hackernews-button

If you use Firefox (and will pardon me plugging my own project), you might be interested in a version of this I made a while ago as a browser extension: https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button My project is somewhat different from the userscript in that mine uses Bloom filters to check whether a link has been submitted, whereas this userscript sends every page you visit to the Algolia search API. Using Bloom filters means that there are no external requests unless you actually press the button. My project also doesn't show the comments in a sidebar. Having a link to past discussions, whether using this userscript or my extension, is useful not only to read the comments for a page you're browsing, but also to find good sites that haven't been submitted yet!

I use Chrome as my main browser and was going to ask if there was a Chrome version. I was sad to see there's a technical reason you couldn't make it work :( https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/issues/1

This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page. In the same vein, a few years ago, I made a Firefox extension for users who want a privacy-preserving way to see if pages have associated HN discussion: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-d... Most other extensions probably hit an external API (such as Algolia) to check submission status, which means they send every page you visit to that API. Instead, my extension uses Bloom filters compiled from every link ever submitted (updated daily from the Hacker News BigQuery dataset) to check the current page's submission status. By using Bloom filters, my extension only hits the API when you click the button to view the discussion. Source code here: https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button Feel free to pull the Bloom filte

I appreciate the Go-style docstring comments in the code! For anyone trying to understand Bloom filters who may be interested in checking out an alternative C implementation (designed to be compiled to WebAssembly), I'll link mine below. I used it to build a Bloom filter of every Hacker News submission ever for a privacy-preserving browser extension that tells you if the page you're currently on has been submitted before. https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/blob/master/blo...

It's worth noting that my extension is far from perfect – it turns out that determining whether a specific page has been submitted to Hacker News is far from a trivial problem to solve. In general, this is because multiple URLs can map to the same page. Direct string comparison of the current URL to previously submitted ones doesn't work because there are many ways for two identical web pages to have different URLs. For example, the URL fragments can differ (the part after the "#" that may or may not be present). Also there can be tracking parameters (often—but not necessarily—prefixed with "utm_"), which don't change anything about the page. But the URL parameters can't be entirely disregarded because sometimes sites, forums in particular, rely on them – consider pages that use an "?id=..." parameter for different pages. Thus some parame

For what it's worth, I made a Firefox extension that will light up whenever the current page has been posted to Hacker News. I find that it helps me in situations like this, and also adds a lot of depth to regular Internet browsing. It uses a giant Bloom filter with every article ever submitted to preserve user privacy. If you normally enjoy being linked back to HN discussion, maybe you will like it! https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button

Thanks for clearing that up, yes I'm not that familiar with Bloom filters, seems like an interesting and useful concept. It could probably (pun intended) be applied to many applications to increase privacy. I like the [1] Workflow file you've made, the comments really help with reading shell code. I'm also amazed you can query 4M entries everyday with BigQuery, I thought that might be fairly expensive to do right? Or is this below a free tier? [1] https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/actions/runs/61...