One of the interesting things about HN, given its current size now, is that all of the submissions end up in the same bucket -- there are no categories, tagging, or sub-HNs.

I'm not going to like everything I see. But if I wasn't open to at least glancing at the new stuff that comes in, I'd miss a lot of cool things. If I really don't like it, though, it bugs me if it sticks to the top of the front page.

So I made a technical solution to a psychological problem. Rather than give myself the opportunity to be a jerk, here is a small Chrome extension that lets you hide submissions by clicking on their number on the left. They'll stay muted forever, or until you click the unmute link that it adds to the bottom of the page.

Screenshot of the effect it has: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2316004/hnmute.png

Link to .crx Chrome/Chromium extension: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2316004/hnm.crx