nowfound

Life & fun · August 14, 2023

Anonymize HN – a Chrome extension to anonymize Hacker News users

I wrote a small Chrome extension that allows the user to replace all usernames on Hacker News with either the string `anonymous` or a deterministic hashed value.

Anonymize HN – a Chrome extension to anonymize Hacker News users launched on August 14, 2023 with 45 votes, #1,476 of 4,347 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.

Visit chrome.google.com ↗Alternatives

In plain words

Anonymize HN is a Chrome extension that replaces usernames on Hacker News with either the word "anonymous" or a consistent hashed identifier. Users can choose which anonymization method to apply while browsing the site. The extension is designed for people who want to reduce username-based bias or focus on comment content rather than commenter identity when reading discussions on Hacker News.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • Login with HN (Unofficially)2022 · loginwithhn.com · ▲436

    (Unofficial) Login with HackerNews

  • HS
    HN Special – A visual theme and Chrome extension for Hacker News2013 · gabrielecirulli.github.io · ▲87
  • I made a tool to hide HN usernames and reduce bias2022 · hackerwhos.com · ▲38

    Hey HN, I made this tool after I read a pretty interesting pg essay - http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html He talks about changing some HN usernames' colors to orange and then deciding to revert back So I thought it could be interesting to remove usernames entirely. This Chrome Extension just replaces HN usernames with question marks. I've enjoyed using it so far myself and I'm curious what you think about the concept?

  • HN
    Hacker News user experience enhancement browser extension2023 · carina.app · ▲153

    Hello everyone! This is a browser extension that attempts to enhance Hacker News user experience, while your data is kept secure, and private (never leaves the browser). Browsers have evolved significantly since doing a v1 back in 2010, which was one of the contributing factors, for attempting a complete re-take few months ago. Personally, I was surprised how useful it turned out to be when browsing around HN. On the linked page you can find install link(s) from web-browser stores, and demo video/screenshots of the features[1] What do you think ? [1] including, browsing content with…

  • Chrome Extension for the one thing I miss on HN2013 · chrome.google.com · ▲59
  • A Chrome extension to see notifications for comments on your HN threads2021 · chrome.google.com · ▲79

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗

Launched alongside, August 2023

the whole month →
  • Resend▲1,325

    An entire collection of pre-built components with a much faster development experience.

    Dev tools · 2023 · resend.com

  • STORI AI▲1,316

    Your ideas become visually compelling branded social posts

    AI · 2023 · storiai.com

  • Kombai▲1,079

    A new AI model that you can prompt with UI designs

    AI · 2023 · kombai.com

  • User Persona Generator▲1,014

    Understand your audience without 50 interviews

    AI · 2023 · founderpal.ai

  • Lottielab▲869

    Create and ship lottie animations to sites and apps faster

    Dev tools · 2023 · lottielab.com

  • LLMs can generate valid JSON 100% of the time▲854

    Outlines is a Python library that focuses on text generation with large language models. Brandon and I are not LLM experts and started the project a few months ago because we wanted to understand better how the generation process works. Our original background is probabilistic, relational and symbolic programming. Recently we came up with a fast way to generate text that matches a regex (https://blog.normalcomputing.ai/posts/2023-07-27-regex-guide...). The basic idea is simple: regular expressions have an equivalent Deterministic-Finite Automaton (DFA) representation. We…

    AI · 2023 · github.com