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The Comments Owl for HN browser extension now hides obvious "AI" items

The Comments Owl for HN browser extension now hides obvious "AI" items

by insin·Apr 3, 2026·1 point·0 comments

AI Analysis

●●SolidNiche GemCozy

Cross-session comment tracking saves HN power users actual time daily.

Strengths
  • Cross-session comment tracking genuinely solves HN thread-following pain
  • Reddit-style folding controls with larger hit targets improve mobile UX
  • User notes and muting work without requiring HN account login
Weaknesses
  • Only useful for Hacker News, extremely narrow audience
  • AI filtering relies on regex patterns requiring manual updates
Category
Target Audience

Hacker News regular readers

Similar To

HN Enhanced · Old Hacker News · Refined Hacker News

Post Description

If you want to give yourself a break from the flood of "AI" items on Hacker News until/unless you feel like reading them, the Comments Owl for Hacker News browser extension now adds a handy toggle to your right-click context menu on the main item list pages (or the extension popup, for mobile browsers) which filters out the most obvious "AI" items by title and site, using (editable) regular expressions which have been tested on the contents of these pages over the last week or so.

The extension's primary functionality is to make it easier to follow comment threads across repeat visits, and catch up with recent comments, but it also offers other UI + UX tweaks, such as muting and noting users, and tweaks to the UI on mobile.

Release notes and screenshots for new functionality:

https://github.com/insin/comments-owl-for-hacker-news/releas...

Similar Projects

Data●●Solid

Opportunities from Hacker News Comments

The site turns HN into an idea-finding feed — tabs for Most Positive/Most Negative and an 'Opportunities' view plus per-story 'View Analysis' make it immediately usable. It's a tidy UX for skimming pain points, but the landing page gives no detail about the extraction accuracy, deduplication, or ranking method, so the real value depends on the unseen NLP and heuristics.

Niche GemSolve My Problem
hnsignal
103mo ago