Show HN: HNRelevant – Add a "related" section to Hacker News
122 points - 05/24/2025
It's been 2 years since the initial release [here](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36102610). The initial version was a very basic prototype which was not available anywhere beyond the GitHub repo. You had to install it as a userscript or load the extension manually.
Since then, it remained simple but better, new features include:
- Improved accuracy by also using comments to help gauge the topic of discussion and the right keywords.
- Published as plugin for more browsers: Chrome, Firefox (including android), and more recently Microsoft Edge.
- Support for narrow screens and mobile devices.
- Added preference controls.
You're here because you love interesting HN discussions but they're often buried away like hidden gems, so give it a try and let me know what you think.
sounds like fun. Perhaps a little too much fun. This sort of algorithmic thing keeps people on social media all day. So be aware folks this can only lose you time working.
(no shade to you, OP. Seems like a cool idea, great that it exists. Just that if there were the option to turn this off on most social media I would probably take it)
It's harsh to compare this to social media personalized feeds when it's fundamentally different.
> if there were the option to turn this off on most social media I would probably take it
This extension has 'manual' mode which only show the search field by default and then you get to fetch results at your command. Very much like an embedded search engine.
Its functionality is more like the book recommendations you come across on goodreads. It only shows when you visit a discussion you're interested in. The nature of this website by itself is quite different from other social media.
But I understand where you're coming from and appreciate you raising awareness.
I think of it like stack overflow's recommended questions feed, which I also turn off. Its fun, but a time sink
So this is a principle you live by to avoid time sinks in any form. Fair.
I'm interested, what makes HN frontpage different? Why spend time on HN but avoid "fun" submissions? To me the extension serves as almost a shortcut to help you find interesting stories you're looking for. I imagine you also closely monitor and limit the time you spend on HN as well?
Do you have recommendation for books or articles that resonate or helped influence you regarding this.
always_imposter
05/24/2025
[dead]
Big plus for supporting Firefox!
There is a compatibility issue with the "Modern for Hacker News. A redesigned web interface for Hacker News." browser extension (I use Firefox). If it is active, I do not see the block with related news.
Can this be fixed?
Interesting. It's ~likely possible.~
I need to investigate what kind of mutations the other extension is doing to HN interface and figure out a way to be compatible with it on top of the native one.
I opened a GitHub issue if you're interested in following the status there: https://github.com/imdj/HNRelevant/issues/24
UPDATE: Based on initial look it seems that the 'Modern for Hacker News' extension completely restructures the DOM and uses its own class names. If someone have suggestions to be compatible with different designs, I'm down to do it.
yep, as a user of Modern for HN i always wondered why they decided to implement it like this; it's not like it adds any crazy features (it's mostly aesthetic). as a result i'm unable to use other great extensions like this one along with it :(
I'm using Modern for Hacker News on Vivaldi (Chrome) and would be interested in this, too.
This is neat. Seems to work on Orion iOS using the firefox extension. Great job.
Awesome to hear. Thank you for giving it a try.
Thought Experiment: Imagine if we had a true "Perma-Web" where something like IPFS was keeping a permanent record of every web page. Then we could have a "Semantic Web" where each webpage maps to a single point (it's Vector Embedding) in higher dimensional space.
This would mean you could do things like:
1) Write a blog post, and then find all other blog posts that were the 'closest to yours' that was ever written.
2) Do basic "Search" in a way that's probably more powerful than even the Google Page-Rank Algo, by being able to look up every web page that exists based on a Cosine Similarity.
It's a shame Web3 didn't really ever "go viral" in a big way, or else we'd be able to do this stuff right now.
Cosine similarity alone can't give you good results. For example, if you want to search specific names or acronyms, cosine similarity won't help much.
People act like embeddings are all you need for search.
Curse of dimensionality also means what you think is the most similar is not necessarily the most similar thing in vector space. See the last Hn discussion on word embeddings for some examples.
I'm not claiming Cosine Similarity can do things it can't do. I'm claiming it's useful to find related pages, in a very powerful way, and I'm correct.
You literally wrote it can be more powerful than Google search.
Because Cosine Similarity is that powerful.
Not the exact implementation you suggest, but similar:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43797896
The idea is to then allow bloggers to link relevant posts so readers can easily traverse the web.
Lots of cool information there that's right in my wheelhouse, that I'll be going thru. thanks!
Nice work, I love extensions which feel like natural... well, extensions of the target site.
can we use this thread to share other useful HN tooling?
mine is here: https://github.com/swyxio/hnx
- displays the latest links from Y Combinator's Hacker News
- Offers a link for submitting the url of the current tab.
- shows previous results when submitting in case someone recently submitted
This is useful - thank you.
I'll try to see if I can make this into a Webfuse extension.
Edit: that was actually pretty easy you can see it here: https://webfu.se/+hn/
I missed this the first time around, that is awesome. A lot of posts here really interest me but a lot do not, this is a great way of hopping between the former. Incidentally, I did something similar for blogs.
Installed and loving it! Super off topic but do you remember what font you used in the extension cover image (e.g on the chrome extension page)? I wasn't able to identify it elsewhere and it seems right up my alley.
This is cool. Love how well it fits in with the site. Will probably keep it on.
This is excellent. Is there a way to filter out low comments dupe posts?
I implemented this and pushed a new release v1.3.0. It should be live on all browser stores within few days.
This is a nice feature will add it next in the coming few days.
It is not working for me on Chrome, even though I have the "Auto Pilot" option set on. What do I need to do to get it to work?
It shouldn't need anything other than the permissions requested on install.
- Visit a submission page like this Show HN.
- Check permissions for the extension. Maybe they were skipped on installation somehow.
- Are you using other extensions for HN? they might obstruct this extension from integrating with the site.
I got your extension to work on Chrome. I was looking for the info from HNRelevant in a different place on the webpage from where it actually was, as most extensions put the added info from the extension on the right side of the webpage instead of below it.
Thank you very much for providing it as a userscript. Most of the extensions can be just that. A simple user editable script.