After two weeks of bliss with my new tool for reading Hacker News, I’ve come up with a shortlist of my favorite commenters there. The difference in quality between the filtered and unfiltered views is huge—just about every interesting thread on hacker news has somebody interesting commenting on it, it seems. That correspondence should hold even if your notion of interesting is different from mine.
If you’ve been using my feed you can create your own shortlist and/or killfile. Here’s the complete reference on configuring the URL. No more orange divider falling to the bottom of the page after a few hours, heralding comments lost.
Filtering should keep Hacker News interesting for me even if it goes the way of reddit and has a huge influx of new users. In the spirit of Zawinski’s law for the web, Hacker News is now perhaps my favorite social network, even though it doesn’t look anything like one, and it doesn’t include most of my best friends in the real world. I think there’s a lesson here.
2 years ago
Here’s a writeup on a radically different approach to the notification and highlighting problems. No extension, no greasemonkey script, no bookmarklet, nothing to install at all, just a different static page.
We still rely on specialized parsing for a single website, though.
Update: Currently atop the Hacker News front-page.
2 years ago
Yet another episode of tracking changes to websites. If you frequent YC News, this greasemonkey script will highlight stories on the front page with fresh comments since you last visited them. On pages with comments it will highlight fresh ones. Finally, it provides easy access to the list of monitored stories; you can stop monitoring a story when you want to.
Inspiration
This script identifies new comments by storing and comparing timestamps. Though obvious on hindsight, this wasn’t the first approach I tried. The inspiration for comparing timestamps rather than full-text came from two sources:
A conversation on reddit when I created the hystry plugin for it back in June.
A conversation with Waleed Abdulla in response to his bookmarklet to address the same problem. This script is based on his bookmarklet, and on the insight that translating bookmarklets to greasemonkey scripts is trivial.
Tradeoffs
Prior hystry plugins maintained multiple versions per page and performed full-text diff. Comparing timestamps rather than full-text requires specialized parsing for each new website to identify comments, their permalinks, and their timestamps. It also imposes limits on the number of pages we can track per site - browser limits on the number of cookies per site range from 20 to 50. On the other hand, this approach requires less disk space, bandwidth, and computation. It stores user-specific timestamp information in browser cookies rather than on the hystry.com server. Indeed, if you don’t care for highlighting new comments on the front page,
this version doesn’t need to contact hystry.com at all, and is fully self-contained in the browser.
Highlighting and notifying
This is the third plugin on hystry.com. Each plugin has been an attack on two mostly-independent problems: highlighting updates on a page, and notifying you of pages with updates. Highlighting updates has worked well each time, but notification has been hard. I first tried the
inbox, but it was slow to load and I found myself reluctant to use it. In the
second version, I gave up on notification and simply highlighted updates in place when you returned to a page. I found I rarely return to pages. This version integrates both highlighting and notification into the look and feel of the site you’re on. But it only works for one site. Now let’s see what we can do about that..
2 years ago
We started out with two use cases: notification when pages update, and highlighting updates on a page. After using hystry for a week, however, we found the inbox to be less useful than expected. There were just too many pages we didn’t care about. Ignoring each of them was too much of a hassle.
The new version tightens our focus in two ways. First, it focusses on reddit, a single set of pages where highlighting updates is more likely to be useful. Second, it eliminates the inbox page altogether; to see differences you have to go to the page you care about. Just save or bookmark the threads you care about.
The previous version will still work for a while, but if you find the inbox view useful or care about updates to other sites besides reddit, please tell us. We are also working on making it easy to switch between versions without having to lose your browser history on hystry. Again, if this is important to you we’d appreciate a holler.
3 years ago
Have you ever returned to a slashdot/digg/reddit thread and wished you could easily tell apart the new comments since you last checked it? Or written a comment only to forget to check if others replied to you? hystry.com is for you.
The story so far. We have put up:
- A browser plugin to send your browser history to hystry.com.
- The inbox page where you get notified when a page gets updated.
- Algorithms to highlight updates to a page since you last visited it.
- This blog. Settling on blogging software took longer than all the above combined. Tumblr is easily the most painless blog-hosting solution around. The killer feature: custom domain names.
One overarching goal of hystry has been to make it as painless to try as possible. In keeping with this, there is no registration process; just bookmark your own private inbox link. To get a new account just go to hystry.com for a new inbox. To delete your browser history with us, simply uninstall the hystry extension. That is all!
This is just our initial solution to these problems, and we have some ideas to improve it. But the plan is to stay loose and see how you like it. So try it! And tell us!
3 years ago
