

Ask HN: Are there any Chrome extensions to hide HN stories? - raganwald

I'm tired of flagging stories about Valley Drama oozing comments about why so-and-so is or isn't a douchebag. Obviously the readers here like this stuff, so much so that such stories get 200+ upmods. I realize my tastes no longer match HN's tastes as it has grown in user base, much as they no longer reflect proggit's tastes as it grew.<p>So... Is there a simple way to hide posts? Perhaps a Chrome extension or a JS bookmarklet? I'd like to participate in a subset of HN's discussions without the distraction and without wasting the mods' time by flagging stories that are obviously <i>popular</i>.
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pook
A naive bookmarklet isn't what you really want.

What you ideally want is a personal karma filter. A way to track your
interests client-side in addition to the HN sieve. "Clickety on the Ignore
button and goodbye human interest stories involving douche*"

How to make one securely, though, can be a bit of a problem.

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raganwald
I'm not sure tackling the problem with machine learning is necessary. It's one
of those things that (so far) doesn't happen often, but when it does there
seems to be a wave of stories around the same topic. One hopes it will go
away, but then a week later another pops up and I'd like to just click ignore
and be done with it.

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michael_dorfman
Is it really necesary to hide posts? Is it such a distraction to just skip
over the stories that are not interesting to you?

I ask because on a good day, I'm interested in maybe half of the stories on
the front page, and it's always been that way for me. I thought it was the
same for everyone...

~~~
ximeng
Once you've decided you're not interested in them, wouldn't it be nice to be
able to hide them from the main screen and see new ones in their place that
you might be interested in more?

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gchucky
At <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1085721> it looks like some people
wrote a Greasemonkey script to remove iPad stories. Maybe you could adapt that
JS to your liking?

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dhrasmus
You could try using Yahoo Pipes with some keywords to filter out stories you
won't be interested in. That'll create another RSS (or ATOM?) feed that you
can share with others of similar taste.

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bgraves
We just need 24 hours of pure <insert obscure, fringe technology here>
stories.

I think we've used Erlang in the past (no offense to the Erlangers, obviously)

~~~
icey
That hasn't really solved anything in the past except making the site
essentially unusable for day.

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bgraves
Yeah, that's kinda the point. HN stops being the place that people come to for
fluffy/inflammatory stories as we've seen for the past few days.

~~~
icey
And yet, here they are again - they start right back up immediately. The
reason for the first "Erlanging" was because HN was getting linked to from a
more mainstream news source and the intention was not to have people stay and
change the community.

------
raganwald
p.s. Sorry about the whining. I haven't finished my first coffee of the day
:-(

~~~
icey
There's no artful way to ask this; but have you found any potential
replacements for HN / Proggit yet?

