Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read).

Main website: https://hackersmacker.org

Chrome/Edge extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg... Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725 Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...

The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.

I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.

Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.

Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker

Directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!

user:	cousinbryce
created:	October 1, 2025
karma:	35