Very cool! I think it's especially great that this is a browser plugin instead of a separate website. It's great when developers make things as easy as possible on users. Nice job, I'll be giving it a try!

Agree! I am an app developer, and I like to think about how to make app developers jobs (and onboarding) easier, and the next thing I will write on that vein I think, already decided with the idea and design mostly formulated, will be a Chrome extension (for Pivotal Tracker users that also connect Bitbucket to a CI, to aid in merge request management)

This example is great, as it is open source and supports Firefox too. Maybe I'll do both browsers as well! This HN friends extension does most if not all of the primitive things that I will need to do, so I'm being sincere and I think it's a great publish.

Love it. Thanks. Even better if tag is visible btw.

I'll work on it!

Funny, I just made something like this today (but more primitive), mostly so that I won't miss Walter Bright's comments.

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name     Hacker News VIP highlighter
    // @version  1
    // @grant    none
    // @match    https://news.ycombinator.com/*
    // ==/UserScript==

    function highlightVIPs() {
      'use strict';

      const VIPs = [
        "WalterBright"
      ];

      const userTags = Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName("hnuser"));

      userTags.forEach(tag => {
        const username = tag.href.split("=")[1];
        if (VIPs.includes(username)) {
          tag.style.fontWeight = 'bold';
        }
      });
    }

    highlightVIPs();

(I'm not much of a JavaScript programmer, but it seems to work.)

Pretty cool! If you want to speed your script up, consider implementing VIPs as a Set() so lookups are approx. O(1) rather than O(n).

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Probably won't see much speedup with one VIP? b^)

I currently have nine usernames in the array (removed all except Walter from the comment for brevity and privacy), but it's still a pretty small `n`. I don't know at what `n` the set becomes faster than the array, but I haven't noticed any performance impact from the script, and I can't be bothered even googling how to profile it in the browser.

To be fair, Walter is a pretty solid choice. He's a successful businessman and extremely technically smart. There are quite a handful of similar people on here, who are very successful and intelligent and whose comments are always well thought out and insightful. (I want to be one of them one day but my career is just budding, so only time will tell.)

It almost makes me think HN should have a related feature, where people can universally stand out, separate from the leaderboard (link at the bottom). But knowing HN's philosophy, I know this would be against the spirit of the humble-meritocracy they're trying to build, and would do more harm than good.

In fact, I even wonder if this HN-Friends extension is going to have an adverse affect on its users. Right now the usernames are (probably intentionally) understated, to draw more attention to the content than the author. If we notice the person, we already have a bias not only toward their comment, but to read their comment before anyone else's. This goes against the meritocracy that I love about HN. But I also wonder how many thread discussion I had where I missed the context of who is talking, and the direction could have gone so much differently because of it.

And even more importantly, I love and encourage this kind of innovation, and don't in any way want to discourage you or anyone from making clever things like this!

What exactly is the b^) face? Smily staring cyclops? If it's an emotion, it escapes me.

Looks like a side profile, with glasses

Could be a misspelled B^) which looks more like a smiley with a nose.

http://symbolhound.com/?q=b%5E%29

If you're the kind of person who wants this, you may also be interested in my RSS feed of good HN commenters: http://hnblogs.thume.net/

Would be neat if you could tag people with different colors, to indicate like/dislike, or to indicate the primary topic that you have encountered them talking about in the past.

I would think that would be generally harmful for the point of thoughtful discussion as you are essentially labeling a person from the get-go with a certain bias.

I think it could actually have the opposite effect — that someone you've tagged at one point as someone you disagree with later posts something that you agree with (or vice versa).

I'd like an extension to remove usernames entirely. I would rather my opinions about commentary be less biased, not more.

Seems useful, does anyone know of a similar thing for Safari or as a userscript that works in Tampermonkey (across all browsers) or Stylish?

this is just like reddit RES that's pretty cool

I was meaning to write my own userscript / chrome extension to show a button if there's a reddit-thread with same URL trending in hackernews, so you can click and go to those comments. It would say how many comments there are, and pull up the one with the most upvotes/comments within a 6 month timespan.

Haven't gotten around to it yet unless someone else wants to make it

I made one for my favorite notetaking app though, that I use fairly often. I made a write up of things I learned to write it

http://vincentmtang.com/2018/06/29/adventures-in-writing-a-t...