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How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first

til.simonwillison.net

1–10 of 28 posts

Re: How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first

#3
I also maintain a website/client that flatly displays HN comments, at https://ditzes.com Here is the comments for this very submission on Ditzes: https://ditzes.com/item/35282815

I wanted something that allow me to read HN with oldest comments first (without being "manipulated" by the karma ranking), offline on my own machine, only updates the frontpage max once per hour and making it easy to follow along submission comments I'm really interested in to read everything in, so that's the goal with the client over. Using Tauri + ClojureScript (https://codeberg.org/ditzes/ditzes)

It's far from done, but felt relevant to this submission so figured I'd share it. To get the latest comments, go to the bottom and scroll up :)

Edit: A more exciting example as this submission doesn't have a lot of comments as of writing this comment, the "ChatGPT Plugins" story (730 comments), might take a bit longer to load the comments so you might have to be patient: https://ditzes.com/item/35277677

Re: How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first

#4

I also maintain a website/client that flatly displays HN comments, at https://ditzes.com Here is the comments for this very submission on Ditzes: https://ditzes.com/item/35282815 I wanted something that allow me to read HN with oldest comments first (without being "manipulated" by the karma ranking), offline on my own machine, only updates the frontpage max once per hour and making it easy to follow along submission…

Username is apropos

I like what you're making.

Re: How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first

#6
I used to want to do this, but now I don't. I'm content to read older comments again, because I realize sometimes I glean new insight or things I want to reply with on the second or third pass. On the other hand, if I decided you were an asshole on the first read, while I'd like to say I'm more reflected upon repetition, that's probably not well-aligned with reality.

Re: How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first

#7
Interesting.

As someone mentioned, one could also use the HN plugin on Steampipe[1] to query among other things, threads with comments sorted reverse chronologically. (Disclaimer: I work on a cloud-version of Steampipe)

[1]: https://hub.steampipe.io/plugins/turbot/hackernews

Re: How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first

#8
FWIW the https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#readme extension does a good job of marking new comment items with a little indicator, although it does lose its mind when dang merges submissions (meaning I'm guessing the "last seen" is per `/item?id=` and not actually last seen by the commentId)

I then have a UserScript to make them more obvious:

    window.setTimeout(() => document.querySelectorAll('.__rhn__new-comment-indent').forEach(it => it.style.backgroundColor='orange'), 1000)

Prior to that I had a UserScript that would actually parse the `document.querySelectorAll('.age[title]')` to highlight the "newer than what"

Re: How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first

#9

I also maintain a website/client that flatly displays HN comments, at https://ditzes.com Here is the comments for this very submission on Ditzes: https://ditzes.com/item/35282815 I wanted something that allow me to read HN with oldest comments first (without being "manipulated" by the karma ranking), offline on my own machine, only updates the frontpage max once per hour and making it easy to follow along submission…

Nice feature! I'm often annoyed by the ordering of comments. The default sometimes places new comments far down the listing.

It'd be nice to have a hexchat script to insert your URLs into the ##hntop IRC channel, instead of the ycombinator links...

Re: How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first

#10
If I want to watch a thread, I simply favorite or upvote it, so I can always come back quickly using my account. It’s all built-in, no need for other techs :)

Yes, even with that, sometimes a thread is so convoluted and so long, that is hard to follow. But we have “fold” and “next”, too ;)

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