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!

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.

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.

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.

This is how reddit supposed to be. A universal comment box for del.icio.us

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?

I don't understand the problem space. Meaning I don't understand what this solves.

My use case, even on phone:

View HN

Right click link to open in new tab OR: tap/hold a link then open I a new window.

What problem is this solving?

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.

I also wrote a Monkey script to save clicks when reading papers: just embed PDF webview into the Arxiv abstract page. https://github.com/OneMoreSecond/FileSave/blob/master/arxiv_...

It seems the software productivity has exploded in the agent era. However, do we treat every point of daily experience seriously enough? Do we recognize such pains actively and try to eliminate them (often easy), or just tolerate infinitely?

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...

I think the amount of upvotes you’re getting here suggests that it might be worth building a proper browser extension for this!

Would you be interested in making one?

The mobile default seems important here: opening the panel collapsed, then preserving its size per site, could keep the first article read predictable while retaining quick access to the discussion.

This is cool. Don't want to minimize that.

That said, in case it helps anyone else, my usual flow is to middle-click (by clicking my mouse wheel) both the link and the comments link which opens each in a new background tab (at least in Chrome). Hopefully that's lower-friction than what you were doing with the two tabs.

I made something slightly similar ~10 years ago where you could embed HN comments in your own site. It was the opposite end of consumer though, for webdevs to embed it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12898366

Note: I took it down when it seemed it could degrade HN quality if people used it as normal comments, but yours is great since it's the opposite target/usage

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.

Is it lame that (especially for super long discussions), I often open a gemini tab and summarize the comments? I like reading HN comment threads, but I often only have a few minutes and just want to get the gist of the reactions from the community for some topic.

Nice. I’ve been using the new split tabs in Chrome. Works perfectly. I believe Firefox had this first?

Phew, thought I was the only one doing that. I thought I was missing some core site feature lol.

This is pretty cool! It had never crossed my mind that everyone else is doing the same two tab thing that I'm doing.

Haha, this is so cool and can't believe I didn't think about it. I've been opening 2 tabs per HN link on my phone since forever!

Nice idea ! How do you handle duplicates ?

Chrome has add tab to split view.

hehe, I opened chatgpt and the little button blocks the three dots

Thought I was the only one hahaha

I feel ya. I'm always middle clicking twice, story and comments.

This shouldn't be a script (no offense, great job!). It should be built into the browsers!

For orange juice, on a "selected" story, i made left arrow open the comments and right arrow open the story. bang bang.

currently rocking 666 users... https://oj-hn.com

Very cool!

Now make a user script that blocks posts titled "I was tired of X, so I...".

Oh, I solved this long time ago by only opening the discussion page, never read tfa, and pretend I did. /s