
Safari extension to hide Bitcoin stories on HN - aaronbrethorst
https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/NoBitcoin
======
ck2
Are people really that sensitive to it?

I mean bitcoin stories are not like constantly seeing the latest bimbo in the
regular news right?

Personally I upvote (some) bitcoin stories because I think it's something new
and innovative and shows hackers being creative in engineering their own
world.

Then again, adding tags to HN would be a wonderful way to allow everyone to
personalize their filtering if desired and an easy way to search too. For
those that do not want tags at all, a simple checkbox in profile could hide
all tag interfaces, or just use a CSS class that is easily hidden.

~~~
est
> Personally I upvote (some) bitcoin stories because I think it's something
> new and innovative and shows hackers being creative in engineering their own
> world.

Personally I think one should only upvote for the content of the link, not for
raping the front page because one think some _topic_ is more interesting than
others.

~~~
anonymous246
I love bitcoin stories. I've learned a lot about economics, crypto, and social
interactions through the stories. No, I'm not being sarcastic, I'm sincere.
One of the most useful things about which HN has alerted me.

Keep them coming. I would rather read that than that Pandora/Groupon filed for
an IPO, the latest marketing driven from Joel/Atwood/37 Signals, or
Techcrunch's reblogging of WSJ/AP/Reuters.

~~~
yhlasx
Anything but not personal opinions from Techcrunch, please

------
praptak
Yeah, whatever. Now go seek some worthy non-bitcoin stories to upvote.
Frontpage or <http://news.ycombinator.com/newest>

------
noarchy
I come to HN for hacker news (at least, as I understand the term). I wish I
could hide all of the stories about startups, for example, but instead I just
ignore them. People can do the same when it comes to bitcoin articles. Also,
these articles shouldn't remain on the front page if people don't upvote them,
right? There may be demand on such articles.

~~~
tokenadult
_I wish I could hide all of the stories about startups_

Well, when you consider that Hacker News was called Startup News when I first
became aware of it,

[http://web.archive.org/web/20070226001637/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070226001637/http://news.ycombinator.com/)

I think that misses out on a lot of the history that made this site what it is
today.

~~~
_delirium
I'm aware of that history, and personally am here despite rather than because
of it. I don't really have much interest in startups, but afaik there isn't
currently another good general-purpose tech-discussion site. Slashdot isn't
quite what it used to be, kuro5hin is now a dive bar, reddit.com/r/programming
is overall worse than HN, and other forums I know about are good but only in
relatively small niches (e.g. Lambda the Ultimate for academic-slanted PLs).

------
mdonahoe
Is there any way to hide people who complain about stories getting upvoted?

~~~
antiscam
The difference is that people who complain about these upvotes don't have a
vested selfish financial interest and aren't marketing anything to us. Unlike
the Bitcoin pump-and-dumpers, they are exercising judgment rather than trying
to manipulate others.

~~~
anonymoushn
Are you saying that everyone who upvotes Bitcoin stories is also long Bitcoin?
I haven't recently been told that I don't exist.

~~~
antiscam
The statistics here seem more important than the individual cases. Not
everyone who talks up penny stocks is long them either, but most of the people
sending spam promoting various penny-stock pump-and-dump schemes have a
selfish financial angle in doing so.

I'm not saying there's no reason to be interested in Bitcoin other than
personal financial motives. The technology is legitimately interesting, but
not nearly enough to have gotten the marketing push that it's gotten,
particularly here. Only one thing explains that: the selfish incentives that
the current implementation of Bitcoin provides. (Well, or extremist ideology.)

------
wickedchicken
Can you make a version to remove stories related to Jason Calacanis as well? I
would pay for that. You could run a bayesian classification algorithm, and
verify false positives/negatives by doing some backup work on Mechanical Turk.
"Is this story related to Jason Calacanis? Y/N"

~~~
jessedhillon
I've heard this sentiment before from other places -- what's the objection to
him? I'm honestly asking.

~~~
Jd
Well, one reason is the spam he sends anyone who is a member of the Hacker
News group on Facebook. Thankfully I have a filter for that too....

------
mukyu
The problem is perceived as bitcoin stories crowding out other ones. Hiding
the bitcoin stories (or ignoring them) does nothing to solve this. If the
front page full of bitcoin stories (think Erlang day) users of this extension
would find the page empty besides the Next link.

~~~
ary
Agreed. If it's getting excessive to the point of astro-turfing or making the
front page less diverse then we should just start flagging them.

~~~
dasil003
And it's not getting excessive. I just clicked through 20 pages of stories,
and there is less than 1 bitcoin story per page on average. Only 2 pages have
2 bitcoin stories, and none have 3 or more.

~~~
mukyu
Going back pages does not give you an accurate representation of the daily
front page. Also, when I go a few pages back there is suddenly a huge swathe
of non-URL posts for seemingly no reason.

I lifted a dataset[1] from <http://hackerslide.com> which has hourly archived
front pages. With that and some dumb regular expressions[2] I categorized
stories and how much time that story stayed on the front page. That is, two
bitcoin posts on four different front-pages in a day would be 8 'story-hours'.

[https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=t2W3xQ5p...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=t2W3xQ5pgv5bXvtdNXki0Cg&authkey=CKL_yI0O#gid=1)

I'm sure this way of measuring has problems such as different times having
different amount of activity on HN.

To me it seems like there are constantly 1+ bitcoin posts on the front-page
everyday. Most of the time the posts are about some trivial event (bitcoin
hits 8.5 on mtgox, EFF starts accepting bitcoins, EFF stops accepting
bitcoins) or a blog post that discusses bitcoin. In all of these circumstances
the discussion seems to follow the same trends and go over the same ground. If
there is ever a truly novel insight it would be hard to find in the mess.

[1] [https://dl.dropbox.com/s/182rbsb8kb83y4w/hn-
frontpages.7z?dl...](https://dl.dropbox.com/s/182rbsb8kb83y4w/hn-
frontpages.7z?dl=1)

[2] <https://www.dropbox.com/s/d6ivp8lrj8esflr/count.py>

------
pnathan
I completely fail to understand the antipathy towards bitcoin.

~~~
edw
Bitcoin = (Ron Paul + Peak Oil) * Sarah Palin ^ Glenn Beck

~~~
evo_9
Really how do you come to that conclusion?

Bitcoin seems like a legitimate attempt to move currency into the future
absent of any one entity controlling it.

Edit: I'm not being snarky, I haven't followed this that closely and wondered
if there was/is a political component to Bitcoin that connects those dots.

~~~
kylemaxwell
From my perspective, the issues around why Bitcoin is made of fail have been
done to death here, including in several stories specifically about that.

------
joeyh
What bitcoin address do we send tips to?

------
ot
The extension hides this story too!

~~~
parfe
Once you have the extension this story is of no more value.

------
tlrobinson
Check out my fork:
[https://github.com/tlrobinson/NoBitcoin/commit/265440e98728c...](https://github.com/tlrobinson/NoBitcoin/commit/265440e98728c91bb5698dff749a2ad7d10d102b)

~~~
tlrobinson
I'm deleting my fork, here's the patch for posterity:

    
    
        @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ for(var index = 0; index < tds.length; index++)
             td.getAttribute('class').indexOf('title') != -1 && 
             td.firstChild && 
             td.firstChild.tagName == 'A' &&
        -    td.firstChild.text.match(/bit\s*coin/i))
        +    td.firstChild.text.match(/(hide|block|ban).*(story|stories|article|submission|comment)/i))
           {
             var tr1 = td.parentNode;
             var tr2 = tr1.nextSibling;

------
jerf
Patience. We're probably just past the peak of the hype cycle. The BitCoin
bubble probably has about three weeks of life left in it.

~~~
3pt14159
Do I have your permission to include this quote (along with todays date) in my
HN profile?

~~~
jerf
Sure.

To be honest, I'm not really guaranteeing the date. Calling bubble dates is
virtually impossible by their very nature. But that we're in one, yes I would
be willing to stand by that. I actually _hope_ something like BitCoin succeeds
at some point, but I don't see it being BitCoin.

~~~
3pt14159
Sweet. Thanks for having the balls to respond :)

------
drx
You can also block the tag 'bitcoin' (<http://archfinch.com/tag/bitcoin>) and
follow 'hn' (<http://archfinch.com/tag/hn>) on <http://archfinch.com/> and
subscribe to your personal RSS.

------
mcrittenden
As someone not at all familiar with writing Safari extensions, this
([https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/NoBitcoin/blob/master/NoBi...](https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/NoBitcoin/blob/master/NoBitcoin.safariextension/nobitcoin.js))
looks really really overcomplicated for something that seems like it would
only take a few lines of JS to do in a bookmarklet or Greasemonkey script
(assuming it's literally just hiding any story that has "bitcoin" in the title
- this might be a bad assumption as I can't try it out myself).

Are all Safari extensions this complex?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I wanted CSS selector support, and so I just copied and pasted in Zepto with
some minor hacks to prevent conflicts with pg's $ function. I'm sure there are
easier ways to do this, but I've never written one before, either, and wanted
to spend as little time as possible writing it.

~~~
eridius
It seems like a remarkably bad idea to modify the prototypes of the built-in
classes inside a Safari Extension. It's bad enough to do that in a library,
but at least the web page is making a deliberate choice to use that library.
When you put it in an extension, you've now modified the prototypes of the
built-in classes in a way that affects the page, but without the page ever
being aware of this. What happens if your function is named the same as one
the page tried to define, but behaves differently?

For the record, document.querySelectorAll() is built-in and can do selector
matching, and the only other thing you use Zepto for (adding classes) is
trivially done manually.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Thanks for the tip. As I'm sure you could tell from the code, this was the
result of about 15 minutes of work this morning (from generating the CSR to
get my certificate to tossing it onto GitHub). If I ever go back and touch
this repo again, I'll use querySelectAll().

------
bry
Pretty soon we're going to need an extension to hide all the IPO stories ;)

------
rbanffy
Hmmm... An HN proxy that allows you to kill stories, threads and comments
according to your taste... Sounds like an interesting project.

------
rewind
You choose to participate in a specific community and its collective approval
or disapproval of news items, or you don't. That's how it works. Is this such
a big deal? I think I wasted about... five or six seconds... ignoring bitcoin
stories on my own. A fair trade-off, as far as I'm concerned, for having other
submissions upvoted without me doing anything.

------
iamdave
There seem to be a lot of people who have objections to how _other_ people
choose to consume their daily news...

------
SpoonMeiser
Great. Can it be adapted to hide any stories from TechCrunch instead?

~~~
scrrr
Someone could just write a configurable extension to allow to hide whatever
the user wants.

But I still find it silly.. Just don't click on stories that don't interest
you. heh

------
mrkva
Guess this calls for tags more than anything. I want to exclude: startups,
windows 8 (wtf - why nobody complains about this?), capitalist pigs.

~~~
drx
Try this:

Follow HN (<http://archfinch.com/tag/hn>), block startups,
(<http://archfinch.com/tag/startups>), windows8
(<http://archfinch.com/tag/windows8>), then subscribe to your personal RSS
feed.

Perhaps I could make it into an extension.

------
Zev
Installed. Bonus points if someone makes it automatically flag any bitcoin-
related story, since they won't be visible for me to flag anymore.

------
gil
Does the extension hide this story?

------
lukejduncan
Do you think the author knows they made it to the front page?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
The +150 bump to my karma would've been a pretty good giveaway on it's own.
The three friends and coworkers who mentioned it to me since I couldn't see it
confirmed it.

also, i've periodically been popping in to read the comments in Chrome or on
iHackerNews.com

------
nextparadigms
Those who agree with the post, should see this:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...](http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html)

------
SeoxyS
Can we have a Chrome version, pretty please?

~~~
dminor
Quick and dirty: <https://github.com/davidminor/No-Bitcoin-on-HN>

------
mixmastamyk
Swatting a fly with a bulldozer, hehe.

------
jcapote
Awesome idea. Now make a chrome one!

------
drivebyacct2
Are we serious? Besides this being a really specific solution to a more
general problem, there aren't _that many_ Bitcoin stories on HN.

Why not make a general purpose filter?

------
noduerme
lol. Bitcoin is a nice idea I guess, but no one who actually accepts online
payments takes it seriously because the <i>only way you can buy and sell the
junk is to go through the shadiest brokers on earth.</i> These guys do a total
turnover of about USD$1k a day. And the whole thing frankly resembles a ponzi
scheme or a late-night infomercial. They talk geek and it's interesting to
watch people fall in love with their concept and their API, but when it comes
to managing money, geeks are obviously not as smart as MBAs who wouldn't touch
this thing with a ten foot pole in 2008, and still won't. It's funny that this
hype, which is basically financial services spam, is making the front page of
HN on a regular basis; it suggests something is wrong here (possibly it's too
easy to sign up for second and third accounts).

~~~
daeken
> These guys do a total turnover of about USD$1k a day.

Woah, wait, what? Even if everything else you said is right (and if nothing
else, these guys _are_ shady), Mtgox has done a volume of 38825BTC in the last
24 hours -- that's a volume of $411541 today. (At the current rate, which
means it's probably more like $380k, but whatever)

~~~
noduerme
hm. Haven't looked at mt gox for awhile, (what is a gox, is it a
mountain?)...their site seems rather crashy at the moment, but last month it
looked to me like they were turning over a volume of around $1k per day. And
who knows if anyone actually got paid out of that. It's one thing to solve
anonymous payments between peers online...totally another to find a way to
translate that into spendable cash, and that's actually the real, serious
problem that any online payment solution seeking anonymity has to face. So
they solved, in a sense, the easy part.

~~~
daeken
People pull money out constantly -- I know many people who have. Whether
that'll keep going, who knows, but at the moment there's nothing scammy going
on.

------
jasonkostempski
6% of people in the world are using Safari, I'm estimating 0.001% of them read
HN AND are bothered by the frequency of Bitcoin stories. Some things don't
need to go on github.

------
hugh3
Well, that's one solution to the problem. Nice work!

(I don't use Safari myself, but...)

