HNHalfLife

Overview

HNHalfLife is a Greasemonkey script designed to facilitate longer discussions on Hacker News.

Motivation

Hacker News is a great source of news and an even better source of intelligent conversation. Unfortunately, the half-life of discussions are painfully short. Once an article moves from the frontpage, discussions quickly die off.

One potential reason is the website itself. Unlike a traditional forum, HN does not inform you when new comments are added to previously viewed posts. Furthermore, the threaded nature of comments make it nearly impossible to identify new additions. Lastly, the one feature which may help ("saved" stories page) is hidden away under your profile.

This script is an attempt to remedy that problem. HNHalfLife identifies and highlights new comments, as well as relocating the "saved" page to your main navigation toolbar. Hopefully this script helps increase the half-life of valuable HN discussions.

Etc.

Being absolutely new to jQuery (and Javascript), it is likely that some code is inefficient, bulky or ugly. Any improvements or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Images