Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

by latchkey • 4 months ago

147 159 4 months ago

I use refined Hacker news Extension.

https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#highlights

It might be beneficial to tell me what the difference between these two can be? A lot of the features from my first glance (I can be totally wrong though) are within HN refined.

I would really appreciate a short summary of differences. Personally I am really happy by HN refined though so kudos to @plibither8

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Refined hasn't received an update in 4 years.

https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news/issues/135...

I used refined for years as well. Great product, but the underlying code was meh, and the author abandoned it. If you're using refined today, you're experiencing a lot of bugs as the HN DOM has changed over time.

I maintained my own fork for a long time but finally motivated myself to try out AI assisted coding and this is what came out of it. It isn't a port, it is a clean rewrite from the ground up.

I took every feature that I enjoyed from refined, re-implemented it from scratch, with a totally different architecture that allows much more control over the DOM and runs a whole lot faster.

I had AI write hundreds of of unit tests, so that we can make sure that bugs don't appear in the future. I also fixed a whole ton of edge cases along the way.

The entire deployment, all the way to the browser stores, is fully automated with CI/CD, so that we know that the supply chain is safe.

In other words, you might as well migrate. If there is something missing that you enjoyed, file an issue, or even better... a PR.

smcleod3• 4 months ago

I tried contacting the author to see if he would open source it but he's gone dark and doesn't seem to really exist on the Internet anymore. So I grabbed the source code and modernised it, added additional feature and it's what I've been using ever since. I haven't open sourced it out of respect for the original author however the software does not actually have any license that prevents it so I have been considering what the best approach might be (any ideas?).

*Edit: Whoops! I was confusing refinedHN with modernHN (https://www.modernhn.com)

Leftium4• 4 months ago

I just tried switching from a slightly more updated fork of Refined Hacker News (2025)[1]

One thing I miss is the orange mark identifying the OP of a post.

[1] https://github.com/alexferrari88/refined-hacker-news

lagniappe• 4 months ago

AI-assisted, not AI-slop
AI is used as a pair programmer to speed up implementation and review, but architecture and final decisions are human. Tested, not vibe coded
The extension has extensive unit test coverage, quality checks, and automation through CI/CD. This project is intentionally not vibe coded.

I felt non-specific mixed feeling reading this. Seemed unnecessary to say that so prominently twice. Be confident. If you do a good job it shows in more ways than the code.

Isolated_Routes• 4 months ago

This is helpful! Thank you

latchkey49• 4 months ago

:heart:

cobbman• 4 months ago

I want hacker news UX to stay as it is, mostly, but these are features I'd welcome.

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Thanks. My feeling as well.

dang7• 4 months ago

What features would you welcome?

latchkey49• 4 months ago

All the features I've added to this extension.

But if you want to pick one: Inline replies.

Right now, I have to do a ton of magic to make that happen in order to work around your auth flow. Namely, pulling the auth token out of the other page and then having to keep track of it in session storage.

I could delete a whole lot of code if that was just built in.

riidom2• 4 months ago

Also "unread comment highlighting" would be so good to have.

minouye• 4 months ago

It would be nice to flag who the OP is in the story comments. Provides helpful context, esp. if they posted their own project.

Here's one potential implementation:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-maker-badge/khod...

niyazpk• 4 months ago

- Better formatting for text: (1) bullet points (2) markdown-like links (3) Slightly different background for code.

- More "sub-reddits". We already have Ask/Show HN. We probably can add a couple more to keep everything organized.

- Option to auto-collapse comments threads deeper than X levels by default. When they are all open by default like today, only the top comment and its children get more of the eyeballs.

prawn• 3 months ago

I like how on Reddit you can click to the right of a comment header (username, timestamp, etc) to collapse that subthread. Gives you a much bigger hit target than just [-]. Also saves putting [-] over near the up/down arrows for consistency of positioning, a decision which could otherwise just create trouble on mobile.

sgbeal2• 3 months ago

What features would you welcome?

1. Dark mode

2. (Now that i'm seeing it in action for the first time) inline responding. That said: this increases the weight of the page considerably (in JS code), so delegating it to the various third-party apps is arguably the better approach for this specific platform. (But now that i've seen it in use here i'll have to add this to the Fossil SCM's forum at some point, as this is sooooo much more comfortable.)

maxloh• 4 months ago

I built a Stylus theme to make Hacker News' UI more modern.

Some screenshots:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mon-jai/modern-hacker-news...

Repo:

https://github.com/mon-jai/modern-hacker-news

latchkey49• 4 months ago

This is exactly what I don't want my extension to become. I don't want a new UX, I want the existing UX to be enhanced.

altairprime3• 4 months ago

Latchkey, would you be comfortable with HN adopting your dark mode styling as a user choice someday, if they came around to liking it? I really like it and I think it’s in the spirit of the site.

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Thanks! A lot of it is AI with my own input, but I think it did a great job.

The code is all open source and people can do with it what they want. It is GPLv3, but I'd special license it to them as MIT without question.

altairprime3• 4 months ago

Ah, oh well. Thanks!

zvr• 4 months ago

Well, if it's AI-generated, it's not really copyrighted by you and you cannot license it under GPL, since you did not write it.

Nice work, nevertheless, and useful!

tomComb• 4 months ago

That would be great! Please do.

satvikpendem7• 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure that will never happen, as it would've happened already by now. People can and do already use custom CSS or Dark Reader for dark mode.

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Or you can just use my extension, heh.

dang7• 4 months ago

Some things have taken us 15 years and then pow they happened

QQ00• 4 months ago

custom CSS is the way. I don't believe HN will ever adopt dark mode. But the site is so stripped down it's easy to write custom dark mode for it.

rcarmo2• 3 months ago

It does not work in embedded browsers inside RSS readers

andrecarini• 4 months ago

For those that prefer userstyles, I made a dark theme a while ago https://github.com/andrecarini/hn-dark-mode/blob/main/hn-dar...

Tom (the moderator) said he was looking into getting it appended to the HN's CSS. I haven't asked them about it since ages ago, wonder if they dropped the idea.

Novosell• 4 months ago

Did you ai generate the Chrome and Firefox logo? That isn't what they look like, or have ever looked like, from what I know.

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Yes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

DrBenCarson• 4 months ago

…why?

ipsum2• 4 months ago

It looks pretty good! I'm using it now and its a meaningful improvement to the existing site.

Out of curiosity, why did you make a new Github account for the extension instead of developing it on your own account?

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Thanks!

Because I see this becoming bigger than me and a separate organization made sense. There is a super thin backend component right now too. There is the potential to also add in some extra features that require a server/db. I'm kind of inspired by the atuin model of things.

I've got a LONG list of features I'd like to implement over time.

xydac• 4 months ago

its funny how us developers build varied UX, but nothing beats the simplicity of HN's default experience. quick and bloat free.

latchkey49• 4 months ago

That's the beauty of this extension, it keeps things simple.

hyperhello• 4 months ago

I would actually like a setting for less. I don’t like upvote downvote social dynamics. How about giving me a mode for a simple conversation by time, without the hierarchy.

greenpizza13• 4 months ago

I can't figure out how to toggle to Light Mode (maybe it uses the system setting?). HN is something I prefer to be in Light Mode but everything else in dark. Gonna remove until this is configurable.

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Defaults to system. The toggle is in the top right corner of the navbar next to your karma.

Klonoar• 4 months ago

What on earth is that Firefox logo...?

latchkey49• 4 months ago

FIXED

ramon156• 4 months ago

Why Install Orange Juice?
Because Hacker News is great, but repetitive UI friction adds up. Orange Juice keeps the original feel while removing the things that cost you time every day.

That does not convince me to use your app? This is like calling someone's Kia shit and instead telling them to buy a Tesla, but just stating that it's better.

I'll stick to HN, thanks.

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Sure. What language would convince you?

UPDATE: I've changed the copy, it is pushing right now.

satvikpendem7• 4 months ago

To me, that doesn't sound like your analogy at all. It'd be true if the extension for example redirected an HN thread to a reddit thread of the same posted URL, ie a replacement of the original, but the extension simply adds features to the existing site. There have been extensions like this available for years, like Refined HN which this is based off, as well as many third party HN clients. Therefore I think you should try it before judging so harshly.

wesz7• 4 months ago

The improvements are nice, that's for sure. But i checked out github and it looks like overengineered ai slop, you could implement all the features with 1/10 of the code. But again, nobody cares nowadays which makes me sad. You even generated chrome/firefox logos using ai...

latchkey49• 4 months ago

How is it over-engineered slop? Happy to improve things, but I thought it was pretty clean.

wesz7• 4 months ago

You claim to have 30+ years of webdev experience and yet 2 MEGABYTES of javascript only for those features doesn't feel/look wrong to you?

fooster• 4 months ago

Why don't you do that? Instead of doing that you unfairly critisize the guy that gave away his time and effort on something which no-one is forcing you to use. Shame.

wesz7• 4 months ago

Oh man, he must have gave away so much time prompting ai agent. Shame on me:)

satvikpendem7• 4 months ago

"Tested, not vibe coded" yet you mention the AI has written all the tests. This extension may not be vibe coded but it's close to that, it seems. Regardless it seems to work well, I replaced the older Refined Hacker News extension with this, which seems like where you initially sourced the code from as the features are very similar, 1:1 even for some.

I also use this extension HNRelevant (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hnrelevant) which shows a list of similar posts, you might want to add that as an optional feature as well.

What's the tech stack, pure TS? You also might want to migrate from Biome to oxc, I did recently and it plays well with Vite+ (or just move to Vite+) directly.

Noticed a bug, once I edit my own comment and go back to the main post, I show up as [op] not you. Also I should be able to edit my post inline not be moved to a separate page.

latchkey49• 4 months ago

It is heavily coded with AI, but I'm also a 30+ year web developer. I'm not just one shotting all of the code, I'm reading it too. I'm feeling like it is giving me super powers.

See the thread below about refined, which hasn't received an update in 4 years.

I have HNRelevant on my list of features that I've been collecting.

I tried oxc and didn't like it as much as biome. They admittedly aren't as good at formatting yet. The real winner here is ultracite.

satvikpendem7• 4 months ago

Sounds good. Another bug or quirk, with Refined, I was able to reply and then tab once to the reply button and hit enter. Now with the "HN's approach to comments and site guidelines." text I can't do that, "comments" and "guidelines" are links so I have to tab three times to get to the reply button which is annoying. Omit that text or change the tab order (this is possible in HTML with the tabindex attribute, just make the reply button higher priority).

Also add ctrl/cmd-enter support to submit the reply.

Also this orange border when clicking a comment or link on the front page is a bit annoying, especially when it doesn't seem to actually do anything (it's not a tab select style, that shows up as the browser's normal style), and it seems to persist.

etothet• 4 months ago

I noticed this as well and came here to comment about it. The term "vibe coding" is becoming quite overloaded.

odysseus2• 4 months ago

How about a Safari/Mobile Safari extension so iPhone users can use it?

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Agreed. Unfortunately, the browser extension tool that I use, wxt [0], doesn't support Safari yet. It seems there are some work arounds, but I haven't gotten to it yet. PR's welcome, of course. =)

[0] https://wxt.dev/guide/essentials/publishing.html#safari

odysseus2• 4 months ago

Is it just:

pnpm wxt build -b safari xcrun safari-web-extension-converter .output/safari-mv2

And that’s it? Or is there some hidden extra work involved.

librasteve• 4 months ago

dang.

just shedding feedbin & reeder (paid)

it's 'hide read stories' for me & darkmode

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Thanks! How about inline replies? That's my favorite.

gitgud• 4 months ago

Another feature idea for you:

There’s an extension that I loved called “Proven” (now archived) which uses keybase.io proofs to show other proven accounts next to hn users

https://github.com/dschep/proven

Also about this:

Mermaid Diagram Rendering

Honest question, how often are people posting raw mermaid diagrams in comments here?… I’ve never seen one

latchkey49• 4 months ago

Is there something else that replaces keybase proofs? I still see a ton of people, including yourself with keybase in their profile, but is anyone still seeing that used?

Nobody uses it because it wasn't supported. I had started off doing images, but their CSP policies prevent an extension from embedding images into the dom. SVG is still game on though. That said, I've seen a bunch of people try to create their own ascii art diagrams and wouldn't it be nice to have them just rendered as svg?

darepublic• 4 months ago

I would like to see users clustered by their political and programming axes of belief

ggm• 4 months ago

I would like to see this projected into a "lawful-neutral" meme template

tptacek• 3 months ago

When someone who programs mostly in Rust responds to someone who programs mostly in Go I would like an animated bouncing icon that says "fight! fight! fight!" and when I press it it should leave a comment that instigates a fight, like "Serde is not really all that good".

xpe• 3 months ago

What is the correct pronunciation of serde? Fight amongst yourselves. /s

redlewel• 4 months ago

Not bad I do like the transparency on AI usage. So many projects omit this completely and its difficult not to assume someone just claude coded it in an evening to farm clicks. But this looks nice I'll probably check it out

latchkey49• 4 months ago

All day long, I read about people vibe coding, so I decided to open my mind and try it out myself and see if I could do some sort of mix between my own skills as a life long web developer and whatever the kids are doing these days. Mostly because I have a strong belief that AI itself won't take our jobs away, but people who know AI will.

What I found out is that I'm never going back to a world where I don't integrate AI into my entire coding workflow. All the way from writing documentation to committing code. It makes things way more enjoyable.

I truly enjoyed creating this whole project, it scratches my itch, and I hope that it continues to grow and be maintained over many years. I have another web project that's going on 7 years now and gets 88k downloads a month [0]. This is my passion, I'm here until I die, and even that project is now benefitting from AI.

[0] https://github.com/lookfirst/mui-rff

scratchyone• 3 months ago

This is super nice, thank you for including an AI disclosure. I would probably normally avoid something like this bc I would be considered by how much code oversight there is. Very nice to know that it's overseen properly by a human. Installed it and it's quite nice!!! great work :)

It would also be nice to be able to hide the checkbox it adds to the homepage. also disabling show focus box doesnt actually seem to work?

mhitza• 4 months ago

Pretty cool. This is the glitchy userscript I use on Firefox mobile[1] (with screenshot) to make tap targets bigger and move navigation at the bottom of the page + collapsed.

[1] https://gist.github.com/mhitza/0956d7e2c11d3102cbd4cba7f6d06...

notatoad• 4 months ago

i like some of the things this does, but pretty much all of this is not UX improvements, it's UX opinions.

as a personal project to make HN better for you, i guess it's cool. but making every link open in a new tab so my back button never works is definitely not for me.

latchkey49• 3 months ago

That's good feedback, I can change that to a preference.

UPDATE: implemented as a preference that you can turn off. just click the app icon in the extensions list.

https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/releases...

nikolay4• 3 months ago

So many extensions and services, because YCombinator cannot have a part-time employee working on such an important community:

* https://hncompanion.com/

* http://oj-hn.com/

* https://hnrelevant.imadij.com/

* https://hnreplies.com/

latchkey49• 3 months ago

Why hire when you can get it for free?

nikolay4• 3 months ago

Because it's a mess. So many extensions are fighting each other because HN has long stagnated. There are so many AI startups with YCombinator that can rewrite it in a modern language and make it a POSITIVE example.

tomhow2• 3 months ago

Dan and I are full time YC employees and other engineers at YC do plenty to keep HN running. HN’s software is continually developed to handle growth in traffic, along with abuse, spam, and (particularly recently) bots and generated content. The lack of new UI features is not due to lack of resources/investment but because it’s always been the HN way to maintain a minimalist design and for the content and discussions to be the primary feature.

nikolay4• 3 months ago

"Minimalist" in 2026 is different than what it used to be in the '90s.

paddim8• 3 months ago

I think the minimalist design is good. But hasn't the font size decreased over time in practice? When HN was first created, the average monitor had a much lower resolution, which made text appear larger. Now I think it's quite difficult to read compared to other websites. Obviously it's easily solved by zooming, but I think it would make sense to adjust for the change in resolutions over the years

swed420• 3 months ago

Also, my favorite:

https://hckrnews.com

eviks• 3 months ago

That's not the reason, it's mainly because the current awful interface is a distinguished mark of pride, so there is a noticeable resistance to changing that, so it's easier to not change

wackget• 3 months ago

Lots of nice tweaks, but the most important is missing: the ability to move the collapse comment buttons (`[-]`) to the left of commenters' usernames. Doing this makes the collapse buttons all aligned with each other, making them far easier to click in succession. "Comments Owl for Hacker News" extension does this I believe.

oersted• 3 months ago

The grey bar on the left that the extension adds also collapses the comments. They are aligned vertically and they have a bigger clickable area than [-].

conorcleary• 3 months ago

but then the upvote button is too close to the collapse thread, plus, why make it easier to hide discussion? => makes it easier for scripts to automate by visual/x,y placement

latchkey49• 3 months ago

Thanks for this suggestion, but I agree with the other commenters.

beatrice111• 3 months ago

omg this is amazing, finally there is someone noticing that the ux of hn needs to be improved...

rcarmo2• 3 months ago

Dark mode!

latchkey49• 3 months ago

Yes!

sgbeal2• 3 months ago

This is pretty darn cool. i've not yet seen any mention of one particular quirk so will point it out: on Firefox it flashes between "normal" and "upgraded" mode pretty starkly (A) when switching pages and (B) when tapping "add comment" (which is apparently done via page reload rather than the HN API). i've no clue whether an extension/app has any influence over the timing of that so cannot suggest how it might be resolved, but will say that it's particularly jarring.

latchkey49• 3 months ago

Honestly, FF has become a total shit show. Debugging something like that is a real PITA.

syngrog662• 3 months ago

my top wishlist of HN features:

* personal ability to mute/block any account

* BONUS: and/or delegate above decision to list-providing service at given externally-hosted URL

* intelligently autowrap text of long lines, like its 2026 (heck like 1997)

krapp3• 3 months ago

personal ability to mute/block any account

Plenty of browser plugins that do this. I like HN Comments Owl.

syngrog662• 3 months ago

browser plugins are an anti-pattern. and security risk. less depedencies are better. all modern social media platforms, including HN, should have out-of-box way to mute/block and delegate to service as well. There are often categories of folks/accounts I likely dont want to see/hear from or have my content exposed to them where I can help it. HN has demonstrated itself to have a toxic subset in their community, as elsewhere.

e40• 3 months ago

Octal on iOS is the best. Been using it for years and I have never found a better reader for hn.

Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

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