It's possible, but as I mentioned in another comment, building this as an extension has some added benefits [1].

> that way I don't have to bloat the browser's start-up time and don't have to "worry" about this extension spying on other websites, even though I realize it's unlikely

No need to worry about that, as it's limited by the permissions specified in the extension manifiest. So this extension can only access news.ycombinator.com and extensionpay.com to facilitate the Pro upgrade.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769145

I wish this were more of an SPA with an account system/db of it's own, I'd even pay for a subscription (small one). I'd basically like there to be a mobile app and desktop version that no matter where I read an article, it's marked read. I use materialize and hckrnews now, if both of these could keep track of the same bookmarks, visited links, and maybe allow note taking or creating groups of saved things, that'd be awesome. Also notifications and a messaging system like reddit has would be cool...in fact I just want a redditized HN experience lol.

Cool ideas! It would definitely be possible to build in a cloud sync feature at some point to enable those features.

> it's good principle to not have to give this permission.

Well consider that when you go to a proxied version of HN, you're essentially giving an opaque server "permission" to view all your traffic it sends to HackerNews... but you can't verify what it's doing with that

At least this extension states exactly what permissions it needs, and I can inspect it and see what it's doing...

There's [Hackerweb](https://hackerweb.app/) which uses the HN API and does some clever stuff delegating to a webview.

Thanks for sharing! I love this skin, the dark mode is really easy on my eyes. And the threading is really nice too.

Depends on what you mean by "proxying". Everything you do (serving a Single-Page Application or requesting HN by backend, processing it's HTML and sending the content to your own frontend) will take traffic away from news.ycombinator.com and to another domain - which comes with it's own set of dreadful scenarios.

There used to be (and still are) things like https://mreidsma.github.io/bookmarklets/jquerify.html which allow to inject JavaScript on click (and thus would make it possible to transform that site), but I gave it a shot and HN is set up to disallow this:

  Refused to load the script 'https://code.jquery.com/jquery.min.js' because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://www.google.com/recaptcha/ https://www.gstatic.com/recaptcha/ https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/". Note that 'script-src-elem' was not explicitly set, so 'script-src' is used as a fallback.

I use hckrnews.com but it only changes the start page.