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Hacker Smacker

Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance

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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: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg... Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725 Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmackerDirectly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!

HN · launched Feb 24, 2026 · 148 upvotes (top 7%) · 0 views

Niche: browser extensions · 257 launches, 17 in the last 7 days ▼ -39% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Analytics & BI
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes Hacker Smacker is a simple browser extension that manipulates the Hacker News DOM backed by a basic Node.js/Redis server storing user-to-user friend/foe graph relationships.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Slashdot (friend/foe system), HN karma system

Concerns raised: Will create echo chambers and prevent exposure to challenging opinions, Bi-directional friending not supported (curator-style only), Friend/foe relationships conflict resolution unclear, Reputation systems on internet fundamentally unsolvable, Who decides what constitutes bad faith?

Feature requests: Extend friend-of-a-friend beyond one level deep, Option to hide usernames in HN settings, Fix layout shift when elements load on right side, Bidirectional friending system

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 135 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #24 of 136 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 110 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.