I use Edbrowse all the time, including to read Hacker News. You can add custom functions into ~/.ebrc, and I have one to search for the next post on an HN page, or the "More" link, if there are no more posts on the current page.

    function:hnn {
        /^\({} \|{More}\)
    }

Edbrowse supports JavaScript, but it doesn't work very well, so I turn it off at startup, and only turn it on if I think it might make a page work better (it usually doesn't). Here's a bit of my config:

    # I use certifi to provide the trusted root certificate authorities
    certfile=/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/certifi/cacert.pem
    jar=/Users/ncarpenter/.config/edbrowse/cookiejar
    downdir = /Users/ncarpenter/Downloads
    # Disable cache, so each Edbrowse session doesn't cache where I've been to disk.
    # It doesn't have persistent history anyways.
    cachesize=0
    
    # User agents (type ua0 for edbrowse, ua1 for Lynx, etc)
    agent = Lynx/2.8.4rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14
    agent = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)
    agent = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)
    agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36
    
    # Automatically convert Markdown, Epub, PDF to HTML
    plugin {
        type = markdown
        desc = markdown file
        suffix = md
        program = pandoc --toc -f markdown %i
        outtype = H
        down_url
    }
    
    plugin {
        type = epub
        desc = epub file
        suffix = epub
        content = application/epub+zip
        #  %o is the temp output file generated by the program
        program = pandoc -f epub %i
        outtype = H
        down_url
    }
    
    plugin {
        type = pdf
        desc = pdf file
        suffix = pdf
        content = application/pdf
        #  file must be local
        down_url
        program = pdftohtml -i -noframes %i %o >/dev/null
        outtype = H
    }
    
    # Play links to audio with mpv
    plugin {
        type = audio
        desc = streaming audio
        protocol = rtsp,pnm,sdp,pls
        suffix = rm,ra,ram,ogg,mp3,mp4,m3u,m3u8,opus,flac
        content = audio/x-scpls,audio/mpeg,application/pls+xml
        program = mpv --really-quiet --no-audio-display --no-ytdl --af=scaletempo=stride=20:overlap=1 %i
    }
    
    # Use mps-youtube to handle Youtube URLs
    plugin {
        type = audio/youtube
        desc = streaming audio from Youtube
        suffix=mpeg # Doesn't matter, but needed for edbrowse not to complain
        urlmatch = .youtube.com/watch?
        program = mpsyt url %i
    }
    
    # These commands run when Edbrowse starts
    # See the user's guide for what these commands mean, but I'm basically setting up startup preferences
    function:init {
        db0
        js-
        sg+
        ci+
        dx
        endm+
        rl+
        z37
        db1
    }
    
    function:b {
        b ~/.config/edbrowse/bookmarks
    }
    
    function+atb {
    db0
    A
        ,j
        w+ ~/.config/edbrowse/bookmarks
        ^
        db1
    }
    
    # Typing <hs some.domain.tld is easier than typing
    # b https://some.domain.tld
    function:hs {
        b https://~0
    }
    
    # Because I read RFCs enough to make use of this
    function+rfc {
        b https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc~1
    }
    
    # Open the current page in the default browser,
    # when it just isn't working right in Edbrowse.
    function+o {
        db0
        ub
        !open "'_"
        b
        db1
    }
    
    # Copy the current URL to the clipboard
    function:cpp {
        !printf '%s' "'_" | sed ' s`^\([a-zA-Z0-9]\{1,\}://.*\)\(\.browse\)$`\1`' | tr -d '\n' | pbcopy
    }

I left a few functions out, like ones to search Google and DuckDuckGo, because I store the search forms locally, but can include those in a separate comment, if anyone's interested.