Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Hacker News

Nice!

It's a neat idea to implement it as an extension. And I enjoy how it just overlays the normal site (loads separate pages as separate pages, etc)

And finally a dark mode. Dear god.

One bit of feedback: it took me a minute or two to figure out how to comment on an article (to write this very comment); I actually had to look back at the website to make sure commenting wasn't a "Pro" feature. I don't know if the reply-arrow really translates to comment threads, especially when you're not "replying" to another comment but to the main post. Some sort of comment-bubble icon might be clearer. At the very least I think those icons could use titles, and/or "modern" tooltips.

Overall pretty cool! I think I'll try it out at least for a little bit

Edit: A couple other things,

- It's a bummer that karma and threads (now "Comments") are hidden behind an extra click. When I'm actively participating in a thread those are two of my most frequently-used parts of the UI

- The thread UI is a little too minimalist I think; it's a little hard to visually parse where one comment ends and another starts, nesting levels, etc. Some tasteful borders or lines would go a long way here, though so would some slightly-more-contrasted colors

- I don't see a way to see upvotes on your own comments like in the main UI. My dopamine receptors would like that feature back ;)

Depends on what you mean by "proxying". Everything you do (serving a Single-Page Application or requesting HN by backend, processing it's HTML and sending the content to your own frontend) will take traffic away from news.ycombinator.com and to another domain - which comes with it's own set of dreadful scenarios.

There used to be (and still are) things like https://mreidsma.github.io/bookmarklets/jquerify.html which allow to inject JavaScript on click (and thus would make it possible to transform that site), but I gave it a shot and HN is set up to disallow this:

  Refused to load the script 'https://code.jquery.com/jquery.min.js' because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://www.google.com/recaptcha/ https://www.gstatic.com/recaptcha/ https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/". Note that 'script-src-elem' was not explicitly set, so 'script-src' is used as a fallback.

I really like that HN is not like that, but nice work anyway :)

Why not make this a user-style? [0]

In particular I ask this because your approach -if generally applied- means installing an extension for each single site, which feels a bit too much.

[0] https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/ycombinator

Good idea, thanks, I'll add that in the next version.