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  • Hacker News
  • This is how reddit supposed to be. A universal comment box for del.icio.us
    by est
  • Fun story. Way back in 2008, I tried to make it exactly that. I worked on figuring a way to inject the reddit comments onto any page. Sadly at the time the JS ecosystem just wasn't mature enough to allow users to log into reddit and safely inject it onto the page.

    Disqus existed, but it worked because every page was completely independent. The discussion only existed embedded on the page.

  • I’d love if there were different “layers” of meta discussion on top of everything on the web. Every blog and website would have an untold number of communities having discussions that are completely optional for you to view.

    Instead of browsing across sites, you’d be browsing across communities seeing the same site.

  • I also wrote a Monkey script to save clicks when reading papers: just embed PDF webview into the Arxiv abstract page. https://github.com/OneMoreSecond/FileSave/blob/master/arxiv_...

    It seems the software productivity has exploded in the agent era. However, do we treat every point of daily experience seriously enough? Do we recognize such pains actively and try to eliminate them (often easy), or just tolerate infinitely?

  • Hello,

    Just for your information, when I open "https://claude.ai/new" the script automatically open a random article, do you know why?

  • There are several non-static pages that people have previously submitted to HN that can cause some strange behavior like this. In the latest version I just published (v1.4.7) I've excluded the main ChatGPT and Claude homepages (but not subpages) which should fix this bug.
  • I made an extension that opens both tabs for you and thus far has a whopping 6 users!

    https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-saved-y...

  • Have you considered modifying it to trigger on every HNews click as well as with as manually triggered? As it is now it leaks browser URLs + query string + fragments to hn.algolia.com since it queries it on every single page you visit. At the very least it might be good to sanitize the queries by restricting to origin + path?
  • This is great and is also something that I've always had an issue with.

    What I do now is open the HN comments, and then when I'm ready to look at the link + comments, right-click on the title and Open in Split View.

  • I made an extension that does exactly this a while ago

    https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-saved-y...

  • I think the amount of upvotes you’re getting here suggests that it might be worth building a proper browser extension for this!

    Would you be interested in making one?

  • Open to it. For now I’m going to keep it as a userscript and build out some of the interesting ideas people have suggested here. If it keeps growing, a proper extension would definitely make sense.
  • I just open the HN post and then open the article. That way I can simply go back to the comments after reading the article, whenever that may be.
    by 8ig8
  • This. I gather interesting posts this way in my browser tabs in the phone and everytime I finish reading something I click "Back" and there's usually a discussion there, unless I opened the link originally from somewhere else than HN.
    by s4i
  • If you use Firefox (and will pardon me plugging my own project), you might be interested in a version of this I made a while ago as a browser extension:

    https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button

    My project is somewhat different from the userscript in that mine uses Bloom filters to check whether a link has been submitted, whereas this userscript sends every page you visit to the Algolia search API. Using Bloom filters means that there are no external requests unless you actually press the button. My project also doesn't show the comments in a sidebar.

    Having a link to past discussions, whether using this userscript or my extension, is useful not only to read the comments for a page you're browsing, but also to find good sites that haven't been submitted yet!

  • I don't understand what the Bloom filter is supposed to achieve here. Can you elaborate?
  • I like the bloom filter idea - I agree I don't want every URL I visit to be sent to Algolia. I really like this project's UI though - automatically opening it in a pane so I don't have to leave the site to see comments is really nice.
  • Firefox has a new Split View that's useful for this, but you still have to left click and select open in split view (M) then click the link. You also used to be able on some browsers to craft a link that was href="tab1.html|tab2.html", no idea if that's still a thing or if it was limited to "home page" setting.
    by pluc
  • alt/option-clicking on the desired tab works too
  • Left click?
  • Yeah Firefox split view is useful for this.

    If any of those vim extensions support link+split, and allow interaction with splits that would be even better.

  • In Chrome, I just right-clicked the link above and hit "open in split view" and it did.

    It was 50/50, with HN on the left, so maybe it's not as easy to read the post in smaller windows. Otherwise, seems to provide the same service, essentially.

  • Thanks for the tip. Didn't know this was added.

    I generally open the HN comment link, then click the article link, read it, then click back to read the comments.

    I'll see if this split view feature works better for me though, but I think I'd prefer a horizontal split instead of vertical.

  • I accidentally closed Firefox’s last “you’ve just updated” screen which probably mentioned Split View. Couldn’t re-open it. It’s not this https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/153.0.1/releasenotes/ , know if it’s mirrored?
  • Vivaldi has included split view for years (called tiles). You can also right click a link and choose open in follower tab. This lets all links clicked in one tile open in another tile. I use this regularly on HN.
  • This is slick. 2 things.

    1. If you name your script with the extension .user.js it is easier to click on to automatically install at least with tampermonkey. 2. When I went to this link from the main page, on mobile I had to scroll to the right to see the (-) to minimize because the sidebar was too large: https://elizabethtai.com/2026/06/10/substack-writers-you-nee... It may make some sense to start minimized so I can read the article first, but I can easily modify the script to do that.

  • is this better than using a chrome extension? i guess people need to have tampermonkey installed and so thats a slightly higher barrier to entry? i wonder if chrome would be interested in "sherlocking" userscripts so that we can distribute non security nightmare code easier.
    by swyx
  • Feature 2 is really useful. When I land on a technical article I know chances are there will be a nice HN discussion, that may sometimes even refute the main point of the article.

    Feature 1 is IMO less useful. It just suggests that people are bad at window management. We didn't like overlapping windows and finding them, so we created tabs inside windows. Then we wanted to see two things at the same time, so we created split views inside tabs (Chrome and Firefox both had this). With a good window manager neither would be necessary. Sadly the community prefers to solve this at the application level rather than the desktop level; I'm currently using Forge (https://github.com/forge-ext/forge) but sadly it's becoming unmaintained.

  • Agree 100%

    I got used to opening a new tab for things to read before RSS first invented. So I guess it became a 2nd nature. I also think it is better to read the article first before going to the comments session. So Feature 1 isn't that useful.

    For feature 2 it is great. Although thinking about it I kind wish this could be done without browser extension but an actual site feature by HN.

    by ksec