Hacker Smacker - Friend and foe writers on Hacker News

Synopsis

Hacker Smacker helps you identify quality authors and filter out obnoxious commenters on Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every author's name and you can choose to either friend or foe them.

If you friend people, and they also use Hacker Smacker, you'll see all of your friend's friends and foes. This helps you identify commenters that you want to read as you quickly scan a comment thread.

I've found that this reduces the time I spent on Hacker News, as I can glance at long comment threads and just find the good stuff.

Hacker Smacker is directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system. Hacker Smacker is also open-source and is available on GitHub.

Field Observations

A standard neutral orb next to a Hacker News comment — A friend or foe has not yet been made. The standard orb.

The orb expanding to show friend and foe options — Choosing a friend or foe. Animation provides a nice slide out.

Multiple comments showing a mix of friends and foes — A blend of friends and foes illustrating the transformative experience of Hacker Smacker.

Get the Extension

Chrome Web Store

Firefox Add-ons

Mac App Store

or, install manually

Chrome

Download .crx

Drag into chrome://extensions

Firefox

Download .xpi

Drag into Firefox to install

Safari

Download .safariextz

Double-click to install

Great comments to start your collection

Background

Hacker Smacker was built to learn how FoaF (Friend of a Friend) works. The idea is that not only do you want to surface content from your friends, but if you chose your friends well, they can help you surface more great content by highlighting comments from their friends.

The impetus for building a small system where the primary goal is simply to quickly show relationships was that I wanted to build the same system for NewsBlur, a visual RSS feed reader with intelligence. The backend is built using Redis sets and CoffeeScript/Node.js. NewsBlur's social layer, which was built immediately after this project, uses a very similar backend.

Learning how to build this project was the main reason, as I am now able to bring this technique to other projects.

Appendix

Installation

Hacker Smacker is divided into two parts:

Client: the extension that gets injected into Hacker News and reports back with friends and foes.
Server: the Node.js/Express.js/Redis system that keeps track of all friends/foes and friend of a friend and foe of a friend relationships.

You can find the repo on GitHub: github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker

You don't need to install the server unless you want to run your own private version of Hacker Smacker. If you do decide to install your own server, you're on your own.

Acknowledgements

Mihai Parparita mihaip@chromium.org — Help with fixing the issue around browsers not allowing a JSONP AJAX request to modify the page, as it is sandboxed and cannot alter the page using arbitrary JavaScript (the JSONP) not included with the extension itself.
Greg Brockman greg@gregbrockman.com — Helped design the authentication system, working through the security model to ensure that friend/foe relationships could be stored and verified without exposing user credentials.

None of the data stored by Hacker Smacker is sold or used in any way except for determining friend/foe and friend/foe of a friend relationships between authors.

License

MIT License

Why the chair?

Some people express their enthusiasm for colleagues by friending them. Others, famously, express it by hurling furniture across the room. The chair is a nod to one such enthusiast who shall remain nameless, but who once demonstrated that the pen is mightier than the sword, and the chair is mightier than both. Besides, a launched laptop makes everyone reconsider.