HN Titles

What is this?

HNtitles is a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that "unmoderates" titles of Hacker News stories: it displays the content of the title in a caption as it was before being moderated (changed).

Why do this

Two reasons:

• sometimes, because the title changed since the first time we saw a story, we click on the same story twice, and this is annoying (yes, in theory the link should be shown as visited, but not on a different device, etc.)
• while moderation usually adds information and reduces clickbait, it sometimes also destroys information; it's nice to be able to read the original version of the title.

How it works

A cron job downloads titles from the newest page at regular intervals and stores the original titles.

The extension scans titles on HN pages and compares them to the stored version using Levenshtein distance; if they're different it shows them with an asterisk; if they're very different it shows two.

Titles marked with an asterisk display the original title on a mouseover (or long pres on mobile).

Where to find it

Available for Firefox and Chrome.

More info

Here's a great post by dang about moderating HN titles.