HNewhere - Lightweight userscript for inline Hacker News discussions
Show HN: I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript
HNewhere is a lightweight userscript that seamlessly integrates Hacker News discussions directly into any article page. By automatically detecting relevant HN stories, it loads comments into a customizable, resizable sidebar, eliminating the need to open multiple tabs. This tool enhances the reading experience by allowing users to browse community insights and reply links without ever leaving the original content. Compatible with popular managers like Tampermonkey and Violentmonkey, HNewhere leverages the Hacker News API and Algolia search to deliver a streamlined, efficient workflow for tech enthusiasts and developers.
HNewhere detects Hacker News stories, loads comments into a sidebar, and lets you browse discussions without leaving the page.
- kccqzy
Feature 2 is really useful. When I land on a technical article I know chances are there will be a nice HN discussion, that may sometimes even refute the main point of the article.
Feature 1 is IMO less useful. It just suggests that people are bad at window management. We didn't like overlapping windows and finding them, so we created tabs inside windows. Then we wanted to see two things at the same time, so we created split views inside tabs (Chrome and Firefox both had this). With a good window manager neither would be necessary. Sadly the community prefers to solve this at the application level rather than the desktop level; I'm currently using Forge (https://github.com/forge-ext/forge) but sadly it's becoming unmaintained.
- perpil
This is slick. 2 things.
1. If you name your script with the extension .user.js it is easier to click on to automatically install at least with tampermonkey.
2. When I went to this link from the main page, on mobile I had to scroll to the right to see the (-) to minimize because the sidebar was too large: https://elizabethtai.com/2026/06/10/substack-writers-you-nee... It may make some sense to start minimized so I can read the article first, but I can easily modify the script to do that.
- jstrieb
If you use Firefox (and will pardon me plugging my own project), you might be interested in a version of this I made a while ago as a browser extension:
https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button
My project is somewhat different from the userscript in that mine uses Bloom filters to check whether a link has been submitted, whereas this userscript sends every page you visit to the Algolia search API. Using Bloom filters means that there are no external requests unless you actually press the button. My project also doesn't show the comments in a sidebar.
Having a link to past discussions, whether using this userscript or my extension, is useful not only to read the comments for a page you're browsing, but also to find good sites that haven't been submitted yet!
- pluc
Firefox has a new Split View that's useful for this, but you still have to left click and select open in split view (M) then click the link. You also used to be able on some browsers to craft a link that was href="tab1.html|tab2.html", no idea if that's still a thing or if it was limited to "home page" setting.
- abudooboo
Have you considered modifying it to trigger on every HNews click as well as with as manually triggered? As it is now it leaks browser URLs + query string + fragments to hn.algolia.com since it queries it on every single page you visit. At the very least it might be good to sanitize the queries by restricting to origin + path?
- 8ig8
I just open the HN post and then open the article. That way I can simply go back to the comments after reading the article, whenever that may be.
- kwar13
I made an extension that opens both tabs for you and thus far has a whopping 6 users!
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-saved-y...
- djfdat
This is great and is also something that I've always had an issue with.
What I do now is open the HN comments, and then when I'm ready to look at the link + comments, right-click on the title and Open in Split View.