conesus
conesus on Hacker News
Flow is gorgeous and fits this ascii art theme beautifully. I've installed it and have lots of changes I'd like to make. Are you open to PRs or should I maintain my own fork without expectation of upstreaming anything?
Examples of changes I'd like to see:
1. I want a decay on the flame, so on every state change, the flame slowly works its way back down to a base rate, say at 2 minutes. That would imply that a strong fire is a recently changed state, while a decayed flame is a stale state that hasn't changed in a while.
2. Automatic choosing of a different animation on every open. I run half a dozen to a dozen agents on a single terminal window (full screened on a 27" monitor) and I already built a way to distinguish sessions from other other with my pre-plugin psuedoterminal crabigator and I'd like to do the same for these animations. Basically a way to distinguish sessions from other other.
3. More so than just changing animations, I'd like to have a random palette chosen per-animation, so there's multiple flames, but there's the purple-esque flames, the blue-esque flames, the red ones, the orange ones, the yellow ones, and so on.
4. I'd like a way to integrate the plugin into crabigator so its takes a single section instead of being full width.
Regardless, this is a beautiful mod, reminds me of the type of MUD hacking in the early-to-mid 90s that I used to love as a child, and I'm going to be stealing/integrating this into my workflows immediately.
BTW, I used to have different ASCII art images on each of my servers. Here's a sampling:
https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol...
https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol...
https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol...
It wasn't actually down from overuse, the node.js server hit an unhandled error and fell over. And because this is the first time I was seeing real usage, I didn't have a supervisor in place to restart it automatically. That's handled now, of course.
I was a NNW user for years and it's why I eventually built my own news reader. NNW had a lot of great features and I wanted to mostly keep them. You might find that NewsBlur takes a similar path but with a different set of opinions.
Seriously. I've been updating NewsBlur with all the pet features people have wanted for years and I'm finding that it's even more enjoyable now with all those AI features built in. Daily briefing, ask AI, story clustering, all of these are AI-flavored improvements to RSS and it's so relaxing to open up my river of news and scroll through all the good stuff without feeling a gross algorithm surfacing endless outrage.
I read plenty of X as well as scroll through various social media apps and nothing comes close to how great RSS feels to read.
VESA mounts are only a few bucks and give you even better height and tilt adjustment. You also get desk space back. I have a shorter desk (24" vs typical 30" depth) and I have two monitors and a laptop mounted on 3 VESAs and I can extend them so that the monitor edge is inline with the desk edge, giving me the same 24" that a 30" desk would have with a monitor stand.
HN caches the profile, sometimes it takes a few minutes for Hacker Smacker to get the latest data. It keeps checking until it works.
That was the toughest lift of all! Firefox and Chrome extensions were easy, just had to go through a quick review. Apple rejected the safari extension 4-5 times and wanted me to make changes to the metadata and even questioned the extension itself. Took a lot of back and forth to get the safari extension approved.
Hacker Smacker doesn't mean you ignore your foes. Their comments are now labeled with the tiny red orb, giving you acknowledgement of how you've felt about them in the past.
I've used this extension for the past 15 years and I can say that I love seeing foes show up in threads. I still read their comments, but I know going into it that I can probably skip it after the first sentence if I recognize that it's more of what I disliked about them in the first place.
This is a time saving browser extension, freeing me up to scan more HN threads. I now often scan a thread to see if there's any friends, foes, or FoaFs inside.
I have not found that to be the case. I have over 150 commenters on my Hacker Smacker foe list and I have only found once or twice that somebody who goes into the red bucket deserves to go into the green bucket.
Now the way I use the friend/foe system of labeling may be different than others, and it's a personal decision for how you choose to label commenters. But the way I do it, if somebody has an opinion that puts them on my red list, that's great to know, because when I see them comment elsewhere I now have the context for why I feel the way I do about them.
I made some changes and the extension now recognizes if you can't hover and will allow you to tap to show the orbs before selecting one. It now works on mobile browsers with extensions.
Hah, at least I'm consistent.
You don't avoid anything, this simply helps highlight commenters in a long thread.
I mean the entire extension is about this, but I can quickly scan this thread (or others) and spot my favored commenters.
The layout doesn't shift down. It only moves the meta information to the right of the user name over a little bit.
Ahh, I have you green orbed, and I recognize your username from NB. The system works!
Thanks to the HN moderators for re-posting this after I posted this a few days ago. I only notice now that it's on the front page.
Happy to answer any questions. Let me tell you, I've really enjoyed having those writers that I like highlighted on this comment thread because it makes it very easy to scan it.
I think it's important to remember that this is not about hiding writers you disagree with. It's simply about making it so that you can read more Hacker News threads and quickly scanning the comments, teasing out those writers that you agree with. It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with, if anything, to reinforce your opinion of them.
There's nothing about this that's horse blinders. It's literally a way to highlight riders that you both agree and disagree with. It actually makes it more likely that you're going to engage with the ones you disagree with, because now they have a red orb.
That's absolutely correct. I started programming at eight in 1993, so I have a soft spot for those types of icons.
The reason I have this extension is because I don't want to hide those comments. I want to be able to read them when I quickly scroll a thread. Oftentimes, I'm reading so many Hacker News threads that I want to be able to pull out the commenters that I like. I even like reading the comments from commenters that I dislike in the hopes that I see if I still disagree with them.
I'm not hiding anybody. I'm just making it more apparent when they're commenting
Oh man, I had no idea this got reposted and I just discovered now, 8 hours later. Anyway, I kicked the server and its back up.
This new remote control handoff is neat but still requires you to remember to do the handoff. Oftentimes I’m waiting on an agent and then walk away.
I built Crabigator[1] and it's a wrapper around `claude` and `codex`, so its ready for coding on the go on start and already streaming. Plus, crabigator shows many parallel windows, separated by repo/project/machine, so you can manage multiple agents seamlessly.
[1]: https://drinkcrabigator.com
Posted by
conesus on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @02:00PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://hackersmacker.org
Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read).Main website: https://hackersmacker.orgChrome/Edge extension:...
I always preferred gmud, but zmud has all the bells and whistles. All I needed was ANSI color, aliases, triggers, and command history.
How can I get access?
N.U.T.S. 3.3.3 4eva! There was a NUTS 4, but about a decade too late.
Say more, what’s the influence? My favorite branches were Diku/Merc and Circle based. SMAUG, Envy, ROM. Somewhere on a hard drive lives Abyss of Curak, my colorful and (in 1998) briefly popular MUD.
Everything is a tradeoff, including aging. You [can] become wiser but at a sizable expense.
Here's what I did to make voice (now WisprFlow, before Superwhisper) a habit:
1. Install Karabiner-Elements, a free macOS keyboard remapper[0]
2. Map F19 -> F5 (mic button) in Karabiner-Elements
3. Choose F19 as the voice hotkey in your voice app
And now you can use the handy F5 mic button on your Apple keyboard. WisprFlow automatically has it set for:
- press and hold to talk
- double tap for indeterminate listening until you f5/esc
That workflow alone, of using the f5 key and switching between the two modes of speaking (holding or double-tap), has freed up a not insignificant part of my working memory. Turning abstract thoughts into text is higher cost than turning them into voice.
I predict individual offices[1] will be more popular as a choice for startups.
[0]: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org
[1]: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1281887
Now that's dangerous to do because the conversation history in Claude Code now also reverts the code to that point. So while this technique may have worked in the past, it no longer works.