That was the toughest lift of all! Firefox and Chrome extensions were easy, just had to go through a quick review. Apple rejected the safari extension 4-5 times and wanted me to make changes to the metadata and even questioned the extension itself. Took a lot of back and forth to get the safari extension approved.

Yea, I'm not blaming anyone for not providing one (Especially as you have to pay the developer fee if you don't already have an account for other reasons) so it was a pleasant surprise!

While I have our attention: Is there any plans on making the hacker smacking profile not public?

Hah, I was just going to do a post of thanks for providing a Firefox extension and not sticking to Chrome only!

Sadly I don't think I'm going to use it. I'm the kind that prefers to read only the comments and not the names attached to them.

Hacker Smacker doesn't mean you ignore your foes. Their comments are now labeled with the tiny red orb, giving you acknowledgement of how you've felt about them in the past.

I've used this extension for the past 15 years and I can say that I love seeing foes show up in threads. I still read their comments, but I know going into it that I can probably skip it after the first sentence if I recognize that it's more of what I disliked about them in the first place.

This is a time saving browser extension, freeing me up to scan more HN threads. I now often scan a thread to see if there's any friends, foes, or FoaFs inside.

I have not found that to be the case. I have over 150 commenters on my Hacker Smacker foe list and I have only found once or twice that somebody who goes into the red bucket deserves to go into the green bucket.

Now the way I use the friend/foe system of labeling may be different than others, and it's a personal decision for how you choose to label commenters. But the way I do it, if somebody has an opinion that puts them on my red list, that's great to know, because when I see them comment elsewhere I now have the context for why I feel the way I do about them.

I made some changes and the extension now recognizes if you can't hover and will allow you to tap to show the orbs before selecting one. It now works on mobile browsers with extensions.

Hah, at least I'm consistent.

There's na open issue to address this exact need. I haven't figured out a good compromise yet, but an option to include symbols would be good.

https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker/issues/3

The layout doesn't shift down. It only moves the meta information to the right of the user name over a little bit.

Right, that's layout shift. The things to the right are clickable and I'm often in the middle of trying to click them when it shifts. It might be possible to "reserve" the space with CSS earlier in the page load?

Ahh, I have you green orbed, and I recognize your username from NB. The system works!

What do you gain from this?

I mean the entire extension is about this, but I can quickly scan this thread (or others) and spot my favored commenters.

Yes, and you just found that you "favor" WorldMaker, and therefore ... read the suggestion "Follow/Distance?" more eagerly?

If that suggestion (which I suppose you'll ignore anyway, but maybe it inspires some other thought in you) came from a foe, then ... you'd be directed away from paying attention to it? Because you've incontinently flipped a colored orb at some point in the past, and now you're going to use that statistical information to direct you to where the most inspiring ideas mostly are? I see.

But maybe this is not very high quality information in the first place (the information that you provide for yourself by flicking an orb)?

Thanks to the HN moderators for re-posting this after I posted this a few days ago. I only notice now that it's on the front page.

Happy to answer any questions. Let me tell you, I've really enjoyed having those writers that I like highlighted on this comment thread because it makes it very easy to scan it.

I think it's important to remember that this is not about hiding writers you disagree with. It's simply about making it so that you can read more Hacker News threads and quickly scanning the comments, teasing out those writers that you agree with. It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with, if anything, to reinforce your opinion of them.

Is that what it's about?

> identify quality authors and filter out obnoxious commenters

> not about hiding writers you disagree with

> It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with

[But] > to reinforce your opinion of them. [Did you misspeak here?]

> this reduces the time I spent on Hacker News

> find the good stuff based on people you trust

This is very confused.

* Do we want to avoid ideas that we disagree with?

* Do we want to avoid authors we've labelled as annoying? (This is about meta-level bad ideas, about how to interact.)

* Do we want to avoid meta-level ideas that we disagree with?

* What if your friends disagree about who their friends and enemies are?

* What it they don't disagree, isn't that creepy? Echo chamber much?

* Is it right to pre-empt your own interest by labelling material before reading it? I don't know!

Seems to me that rational pre-filtering should be along subtle, personal, ever-changing lines, and you should constantly be deciding on the spot based on complex information including your current mood and dyspepsia. How should interest work? You may start reading a thing and decide "this is not for me" (or "this is a troll or a bot"). Or with a tool like this one you may carry out the same process faster, and more crudely, using less information and less serendipity. So you're encouraging people to be in a rush and make more superficial choices instead of mining for the gold. On the other hand, maybe they are in a rush and need to be like that.

You don't avoid anything, this simply helps highlight commenters in a long thread.

So that you can not avoid the ones you don't like, huh.

i clicked to fast. "please leave the link in your about section and it'll allow..." it will do what? i don't want to put ands there. what was the function of leaving it?

HN caches the profile, sometimes it takes a few minutes for Hacker Smacker to get the latest data. It keeps checking until it works.

Might as well just have one ambiguous orb, then.

For a further improvement, let the extension set some orbs automatically at random, to encourage discoveries. Then upgrade this to all the orbs.