HN is great for the links people share, but a big part of the value I get comes from reading the discussion around them. I realized I was always opening the article in one tab and the comments in another, constantly switching back and forth.

I figured there was probably a simpler way, so I threw together this userscript to merge the two.

1. Clicking a link from Hacker News opens the article with a side panel containing the discussion. It doesn't require your credentials, is resizable, and is easy to tweak if you want to customize it.

2. If you land on an article that has previously been shared on HN, the script finds the existing discussion and adds a button in the top-right to open the panel.

Feedback welcome.

This is slick. 2 things.

1. If you name your script with the extension .user.js it is easier to click on to automatically install at least with tampermonkey. 2. When I went to this link from the main page, on mobile I had to scroll to the right to see the (-) to minimize because the sidebar was too large: https://elizabethtai.com/2026/06/10/substack-writers-you-nee... It may make some sense to start minimized so I can read the article first, but I can easily modify the script to do that.

Firefox has a new Split View that's useful for this, but you still have to left click and select open in split view (M) then click the link. You also used to be able on some browsers to craft a link that was href="tab1.html|tab2.html", no idea if that's still a thing or if it was limited to "home page" setting.

~10 years ago (wow) I made something similar where you could embed HN comments in your own site. It was the opposite end of consumer though, for webdevs to embed it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12898366

Note: I took it down when it seemed it could degrade HN quality

I also wrote a Monkey script to save clicks when reading papers: just embed PDF webview into the Arxiv abstract page. https://github.com/OneMoreSecond/FileSave/blob/master/arxiv_...

It seems the software productivity has exploded in the agent era. However, do we treat every point of daily experience seriously enough? Do we recognize such pains actively and try to eliminate them (often easy), or just tolerate infinitely?

This is great and is also something that I've always had an issue with.

What I do now is open the HN comments, and then when I'm ready to look at the link + comments, right-click on the title and Open in Split View.

I think the amount of upvotes you’re getting here suggests that it might be worth building a proper browser extension for this!

Would you be interested in making one?

Nice. I’ve been using the new split tabs in Chrome. Works perfectly. I believe Firefox had this first?

hehe, I opened chatgpt and the little button blocks the three dots

Haha, this is so cool and can't believe I didn't think about it. I've been opening 2 tabs per HN link on my phone since forever!

Nice idea ! How do you handle duplicates ?

Phew, thought I was the only one doing that. I thought I was missing some core site feature lol.

Thought I was the only one hahaha

I feel ya. I'm always middle clicking twice, story and comments.

This shouldn't be a script (no offense, great job!). It should be built into the browsers!

Very cool!

Now make a user script that blocks posts titled "I was tired of X, so I...".