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How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first

til.simonwillison.net

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

#21

Post by KirillPanov »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #20

Please note that dang also has a feature in the works which adds an orange border on the left side of the new comments since your last visit of the thread. I've been using it for months and it is amazing! Email him and he might turn it on for you.

Yeah but the tricky part as always is: what counts as a "visit"?

If I accidentally hit reload in my browser? Or Firefox unloads the tab and then I switch to it briefly before quitting the browser (which probably causes a re-fetch)?

Real newsreaders and mailreaders maintain their own "read-ness" bits and give you nice tools for manipulating them effortlessly. Stuff like "catch up" (mark everything read) or "mark subtree as read" or "mark subtree as ignored". Anybody who has used GNUS knows how nice this is.

Trying to shoehorn this into a browser worldview is a losing battle.

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

#26

Post by nmstoker »

This is good to know.

What is a harder challenge is how to read the comments that are on topic whilst skipping those that derail the topic with a ranty tangent or bikeshedding, usually generating a mass of less valuable comments in reply.

(I'm aware there could be irony in me posting this at a tangent but I hope it's at least close enough and not ranting or arguing about an obscure aspect)

I enjoy HN enormously, both the articles and the comments but it does seem increasingly prone to derailing that often masks a load of interesting/valuable comments.

Of course one person's side issues is another person's central issue, so this may be somewhat intractable.

The best way I've seen see far is simply to close an entire branch of comments as soon as it's clear someone is derailing and then move down, hoping that the next set stay on topic.

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