8 ms·

Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on

193 points by posobin 5y ago

vort3 5y ago
Why does it require sign up though?…
- camhart 5y ago
  Plus connecting twitter account
  - rememberlenny 5y ago
    It uses your user's Twitter account to make queries to avoid rate limits. Very normal. Also works really nicely.
  - posobin 5y ago
    That is needed to see the tweets mentioning the page, but it is not required to use Ampie. This is done because twitter api is very limiting otherwise.
    - camhart 5y ago
      Makes sense, thanks for the answer.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Why is it free at all? This should be charging money for the service from day one. Maintaining addons isn’t a charity.
  - 0x008 5y ago
    I'd rather they be transparent with the data they collect.
    - posobin 5y ago
      Yeah, I will write it down on the website. As I mentioned below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28700703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28700703), I do not store the URLs that you go to (though of course you have to trust me on that), and as all the processing is done on the server, that URL doesn't get sent to any external APIs (though if I go through with adding reddit I might need to send it to the reddit API). I do collect some telemetry statistics (right now the number of times you have seen the sidebar + the number of times you clicked/scrolled/closed it), aggregated hourly.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  > First, please sign up at ampie.app I installed your extension, which is a pretty big investment in your product as a user. Uninstalled it at this point.
  - posobin 5y ago
    Sorry about that =( This is done in part to prevent abuse of the api, since all the requests are processed on my server and not offloaded to e.g. algolia.
    - mikkel125 5y ago
      Are all URLs I visit sent to your server? Or is there a way I can see related HN/Twitter comments only on a button click when I choose so?
      - floatingatoll 5y ago
        How else could it work, if not in that manner?
        posobin 5y ago
        Actually Ampie used to work differently: Ampie would store the local cache of links from your twitter feed and links submitted to HN, and check against it when you went to any web page. If there were hits, it would show a small tab in the bottom right corner, showing that there are N tweets, M HN submissions with this page. Then you could click on the tab and the sidebar would pop up, so no requests were sent until you actually clicked on the tab. There are two problems with this: first, the cache had to be large, several hundreds of megabytes, because there are a lot of links (~200k from HN, and each person I follow on average tweeted 1k links among the last 3k tweets that twitter lets me access) and indexeddb is not memory-efficient. Second, this is easy to miss, and those numbers alone don't give enough information to go through the effort of clicking there every time. And this doesn't include the backlinks and HN comments mentions (fun fact: there are about 4m URLs mentioned in HN comments), so you'd miss out on a lot of stuff. You could suggest Bloom filters as caches, but that is a bad solution since now you only can show if there is a hit or not (instead of two numbers), but also there are false positives so the sidebar is not reliable anymore, and given that you go to hundreds of URLs a day, the FP rate has to be really low which makes the cache really large. Maybe using something like https://jlongster.com/future-sql-web https://jlongster.com/future-sql-web would have reduced the memory usage, but at that point I gave up on that approach already. Given how technically hard it was to maintain those caches of links (they had to be updated incrementally, for example, not to send hundreds of MB every time they were recomputed, you had to wait to download the cache after installing ampie), the fact that most of the friends I have talked to didn't mind if the request was sent on every URL visit (as long as I promised not to save it), and the fact that this made the sidebar less fun, I decided to remove those caches and just send the URL to the server on every visit. So yes, every URL you go to is sent to the ampie server, but I do not save the URLs sent to the server, and if ampie is disabled on a domain (you can disable it on a domain in the settings), it will not request information about pages on that domain at all.
posobin 5y ago
Hi HN! Ampie is an extension that lets you discover backlinks to the page you are reading: either from HN, tweets, or blog posts that ampie scraped. It's been unexpectedly useful for myself: finding alternatives to libraries or apps I was going to use, see reviews for books, discover related blog posts or talks. I think of it as an assistant that helps you find connections you wouldn't have found otherwise. Here is a 2min demo video of what it can do right now: https://twitter.com/posobin/status/1443269542323658753 https://twitter.com/posobin/status/1443269542323658753 I've been working on it for the past 1.5 years now, and there have been a bunch of features over that time, but now I am trying to simplify it and see if people like it if it is condensed to its essence. Give it a try and tell me what you think =)
valarauko 5y ago
Odd... it doesn't seem to show me HN links for the current page, at all. I tried it on a few top HN linked articles, and Ampie shows me only other pages on the domain, but not for the page in question. I had tweets show up for a few pages, but never the HN discussion (the 'other pages on the domain' do have tweets & HN links as expected)
- posobin 5y ago
  Yeah there is some lag in the indexing, I do scrape all the HN submissions but like once a week (it's in plans to make this immediate but haven't gotten around to it yet). Just to make sure, if you go to one of those other pages on the same domain, do you see the the HN threads/comments in the sidebar on that page?
  - valarauko 5y ago
    > if you go to one of those other pages on the same domain, do you see the the HN threads/comments in the sidebar on that page? yes
    - posobin 5y ago
      Ok yeah that's just the indexing. I am using the bigquery HN dump to index, but using their free quota I can go through the archive only ~once a week. Ideally ampie would just go through the new submissions regularly using the HN api, but I haven't built that yet.
Retr0id 5y ago
Did anyone else find the layout of the landing page visually overwhelming, and hard to follow?
- lancesells 5y ago
  It was a little hard to follow but I thought it had a lot more charm than a lot of sites I see.
  - posobin 5y ago
    Thanks! My intent definitely was to make it a little bit chaotic =) I will try to figure out how to make it a bit easier to follow, heard some advice to space it out a bit possibly.
    - lancesells 5y ago
      I think padding and font size would do a lot.
soheil 5y ago
This is great, it'd be amazing if there was a place to comment on directly about the page using this extension or otherwise a central database where all discussion about a URL exists beyond the control of the page itself.
- posobin 5y ago
  You actually can amplify the page and add a comment! Other ampie users will see that you've been there and the comment, and you can see the list of amplified links of other people, e.g. mine: https://ampie.app/posobin https://ampie.app/posobin Though you can't respond to others comments for now, but thank you for voicing the interest in that! There are other extensions that provide just the commenting part (e.g. https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/, https://curius.app/ https://curius.app/, https://glasp.co/ https://glasp.co/), but I find that they suffer from the cold start problem, i.e. it's rare to stumble upon comments for a page you go to.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    You could add those to Ampie. (I say, as if that isn't something you haven't thought of.)
    - posobin 5y ago
      Sorry, what do you mean by "those"? Add comment threads to ampie, or integrate comments from other services into ampie?
ernopp 5y ago
Awesome! I've always wanted something like this to exist. Thanks for building it <3
- ernopp 5y ago
  I just hope there won't be too much of a performance impact on my browser or the page load times
  - posobin 5y ago
    IIUC the content scripts that extensions use load after the page is loaded, so this shouldn't affect page load times. But please reach out if you feel like it does!
    - modeless 5y ago
      Most pages these days still do a lot of additional loading after "page load", so you're still going to be delaying that unless you take special pains to wait until all other JavaScript activity has died down.
i_like_waiting 5y ago
It's amazing, first I wasn't sure why I need to register, but very well worth it! Good job
yagudin 5y ago
I amplified >500 links, am a huge fun. An undocumented use case is keeping up with that posobin is reading by following https://ampie.app/posobin https://ampie.app/posobin :P
- siddish 5y ago
  500!? Wow! Can you share your profile, so I can find cool links across internet? Recently removed extension, it was occupying quite a bit of screen and am not discovering new pages anymore so Btw here's mine: https://ampie.app/siddish https://ampie.app/siddish
devgoldm 5y ago
Just to offset the negative comments on here, I think what you did is great! I don't think people appreciate the 1.5 years of individual effort you put into this and the demo looks like something I would find genuinely very useful. This clearly has lots of potential! I would honestly prefer paying for it, perhaps with a cut-down free version (perhaps using cached data only?) without sign-up to try it out, so one day you can work on it comfortably and doesn't require commitment for me to try out. However I'm sure you'll refine it in the years to come considering how well you've done so far. Keep up the good work!
- posobin 5y ago
  Thank you for the kind words! Yeah, I haven't thought about a no-sign-up version, might do something like that.
- metabeard 5y ago
  With additional controls/customizations in place I'd gladly pay to keep it ad-free and not have the data sold.
  - posobin 5y ago
    What kind of controls/customizations would you like?
mikkel125 5y ago
I don't use twitter, but would love to see related reddit threads.
- hbn 5y ago
  Years ago I had found an extension that did this. Can't remember the name, but I loved it until a reddit API change broke it, and the dev had seemingly disappeared.
- Guillaume86 5y ago
  Kiwi Conversations is an extension that does it, I use it all the time.
- smusamashah 5y ago
  https://epiverse.co/ https://epiverse.co/ shows HN and Reddit discussions for the page you are on.
- xojoc 5y ago
  Hey! I built https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ just for that. It also has a bookmarklet to search for Reddit threads for the page you're visiting.
smusamashah 5y ago
I use https://epiverse.co/ https://epiverse.co/ to see HN and Reddit discussions for the page I am on. This is a great addition to that.
willhinsa 5y ago
I love the idea. I like the concept of the name, a fun shortening/nickname for "Ampersand", which in this function also makes me think of the "Yes, And" concept from improv comedy. For me as a user, the drawback to the name "Ampie" is that it also makes me think of Google AMP, which certainly isn't my favorite thing lol :) I didn't love that the plugin is automatically active on every page I open; I was expecting that it would be a button in the toolbar that I could click at my leisure to see what discussion of a particularly interesting article was. I really do love the Twitter integration with people who you follow, but again, I wish it was kind of an on-demand plugin, or maybe just a site I could go to at my leisure and input a URL to see a nice big display of all the discussions about something specific. I'll be turning it off for now as I'm already prone to too many distractions, but I might toggle it on sometime if I want to deep dive on something and see others' comments about it.
- posobin 5y ago
  It pops up the first two times you go to a domain or a URL that has mentions, so it should stop bothering you after a little bit of usage. I do hear you though, several people brought this up. The problem with making it a button is that people forget to click it (me included), and most of the interesting connections go unnoticed this way. If you have ideas how to make this better, please tell me!
  - metabeard 5y ago
    How about opt-out instead. A button to disable it on a domain. Its very non-intrusive otherwise but I'd still like the option to disable thing. (I also sent this suggestion as a note from the bottom of the extension) Thanks for building Ampie!
    - posobin 5y ago
      As I said in email, you only see the sidebar two times per domain (unless there are mentions of the particular URL you are on, then two times on that URL). You can also disable ampie on a domain completely by going into settings: click on the ampie icon in the extension toolbar, and you can add blocked domains there. URLs from those domains won't get sent to the server to be checked, and the sidebar won't pop up. Thank you for trying it out and sharing feedback!
modeless 5y ago
I love the idea. I just wish the extension didn't require permission to "read and change all your data on all websites". I severely restrict the number of extensions I install with that permission. If any one of them is sold to unscrupulous people, or has a vulnerability, or just has their developer account hijacked, the extension can be silently updated to do anything, including for example stealing all of my money, or taking over any online account I use. It's a really scary permission when combined with silent automatic background updates. It seems like it ought to be possible to do some or most of this functionality with more restrictive permissions.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I gave up this fight back when I realized Twitch Now requires this permission, and that there are no other good extensions to show your twitch feed. https://i.imgur.com/d92BWVW.png https://i.imgur.com/d92BWVW.png It's basically "too good": an extension so convenient that I can't imagine living without it. One idea is to install the extension, unpack it, change the permission manifest, then "install unpacked." I did this when I fixed the netflix auto-skip extension (always skips intros and outros; saved me hours of Star Trek outro pain): https://github.com/shawwn/netflix-skip https://github.com/shawwn/netflix-skip But I suspect that if you turn off those permissions for this extension, you'll just see it break, since it does need the ability to read data on the current site to then pull up twitter conversations about the site. It's a shame that "examine current url" isn't a separate permission from "modify all data on the site" though. And that read/write permissions aren't separate. I'd be much more inclined to let extensions read all sites I visit.
  - modeless 5y ago
    I believe that the "tabs" permission does allow you to read the current URL without granting the ability to modify the page. It's also possible that some of the functionality could be built with the chrome.declarativeContent API or other alternatives. I'm sure there are features that would be impacted, and I doubt that most users would understand or care about the reduced permissions. But I would.
sdwr 5y ago
Beautiful! I have a soft spot for meta stuff like this, a vine climbing up a tree. I'm not a fan of browser extensions though, shit gets clogged up.
- posobin 5y ago
  You can use it as a bookmarklet instead if you go to https://ampie.app/url-context https://ampie.app/url-context!
RileyJames 5y ago
Cool app. Installed and been using today. Feedback: I’ve already added meet.google.com, calendar.google.com and a few other web apps. And I foresee having to add a LOT more of these to the disable list. From UX perspective I’d suggest fleshing this list out. And if possible, find an automated way to generate a list of web app subdomains/urls and disabling them all. I can see this list getting very long, very quick.
- posobin 5y ago
  Yeah after reading all the comments like this I thought maybe I should just take the top 1000 most popular websites and not show it by default on them.
  - MoritzWall 5y ago
    Yea, or the crowdsourced solution where you hide all websites that were hidden by < n users.
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0x008 5y ago
Hey, I think it is a fantastic idea! And I am really excited which blogs I will discover with this. HOWEVER, 3 things I noticed: - Why do I need to register? - Why cannot I disable twitter? I don't want to see twitter recommendations. - It is incompatible with dark mode extensions because the css is somehow not inverted correctly (not sure how much you can do about that).
- shinryuu 5y ago
  Yeah, why do I need to signup. Installed the extension, but thinking of uninstalling it because I can't be bothered to sign up.
- posobin 5y ago
  You need to sign up to prevent the api abuse. Thanks for the feedback, disabling twitter is in the plans! Which dark mode extensions are you using?
xojoc 5y ago
Shameless plug. I've built something similar at https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ It returns the discussions on Hacker News, Reddit and Lobsters. In the future I'll also add Lambda The Ultimate and Less Wrong. But intead of an extension you can use a bookmarklet.
- Ecto5 5y ago
  Thanks! I have been looking for something like this, particularly for youtube videos. Added bonus that this won't track every website I visit.
- posobin 5y ago
  Actually, ampie also has a bookmarklet that you can add at https://ampie.app/url-context https://ampie.app/url-context! But as I said elsewhere, in my experience I rarely use it myself since that requires a bit of effort to click and with an unknown reward it rarely seems worth the click.
- kukabynd 5y ago
  It’s down. Caprover?
rohithkp 5y ago
Similar extension for Hacker News discussions - https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext
ekzy 5y ago
It's funny how every now and then an extension like this comes up on HN. Nice execution, I like your homepage too. I wrote a comparable extension with a similar vision about 5 years ago (with Clojurescript): https://jazzytomato.com/hnlookup-chrome-extension-clojurescript https://jazzytomato.com/hnlookup-chrome-extension-clojurescr...
- posobin 5y ago
  Ampie is written in clojurescript as well! https://github.com/posobin/ampie https://github.com/posobin/ampie I have actually seen your extension when I was trying to figure out how to get started with making one in cljs. I've used shadow-cljs though instead of figwheel.
yewenjie 5y ago
I was using Ampie last year when it first came up and was more or less enjoying it. However, it was a bit of a annoyance because (I cannot remember exactly) usually I would find some really generic links at the top and the UI scrolling was not very pleasant. In general I felt like finding new discussions/ content that I would like required a couple of clicks/ interactions. I wished it was more effortless and kinda passive to stumble upon interesting stuff. I disabled the extension when it started asking for new permissions, thinking I need to configure it so that it is never activated on sensitive pages like my bank's site. I am going to give it another try now. Wishing all the best to Ampie's development.
virologist 5y ago
innovative! well done.
gvv 5y ago
Great extension and idea, but I had to remove the moment I saw you needed to sign up. Hopefully there will be an anon version in the future. Happy to donate if it's about $.
sisjohn 5y ago
I'm quite interested in seeing this extension limited to HN and Twitter and with Reddit and Facebook.
brastick 5y ago
How does it work ? Are you just scraping ?

193 points by posobin 5y ago

vort3 5y ago

Why does it require sign up though?…

camhart 5y ago
Plus connecting twitter account
- rememberlenny 5y ago
  It uses your user's Twitter account to make queries to avoid rate limits. Very normal. Also works really nicely.
- posobin 5y ago
  That is needed to see the tweets mentioning the page, but it is not required to use Ampie. This is done because twitter api is very limiting otherwise.
  - camhart 5y ago
    Makes sense, thanks for the answer.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
floatingatoll 5y ago
Why is it free at all? This should be charging money for the service from day one. Maintaining addons isn’t a charity.
- 0x008 5y ago
  I'd rather they be transparent with the data they collect.
  - posobin 5y ago
    Yeah, I will write it down on the website. As I mentioned below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28700703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28700703), I do not store the URLs that you go to (though of course you have to trust me on that), and as all the processing is done on the server, that URL doesn't get sent to any external APIs (though if I go through with adding reddit I might need to send it to the reddit API). I do collect some telemetry statistics (right now the number of times you have seen the sidebar + the number of times you clicked/scrolled/closed it), aggregated hourly.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
> First, please sign up at ampie.app I installed your extension, which is a pretty big investment in your product as a user. Uninstalled it at this point.
- posobin 5y ago
  Sorry about that =( This is done in part to prevent abuse of the api, since all the requests are processed on my server and not offloaded to e.g. algolia.
  - mikkel125 5y ago
    Are all URLs I visit sent to your server? Or is there a way I can see related HN/Twitter comments only on a button click when I choose so?
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      How else could it work, if not in that manner?
      - posobin 5y ago
        Actually Ampie used to work differently: Ampie would store the local cache of links from your twitter feed and links submitted to HN, and check against it when you went to any web page. If there were hits, it would show a small tab in the bottom right corner, showing that there are N tweets, M HN submissions with this page. Then you could click on the tab and the sidebar would pop up, so no requests were sent until you actually clicked on the tab. There are two problems with this: first, the cache had to be large, several hundreds of megabytes, because there are a lot of links (~200k from HN, and each person I follow on average tweeted 1k links among the last 3k tweets that twitter lets me access) and indexeddb is not memory-efficient. Second, this is easy to miss, and those numbers alone don't give enough information to go through the effort of clicking there every time. And this doesn't include the backlinks and HN comments mentions (fun fact: there are about 4m URLs mentioned in HN comments), so you'd miss out on a lot of stuff. You could suggest Bloom filters as caches, but that is a bad solution since now you only can show if there is a hit or not (instead of two numbers), but also there are false positives so the sidebar is not reliable anymore, and given that you go to hundreds of URLs a day, the FP rate has to be really low which makes the cache really large. Maybe using something like https://jlongster.com/future-sql-web https://jlongster.com/future-sql-web would have reduced the memory usage, but at that point I gave up on that approach already. Given how technically hard it was to maintain those caches of links (they had to be updated incrementally, for example, not to send hundreds of MB every time they were recomputed, you had to wait to download the cache after installing ampie), the fact that most of the friends I have talked to didn't mind if the request was sent on every URL visit (as long as I promised not to save it), and the fact that this made the sidebar less fun, I decided to remove those caches and just send the URL to the server on every visit. So yes, every URL you go to is sent to the ampie server, but I do not save the URLs sent to the server, and if ampie is disabled on a domain (you can disable it on a domain in the settings), it will not request information about pages on that domain at all.

posobin 5y ago

Hi HN! Ampie is an extension that lets you discover backlinks to the page you are reading: either from HN, tweets, or blog posts that ampie scraped. It's been unexpectedly useful for myself: finding alternatives to libraries or apps I was going to use, see reviews for books, discover related blog posts or talks. I think of it as an assistant that helps you find connections you wouldn't have found otherwise. Here is a 2min demo video of what it can do right now: https://twitter.com/posobin/status/1443269542323658753 https://twitter.com/posobin/status/1443269542323658753 I've been working on it for the past 1.5 years now, and there have been a bunch of features over that time, but now I am trying to simplify it and see if people like it if it is condensed to its essence. Give it a try and tell me what you think =)

valarauko 5y ago

Odd... it doesn't seem to show me HN links for the current page, at all. I tried it on a few top HN linked articles, and Ampie shows me only other pages on the domain, but not for the page in question. I had tweets show up for a few pages, but never the HN discussion (the 'other pages on the domain' do have tweets & HN links as expected)

posobin 5y ago
Yeah there is some lag in the indexing, I do scrape all the HN submissions but like once a week (it's in plans to make this immediate but haven't gotten around to it yet). Just to make sure, if you go to one of those other pages on the same domain, do you see the the HN threads/comments in the sidebar on that page?
- valarauko 5y ago
  > if you go to one of those other pages on the same domain, do you see the the HN threads/comments in the sidebar on that page? yes
  - posobin 5y ago
    Ok yeah that's just the indexing. I am using the bigquery HN dump to index, but using their free quota I can go through the archive only ~once a week. Ideally ampie would just go through the new submissions regularly using the HN api, but I haven't built that yet.

Retr0id 5y ago

Did anyone else find the layout of the landing page visually overwhelming, and hard to follow?

lancesells 5y ago
It was a little hard to follow but I thought it had a lot more charm than a lot of sites I see.
- posobin 5y ago
  Thanks! My intent definitely was to make it a little bit chaotic =) I will try to figure out how to make it a bit easier to follow, heard some advice to space it out a bit possibly.
  - lancesells 5y ago
    I think padding and font size would do a lot.

soheil 5y ago

This is great, it'd be amazing if there was a place to comment on directly about the page using this extension or otherwise a central database where all discussion about a URL exists beyond the control of the page itself.

posobin 5y ago
You actually can amplify the page and add a comment! Other ampie users will see that you've been there and the comment, and you can see the list of amplified links of other people, e.g. mine: https://ampie.app/posobin https://ampie.app/posobin Though you can't respond to others comments for now, but thank you for voicing the interest in that! There are other extensions that provide just the commenting part (e.g. https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/, https://curius.app/ https://curius.app/, https://glasp.co/ https://glasp.co/), but I find that they suffer from the cold start problem, i.e. it's rare to stumble upon comments for a page you go to.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  You could add those to Ampie. (I say, as if that isn't something you haven't thought of.)
  - posobin 5y ago
    Sorry, what do you mean by "those"? Add comment threads to ampie, or integrate comments from other services into ampie?

ernopp 5y ago

Awesome! I've always wanted something like this to exist. Thanks for building it <3

ernopp 5y ago
I just hope there won't be too much of a performance impact on my browser or the page load times
- posobin 5y ago
  IIUC the content scripts that extensions use load after the page is loaded, so this shouldn't affect page load times. But please reach out if you feel like it does!
  - modeless 5y ago
    Most pages these days still do a lot of additional loading after "page load", so you're still going to be delaying that unless you take special pains to wait until all other JavaScript activity has died down.

i_like_waiting 5y ago

It's amazing, first I wasn't sure why I need to register, but very well worth it! Good job

yagudin 5y ago

I amplified >500 links, am a huge fun. An undocumented use case is keeping up with that posobin is reading by following https://ampie.app/posobin https://ampie.app/posobin :P

siddish 5y ago
500!? Wow! Can you share your profile, so I can find cool links across internet? Recently removed extension, it was occupying quite a bit of screen and am not discovering new pages anymore so Btw here's mine: https://ampie.app/siddish https://ampie.app/siddish

devgoldm 5y ago

Just to offset the negative comments on here, I think what you did is great! I don't think people appreciate the 1.5 years of individual effort you put into this and the demo looks like something I would find genuinely very useful. This clearly has lots of potential! I would honestly prefer paying for it, perhaps with a cut-down free version (perhaps using cached data only?) without sign-up to try it out, so one day you can work on it comfortably and doesn't require commitment for me to try out. However I'm sure you'll refine it in the years to come considering how well you've done so far. Keep up the good work!

posobin 5y ago
Thank you for the kind words! Yeah, I haven't thought about a no-sign-up version, might do something like that.
metabeard 5y ago
With additional controls/customizations in place I'd gladly pay to keep it ad-free and not have the data sold.
- posobin 5y ago
  What kind of controls/customizations would you like?

mikkel125 5y ago

I don't use twitter, but would love to see related reddit threads.

hbn 5y ago
Years ago I had found an extension that did this. Can't remember the name, but I loved it until a reddit API change broke it, and the dev had seemingly disappeared.
Guillaume86 5y ago
Kiwi Conversations is an extension that does it, I use it all the time.
smusamashah 5y ago
https://epiverse.co/ https://epiverse.co/ shows HN and Reddit discussions for the page you are on.
xojoc 5y ago
Hey! I built https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ just for that. It also has a bookmarklet to search for Reddit threads for the page you're visiting.

smusamashah 5y ago

I use https://epiverse.co/ https://epiverse.co/ to see HN and Reddit discussions for the page I am on. This is a great addition to that.

willhinsa 5y ago

I love the idea. I like the concept of the name, a fun shortening/nickname for "Ampersand", which in this function also makes me think of the "Yes, And" concept from improv comedy. For me as a user, the drawback to the name "Ampie" is that it also makes me think of Google AMP, which certainly isn't my favorite thing lol :) I didn't love that the plugin is automatically active on every page I open; I was expecting that it would be a button in the toolbar that I could click at my leisure to see what discussion of a particularly interesting article was. I really do love the Twitter integration with people who you follow, but again, I wish it was kind of an on-demand plugin, or maybe just a site I could go to at my leisure and input a URL to see a nice big display of all the discussions about something specific. I'll be turning it off for now as I'm already prone to too many distractions, but I might toggle it on sometime if I want to deep dive on something and see others' comments about it.

posobin 5y ago
It pops up the first two times you go to a domain or a URL that has mentions, so it should stop bothering you after a little bit of usage. I do hear you though, several people brought this up. The problem with making it a button is that people forget to click it (me included), and most of the interesting connections go unnoticed this way. If you have ideas how to make this better, please tell me!
- metabeard 5y ago
  How about opt-out instead. A button to disable it on a domain. Its very non-intrusive otherwise but I'd still like the option to disable thing. (I also sent this suggestion as a note from the bottom of the extension) Thanks for building Ampie!
  - posobin 5y ago
    As I said in email, you only see the sidebar two times per domain (unless there are mentions of the particular URL you are on, then two times on that URL). You can also disable ampie on a domain completely by going into settings: click on the ampie icon in the extension toolbar, and you can add blocked domains there. URLs from those domains won't get sent to the server to be checked, and the sidebar won't pop up. Thank you for trying it out and sharing feedback!

modeless 5y ago

I love the idea. I just wish the extension didn't require permission to "read and change all your data on all websites". I severely restrict the number of extensions I install with that permission. If any one of them is sold to unscrupulous people, or has a vulnerability, or just has their developer account hijacked, the extension can be silently updated to do anything, including for example stealing all of my money, or taking over any online account I use. It's a really scary permission when combined with silent automatic background updates. It seems like it ought to be possible to do some or most of this functionality with more restrictive permissions.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
I gave up this fight back when I realized Twitch Now requires this permission, and that there are no other good extensions to show your twitch feed. https://i.imgur.com/d92BWVW.png https://i.imgur.com/d92BWVW.png It's basically "too good": an extension so convenient that I can't imagine living without it. One idea is to install the extension, unpack it, change the permission manifest, then "install unpacked." I did this when I fixed the netflix auto-skip extension (always skips intros and outros; saved me hours of Star Trek outro pain): https://github.com/shawwn/netflix-skip https://github.com/shawwn/netflix-skip But I suspect that if you turn off those permissions for this extension, you'll just see it break, since it does need the ability to read data on the current site to then pull up twitter conversations about the site. It's a shame that "examine current url" isn't a separate permission from "modify all data on the site" though. And that read/write permissions aren't separate. I'd be much more inclined to let extensions read all sites I visit.
- modeless 5y ago
  I believe that the "tabs" permission does allow you to read the current URL without granting the ability to modify the page. It's also possible that some of the functionality could be built with the chrome.declarativeContent API or other alternatives. I'm sure there are features that would be impacted, and I doubt that most users would understand or care about the reduced permissions. But I would.

sdwr 5y ago

Beautiful! I have a soft spot for meta stuff like this, a vine climbing up a tree. I'm not a fan of browser extensions though, shit gets clogged up.

posobin 5y ago
You can use it as a bookmarklet instead if you go to https://ampie.app/url-context https://ampie.app/url-context!

RileyJames 5y ago

Cool app. Installed and been using today. Feedback: I’ve already added meet.google.com, calendar.google.com and a few other web apps. And I foresee having to add a LOT more of these to the disable list. From UX perspective I’d suggest fleshing this list out. And if possible, find an automated way to generate a list of web app subdomains/urls and disabling them all. I can see this list getting very long, very quick.

posobin 5y ago
Yeah after reading all the comments like this I thought maybe I should just take the top 1000 most popular websites and not show it by default on them.
- MoritzWall 5y ago
  Yea, or the crowdsourced solution where you hide all websites that were hidden by < n users.

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0x008 5y ago

Hey, I think it is a fantastic idea! And I am really excited which blogs I will discover with this. HOWEVER, 3 things I noticed: - Why do I need to register? - Why cannot I disable twitter? I don't want to see twitter recommendations. - It is incompatible with dark mode extensions because the css is somehow not inverted correctly (not sure how much you can do about that).

shinryuu 5y ago
Yeah, why do I need to signup. Installed the extension, but thinking of uninstalling it because I can't be bothered to sign up.
posobin 5y ago
You need to sign up to prevent the api abuse. Thanks for the feedback, disabling twitter is in the plans! Which dark mode extensions are you using?

xojoc 5y ago

Shameless plug. I've built something similar at https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ It returns the discussions on Hacker News, Reddit and Lobsters. In the future I'll also add Lambda The Ultimate and Less Wrong. But intead of an extension you can use a bookmarklet.

Ecto5 5y ago
Thanks! I have been looking for something like this, particularly for youtube videos. Added bonus that this won't track every website I visit.
posobin 5y ago
Actually, ampie also has a bookmarklet that you can add at https://ampie.app/url-context https://ampie.app/url-context! But as I said elsewhere, in my experience I rarely use it myself since that requires a bit of effort to click and with an unknown reward it rarely seems worth the click.
kukabynd 5y ago
It’s down. Caprover?

rohithkp 5y ago

Similar extension for Hacker News discussions - https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext

ekzy 5y ago

It's funny how every now and then an extension like this comes up on HN. Nice execution, I like your homepage too. I wrote a comparable extension with a similar vision about 5 years ago (with Clojurescript): https://jazzytomato.com/hnlookup-chrome-extension-clojurescript https://jazzytomato.com/hnlookup-chrome-extension-clojurescr...

posobin 5y ago
Ampie is written in clojurescript as well! https://github.com/posobin/ampie https://github.com/posobin/ampie I have actually seen your extension when I was trying to figure out how to get started with making one in cljs. I've used shadow-cljs though instead of figwheel.

yewenjie 5y ago

I was using Ampie last year when it first came up and was more or less enjoying it. However, it was a bit of a annoyance because (I cannot remember exactly) usually I would find some really generic links at the top and the UI scrolling was not very pleasant. In general I felt like finding new discussions/ content that I would like required a couple of clicks/ interactions. I wished it was more effortless and kinda passive to stumble upon interesting stuff. I disabled the extension when it started asking for new permissions, thinking I need to configure it so that it is never activated on sensitive pages like my bank's site. I am going to give it another try now. Wishing all the best to Ampie's development.

virologist 5y ago

innovative! well done.

gvv 5y ago

Great extension and idea, but I had to remove the moment I saw you needed to sign up. Hopefully there will be an anon version in the future. Happy to donate if it's about $.

sisjohn 5y ago

I'm quite interested in seeing this extension limited to HN and Twitter and with Reddit and Facebook.

brastick 5y ago

How does it work ? Are you just scraping ?