The initial version was released in April 2014, when I decided I desperately wanted to sort HN by points, time, or comments. At the time there wasn't a Chrome extension that did it without making the page look weird, so I wrote one. 12 years on it's still relevant, and still the most subtle and to-the-point extension I've found for the job. I've kept adding things I wanted for myself, and recently I noticed it started getting some traction, so figured why not share it on HN itself one more time :)
The extension is super-simple. It just adds four buttons into the HN header: points, time, comments, default. Click one and the table reorders in place. P, T, C, D hotkeys do the same thing. It runs on every page with a post list (front, newest, ask, show, jobs, past).
Two recent additions:
1. New post indicators: An orange dot shows up next to posts that appeared since your last visit. The dots fade out over a window you set in the popup (default one hour), so eventually the page looks untouched again.
2. True time ago: HN's "second chance" system resurfaces old posts and resets the displayed age, so a three-day-old post can say "7 hours ago". The extension reads the original timestamp out of the title attribute and shows the real age instead.
Everything syncs through Chrome sync storage. No analytics, no network calls, MIT. Plasmo, React, TypeScript, Vitest.
Source: https://github.com/svyatov/hacker_news_sorted
Would appreciate any feedback or ideas but I'd like to keep the extension as simple as possible ;)