So I made a quick Chrome extension called HN Retreat. It turns off the comments on the home page of Hacker News.
Aaron Patterson, a notably optimistic hacker I want to be more like when I grow up, actually complained on Twitter about his recent visit to Hacker News. Corey Haines replied with a bookmarklet that disables the second line of each post on the page. I tried it and liked it so much I thought I’d wrap it up. It turned out that I could implement the feature with a tiny snippet of CSS, so the extension doesn’t need any permissions beyond being allowed to run when the user visits Hacker News.
It was fun seeing how fast I could turn around an idea to deployed product in an environment I’d never developed for before. Most of the time was spent on the packaging, so I’ll leave you with the artwork I cooked up.
And in some sort of strange self-referential completeness, here’s the HN comment thread to discuss this extension. Of course, at this writing, it’s empty.