

Ask HN: What tools/add-ons/sites do you use to get most out of Hacker News? - shekhar101

I use hckrnews.com along with chrome extension to get &#x27;Top stories&#x27; and also to catch up with days when I don&#x27;t have access to internet. I&#x27;m curious what other add-ons other members use? I also noticed people reference old threads in discussions. How do you keep track of them?
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davybrion
I love the weekly-newsletter format, so i very much appreciate Kale Davis'
hacker newsletter:
[http://www.hackernewsletter.com](http://www.hackernewsletter.com)

Other than that i use MiniHack on iOS
([https://itunes.apple.com/be/app/minihack-for-hacker-
news/id6...](https://itunes.apple.com/be/app/minihack-for-hacker-
news/id631108846?mt=8))... I rarely use the website

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jyu
I use RSS for nearly everything. RSS allows you to avoid the fear of missing
great stories or content due to timing, groupthink flagging, etc. You can also
follow individual user comments with RSS with some quick mods.

An added bonus is that RSS preserves [dead] stories. Once a story is [dead],
it won't show up in hn.algolia.com search results, even though it still shows
up on HN.

~~~
hashtag
_You can also follow individual user comments with RSS with some quick mods_

Can you elaborate on how the mod works?

~~~
jyu
I fed the custom hn.algolia.com search to something that made it into an RSS
feed. So if I wanted to get an RSS feed of all of pg's comments, you could use
this as the source link:

[http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/sort_by_date/prefix/0/author%...](http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/sort_by_date/prefix/0/author%3APG)

Then I made a custom yahoo pipe to create an RSS feed, taking a username as a
parameter:

[http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=b5d191396ff8e04acd...](http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=b5d191396ff8e04acddcaedebc2d176d&_render=rss&username=pg)

~~~
rahimnathwani
I had the same need, but didn't want to use Yahoo! pipes, so I submitted a
small patch:

[https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/pull/27](https://github.com/algolia/hn-
search/pull/27)

~~~
walterbell
Taking that one step further, you can convert RSS to NNTP via
[http://gwene.org/](http://gwene.org/)

~~~
rahimnathwani
This is awesome and brought a big smile to my face! Some questions:

\- Is trn still the most awesome news reader? It's been a while since I've
used NNTP.

\- Does gwene.org still update? Every feed I found in the search results was
last updated in March 2014 :(

\- Apart from RSS->NNTP being cool, is there any real situation in which I'd
want to use this?

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percept
I'm constantly doing one of the following:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+someth...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+something)

[https://www.google.com/?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+somethin...](https://www.google.com/?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+something)

[Aside: I really like the DDG mission, but am finding myself more frequently
(and unfortunately) returning to Google for technical searches, and switched
back to it as my default. I'm finding more relevant results at the top of
Google's SERPs. Both DDG and Google diminished IMO when they tried to become
"smarter."]

~~~
dolzenko
How that compares to [https://hn.algolia.com/](https://hn.algolia.com/) ?

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xngzng
I use [http://www.tophackernews.net](http://www.tophackernews.net) by a
friend, which captures only news that hit front page top 3. Mainly follow
@TopHackerNewsHQ to read on Twitter.

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snikeris
I almost exclusively read from:

[http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/)

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joshschreuder
Just HN Enhancement Suite, which does a whole heap of things like collapsible
comments, an (arguably) nicer site design / layout, as well as a bunch more.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhanc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm)

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Concours
I use HN RSS feed with [https://www.feedsapi.org/](https://www.feedsapi.org/)
to get all the stories in full length forwarded to my email inbox and read
them in full length in theoldreader reader. I now and then use
[http://www.ihackernews.com](http://www.ihackernews.com) on the go (on my
smartphone).

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codecondo
[http://codecondo.com/hacker-news-web-apps/](http://codecondo.com/hacker-news-
web-apps/)

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dolzenko
Old thread with suggestions
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4474078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4474078).
Personally I feel the strong desire to have collapsible comment threads, but
still haven't invested any time into finding proper solution.

~~~
egor83
I use 'hckr news' extension for Chrome which has collapsible threads (and also
highlights new comments):

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-
news/mnlaodle...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-
news/mnlaodleonmmfkdhfofamacceeikgecp)

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dennybritz
I usually only check "Ask HN" and read the top stories posted by Hacker News
on Twitter.

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gauravgupta
I use HackerNode to read HN on my iPhone.

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mromanuk
Minihack is the best for iPad

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motyar
FireFox

