In April 2014 I wanted to sort posts on the Hacker News front page by points, by time, or by comments. Nothing I found did it without cluttering the page, so I wrote a tiny Chrome extension over a couple of days, uploaded it to the Web Store, and mostly stopped thinking about it for ten years.
I touched it exactly once in that decade, in 2019, to fix the selectors.
Then in March 2024 I rewrote it from scratch, with the old version still working fine: I wanted TypeScript, React, and tests, and Manifest v3 while I was in there. That's when I started actually maintaining it.
It's called Hacker News Sorted, it's now at v2.6.1, and it has one dependency that never appears in package.json: the exact HTML structure of the Hacker News front page. HN can change that structure any day, without a changelog, and they owe me nothing.
Sorting 30 rows of a table is a weekend project. This post is about everything else: the selector that survived a layout change and the one that didn't, the badge that tells users it's my fault, the GitHub Action that checks HN's HTML every morning, and the timestamps HN quietly rewrites.
