Thanks for the heads up; I will see what I can do. :)

The design is from themeforest.net, with some minor adjustments. :)

The source code for Hacker News is available with the Arc download. pg has said that the actual ranking algorithm differs slightly from the code listed in order to thwart abuse, but for the purposes of ranges I thought it'd be close enough. Knowing the time, relative ranking, and the known scores of participants, the ranges are basically "how many points would this comment need to be one rank higher/lower".

Thanks for this extension.

A suggestion- I understand what you're trying to convey with the point range, but for usability I'd prefer always seeing one number there. I don't mind a best guess and marking the score as an approximate number. Having to mentally parse ranges and less than symbols adds a slight speed bump.

Yeah, in its infancy, it's natural for all of the participants to be congregated on the inaugural thread. :) Comment scores for people who have the extension should show up for any comment they've made in the past two weeks, though, and it should start filling in around HN as more people start using it.

Thanks for your support! Yep, just trying to make something people want. :)

This is definitely something people want. Thanks for building it :)

I'm planning on doing that, but wanted to fix up any bugs that crop up first. In the meantime, as you noted, the un-obfuscated JS file is up on the server for all to see. It's used in the bookmarklet and Firefox plugin directly, and the Chrome, Opera, and Safari extensions use the same file bundled up with minor or no changes.

By the way, I don't think you'll get past the mozilla review process with this extension structure. When I wrote one for my job, I seem to remember them being nervous about loading and executing JS from 3rd parties (the thinking being: if you're hacked, suddenly everyone who installed your extension is also hacked, especially as the JS is executed with raised privs.) Not that you're at that stage yet, but I just thought I'd give you a heads-up :)

Nice idea, well executed.

PS: You aren't using the extension yourself? edit: ah you are now :)

Thanks for the tip! Given how technically savvy most of HN is, I was thinking the XPI download would be sufficient at least for now, but when I do go to submit it to the addons repository, I will be sure to put the actual JS in there.

I am indeed using the Chrome extension, but it only updates comment scores every 10 minutes while on HN as not to slow down the HN reading experience. :)

Thanks! :)

I don't have 1.5 to test on, but the Greasemonkey script should work, or you can email me at hnpoints at gmail and I'll try to help you get it working.

Thanks for checking it out :)

As an early adopter, it's quite likely that you'll see comments that are missing scores. This occurs when there is insufficient data to even make an approximation for a comment.

I can see the points on your reply, and the number of points on this comment should show up for you. As more users start using HNPoints, more comments should show scores.