I enjoy reading Hacker News, as I'm sure the rest of you do too. So, I've been building a Firefox extension that integrates with this site and helps to submit web pages that haven't been submitted before.

The basic idea of the extension is that it searches whatever web page you are currently on against Hacker News. If no one has submitted that page, the extension button will give you a submission link. That way, if you come across a neat answer on Quora or Stackoverflow, or a neat article on nytimes or wsj, you won't have to manually search it on Hacker news to find out if it has been submitted before.

The other nice feature is being able to browse by site. What I mean by that is if you were to install the extension, navigate to nytimes.com, and then click the button, you would get submissions that matched that url. You can sort them by date or by comments, and page through the results.

Here is the code: https://github.com/mmcru/hackernews-helper

Here is the addons page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-helper/

(disclaimer: I'm still waiting for Mozilla to review my addon, which could be a while, so the second link could be taken down at any time if they find anything that they don't like)

I'm interested to see what people think of this functionality and how it could be improved. Of course, the project is open source, so feel free to take the code and adjust it as you see fit. I'm still fixing minor bugs; but I was excited to see other people's thoughts, so I thought now would be a good time to submit this here and perhaps find some inspiration for improving on the project.

Thanks!