Links in Hacker News Comments

TL;DR I created this Links in Hacker News’s comments page. This page allows you to browse Hacker News ..in a different way.

When I browse Hacker News, I usually glance at the titles of the submissions on the front page to see if the topics are interesting to me. … Then I dive right in to the comments, because I find that the comments on hacker news are often time even more interesting the original submission. Links posted in the comments are sometimes better too. So I build this page https://hnlinks.tentativeknowledge.com to support my HN’s browsing habit.

The frontpage shows links from Hacker News’s frontpage. There’s a More link at the bottom to load more links. You know, just like Hacker News. So what’s the values added ?

Behind each Hackernews submission there are 2 links:

1. Number of links found
2. Orginial submission on Hacker News (HN)

Number of links found toggles the list of URLs that are posted by commenters in the discussion. Each link has a ..link back to the original comment that posts it.

I’ve found that this actually gives a good overview of the main discussion that is going on. This also helps me find more curated links quickly!

In the example screenshot above, the original submission is a Smithsonian magazine page that has photos of snowflakes. The page shows me the following collection of links:

• An youtube video to explain why snowflakes look like they are - very interesting !
• An Wired article that shows snowflakes under microscope
• And more links to related Hacker News dicussions in the past !

Cool! I find this way of browsing Hacker News is very useful to me that I actually prefer to the original site :)