I love it. I wonder if it's possible to do this by proxying requests to HN instead of a Chrome extension -- that way I don't have to bloat the browser's start-up time and don't have to "worry" about this extension spying on other websites, even though I realize it's unlikely, it's good principle to not have to give this permission.
It's possible, but as I mentioned in another comment, building this as an extension has some added benefits [1].
> that way I don't have to bloat the browser's start-up time and don't have to "worry" about this extension spying on other websites, even though I realize it's unlikely
No need to worry about that, as it's limited by the permissions specified in the extension manifiest. So this extension can only access news.ycombinator.com and extensionpay.com to facilitate the Pro upgrade.
I wish this were more of an SPA with an account system/db of it's own, I'd even pay for a subscription (small one). I'd basically like there to be a mobile app and desktop version that no matter where I read an article, it's marked read. I use materialize and hckrnews now, if both of these could keep track of the same bookmarks, visited links, and maybe allow note taking or creating groups of saved things, that'd be awesome. Also notifications and a messaging system like reddit has would be cool...in fact I just want a redditized HN experience lol.
> it's good principle to not have to give this permission.
Well consider that when you go to a proxied version of HN, you're essentially giving an opaque server "permission" to view all your traffic it sends to HackerNews... but you can't verify what it's doing with that
At least this extension states exactly what permissions it needs, and I can inspect it and see what it's doing...
Depends on what you mean by "proxying". Everything you do (serving a Single-Page Application or requesting HN by backend, processing it's HTML and sending the content to your own frontend) will take traffic away from news.ycombinator.com and to another domain - which comes with it's own set of dreadful scenarios.
There used to be (and still are) things like https://mreidsma.github.io/bookmarklets/jquerify.html which allow to inject JavaScript on click (and thus would make it possible to transform that site), but I gave it a shot and HN is set up to disallow this:
Refused to load the script 'https://code.jquery.com/jquery.min.js' because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://www.google.com/recaptcha/ https://www.gstatic.com/recaptcha/ https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/". Note that 'script-src-elem' was not explicitly set, so 'script-src' is used as a fallback.
Ah, mostly the same for me! (I'm very happy with it this way and wouldn't expect the site to change). But I do this on a couple of other text-heavy sites also, but not many.
So often a zoom will break complicated UI layouts and their JS interactions, so I appreciate the simplicity of this site allowing my user agent to customise my experience and still have it work.
> But this is the good thing about it, people can extend it as they wish.
You would think that but no. The HTML is so full of tables everywhere that it's not that easy to do anything creative with it. I'm pretty sure that's why some features such as collapsing comments took so long to be implemented (and not because "not collapsing forces you to read")
But this is the good thing about it, people can extend it as they wish.