosity, why did you make a new Github account for the extension instead of developing it on your own account?
[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.
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.
* 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)
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:
https://github.com/mon-jai/modern-hacker-news
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
* https://hncompanion.com/
* http://oj-hn.com/
* https://hnrelevant.imadij.com/
* https://hnreplies.com/
> Why Install Orange Juice?
> 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.