About
Hacker News Plonk is a browser user script that filters and removes stories on Hacker News. It gives you convenient keyboard shortcuts for navigating and processing stories.
I wanted to have a way to ignore certain stories or just kill ones that I'm not interested in. Hacker News Plonk allows you to read down through the front page kind of like an inbox, touching the list just once, deleting, reading or voting on the story.
The term plonk comes from the Usenet news reader days where most user agents were able to filter out postings from certain users via a killfile maintained by the reader.
Installation
Installation varies depending on the browser. Google chrome allows you to just open the .user.js file and it will prompt you to install it as an extension. In Mozilla you will have to install GreaseMonkey first, and then use GreaseMonkey to install the hn.user.js extension. Opera allows you to specify a directory to read user.js scripts from. Specify the directory and just drop hn.user.js there and Opera will find it.
Usage
HN Plonk uses VIM-style keyboard commands in addition to adding three new links at the top of the page.
Menu links
kill
Prompts you to enter a space-separated list of kill filters that operate on the story title. These are treated as regular expressions and may not contain space characters.
plonk
Same as kill, but filters on HN user id. These must be full ids, no partial matches, and these are not treated as regular expressions.
reset
Clears local storage for news.ycombinator.com, effectively clearing all filters.
Key commands
x
Kill an individual story. This stores the story ID in HTML5 local storage. When Hacker News loads, the HN Plonk compares the stories with the kill list and removes any matches from the page.
j/k
Move up and down in the list. The current story will be highlighted with a white background.
enter
Read the story. Browses away from Hacker News.
c
Read comments for the selected story.
v
Vote the story up. This only works in Opera currently due to security restrictions in Chrome/FF.