(updated: 7 Aug 2026)
As part of Code Trek, I just created 2 user scripts for Hacker News:
HackerBrain – pulls comments into a sidebar for any item of interest.
HackerTrain – shows an expandable ladder/train of newest best comments.
As “new and unique ways to view static content dynamically on webpages” I reckon these scripts are presently still patentable – sort of like how infinite-scrolling could have been patented, but wasn’t due to the early proliferation of the user experience, whereby:
UI designer Aza Raskin is widely credited with inventing and popularizing the web design pattern in 2006 while working at Humanized. He published the open-source JavaScript concept without securing a patent on the pattern, allowing it to rapidly spread across the web and become standard UX on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and social media platforms.
But now I’m thinking in terms of the evolving Local-First Fediverse. How can I see any URL and then preview its comments, say with mouseover, without getting those comments as stored on the underlying domain?
They should also be sourced and controlled by the user who wrote them, not from an intermediary like X with all its comments associated with the URL.
I feel that this is another solution-in-the-making, whereby:
In a true Local-First model (defined by principles like offline capability, local data persistence via CRDTs, and local-first execution), the local device holds the primary source of truth.
Yet on Hacker News, a person can’t even delete their old comments and that is by design to keep the forum as a book, and books shouldn’t have pages ripped out of them. [info]
Thus, should there also be a way to conditionalize comments like that for the Local-First Fediverse? Should sources of information decide their own unique level of information sovereignty so that comments can’t be “ripped out?” Is that even possible? What is the best way to anonymize something that once wasn’t, or vice versa?
✓ 1 hour ago ago