GitHub - karnagebitcoin/HN-Buddy: Mini Hacker News in Chrome (extension)

1 min read Original article ↗

A sleek Hacker News popup widget with feed tabs, story browsing, theme toggle, and in-popup discussion actions.

HN Buddy screenshot

Features

  • Top, Ask HN, Show HN, Best, New, and Jobs feed tabs.
  • Modern popup experience inspired by mobile/news widget cards.
  • Dark/light mode with persisted preference (chrome.storage.local).
  • Sign-in awareness (uses your existing news.ycombinator.com session cookie).
  • Open comments in-popup and reply directly from the extension.
  • Add top-level comments from popup.
  • Create new posts from popup (link posts and Ask HN style text posts).

Load locally in Chrome

  1. Open chrome://extensions.
  2. Enable Developer mode.
  3. Click Load unpacked.
  4. Select this project folder (the extension root you cloned/downloaded).

Notes on authentication

  • The extension does not handle HN credentials itself.
  • Use the Sign in button to open HN login in a tab.
  • After logging in, reopen the popup and refresh the feed.

Permissions

  • storage: theme + local state persistence.
  • Host permissions:
    • https://news.ycombinator.com/* for auth-aware form actions.
    • https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/* for feed + item reads.