It doesn't mess with the layout beyond that, which I like.
By the way, http://hckrnews.com/ itself is wonderful. It's HN, but in chronological order. That seems like a bad thing, but in fact there are only a few dozen submissions per day, and it's easy to pick out the interesting ones.
It may not have been clear from sillysaurus3's comment, but the "hckrnews" extension defines "new" differently. It keeps a database of the last time that you've visited each page, and highlights all the comments that are new since your last visit. I use it as well, and it's great. When I access HN from a browser without it it feels practically unusable. My only issue with it is that I sometimes accidentally click on the "collapse thread" option. Ironically, considering the topic of this thread, I don't use or want that functionality, and would prefer an option to disable it. But highlighting the posts since the last visit is fabulous!
I've seen this linked to, but I never understood what the selling point was. It turns out I never realized that it sorted the posts in chronological order according to when they first appeared on the front page. Pretty cool! This definitely feels good for someone like me who refreshes the front page repeatedly throughout the day. I don't have to expend energy trying to figure out what's new.
Have you ever used f.lux? https://justgetflux.com/ it adjusts the colour temperature of your display(s) based on the time of day. I often use my laptop in bed with the brightness turned down and colour temperature at 2700k, makes the screen look like it's backlit by candles.
Yeah Flux is great, have used it for years, but dark mode it much different, basically inverts the colors 100%, HN for me has a black background, and grey text. Super easy on the eyes. I do this in all my IDEs, reddit, HN, stackoverflow, etc....
Highly recommended. Of all the Hacker News styles I've tried, this has been the only one that I've used consistently.
Notably, it preserves the compactness of the front page. A lot of other styles tend to space out stories on the front page too much, which makes it harder to read through.
I’ve also hacked bigger voting buttons (for the sake of Fitt’s law [1]) and some indentation marks [0] which I find quite helpful, both included with ~/.js [2].
I still don't get why HN is against adding features like this or open links in new windows/tab AS AN OPTION.
I get that some people don't want anything to change on HN - no problem - but what is the harm in adding features that we individually can turn on that would not effect anyone else? Aka, add the features but have them off by default.
they need a new API to manipulate nested DOM elements in the web browser? Maybe they're doing more like making each comment atomic so you can dig deep into nests, but at the surface adding such a toggle would be a very trivial thing to implement via HTML/JS.
I think its ridiculous that something with so much traction gets so little love and people have to create extensions to fix some of the basic site interactions.
In addition to collapsing, it highlights new comments and shows how many new comments there are on story list pages since you last looked at the full thread.
If you click the "X new" link it adds, it automatically collapses all threads which don't have new comments on page load.
All I'd like is to be able to click on the left margin of a post to skip under it. Sometimes it's just that the first comment has too many replies and I'd like to jump past it easily.
I have also wanted this for a long time. I think you'd have to go back to the top of the parent, or else you'd wind up jumping way past the end of that thread.
edit: This has the collapse button between the voting arrows and username, just like reddit. Seems like something minor, but it's a big detail. (1) I'm used to that location from reddit, and (2) it doesn't move, which isn't the case with many other extensions that have it on the end.
Despite there being a whole bunch of implementations out there, I had also written one a while ago: https://github.com/thebrokencube/yahnes . It does need some updating, but seems to work well enough for my use (plus, I just wanted to scratch my own itch).
Probably best to sort of consolidate some of these into a few really good ones, but we'll see.
I use HN Special [0]. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the default look of Hacker News and I also couldn't live without features like infinite scrolling, showing which link you just returned from and more accurate domain names .
Follow other HN users, notifications when replied to, notifications when your karma changes, notifications when followed, comment viewing while on article/video/page, and chat.
Thanks for this website! I use it all the time. I love the way comments collapse under the mouse so that the next parent is at the same position the cursor was at. Lets me skim through threads super fast
Maybe Ycombinator should just stop trying to maintain hacker news and move to a subreddit, and thereby get all the benefits of reddit's features and ecosystem.
In addition to collapsing threads, it also tastefully identifies new comments: http://i.imgur.com/qs6FDRU.png
It doesn't mess with the layout beyond that, which I like.
By the way, http://hckrnews.com/ itself is wonderful. It's HN, but in chronological order. That seems like a bad thing, but in fact there are only a few dozen submissions per day, and it's easy to pick out the interesting ones.