I just finished up a simple Hacker News extension for Google Chrome. It allows you to view the front-page stories as well as submit your current tab. Let me know what you think and I'd like to hear your ideas for future updates.
Simultaneous left+right click counts as middle click for me on Ubuntu, I'm not sure if it's like that everywhere. So maybe you don't even need a scroll wheel.
I'm just trying it out in Windows for the first time (on my work PC) and I realize that it works a little better on my Mac. On the mac version of Chrome, when you click on a link within the extension popup, it opens up a new tab in the background and leaves the popup open. But in the Windows version, the popup closes every time you click a link. That's annoying.... I'll look into it later.
One thing I could see useful is to get to comments for your current tab. Let's say you're reading something and you would like to see if there's any discussion around that on HN and if so, get to it. If not, get the option of submitting it.
I also remember that there was a bookmarklet that was adding links for each story to open a split window with the article on the left and the comments on the right. I liked it, though I lost it and never really looked for it.
I think what he's asking for (if I understand correctly) is a way for the plugin to check the page I'm currently on, say it's a mixergy blog post or something, and determine if that blog post has already been submitted to HN and if there are any comments about it. That would be sweet, that way I'd know right away without having to google search (site:news.ycombinator.com) for the url, and if there' already a thread I can join in the discussion quickly.
I would love to do something like that, but I don't think Hacker News provides any sort of API for accomplishing this. I'll look into it, though. Thanks!
Possibly better way to do it is to make a content script (or a greasemonkey script - same thing?) that rewrites links in HN's page such that when you open them in a new tab, you can keep track of the corresponding comments link, and then provide a Page Action that shows up in the location bar, clicking on which, will open up the comments page for the link.
This won't work where you directly happen to go to a site that was also on HN, but will work for the 80% use-case where you are going to a site from the HN front page itself.
This is not the best place to talk about that but:
As far as I know, HN doesn't have this capability indeed. However the script could scrape a certain number of the pages (it goes up to seven). You can easily match the linked URL with the current URL. I believe a Chrome plugin can have a list of remote sites it can do XmlHttpRequest on, no?
Yeah, I'm using it. I was replying specifically to the comments in this thread about the "Submit Current Link" feature making it easier to post links. Sorry for being unclear.
I agree that the numbers are pretty useless, but I decided to keep them to match the Hacker News theme. Maybe in the future, I'll add a second theme and let you choose between them in the options. Thanks for your input.
The source code can be found here: http://github.com/adamalbrecht/hacker-news-for-chrome