I use my own site to check HN, http://hackerbra.in http://hackerbra.in In terms of grabbing top comments quickly for articles that take my interest, it's unbea

I use my own site to check HN, http://hackerbra.in http://hackerbra.in In terms of grabbing top comments quickly for articles that take my interest, it's unbeatable. edit: if someone is interested, they should make a plugin that scrapes HN, to allow hovering over a HN item to see the top comment(s). (it can also scrape my site if it encounters a temp ban on HN -- although Javascript can scrape anyhow, so it could be done client side.) -- in fact hovering or right-clicking over any Comments links around the web to reveal comments would be awesome instead of having to be forced to click through all the time, including in the rss reader. Also, bookmarking or somehow recording any particular useful comment would also be great. You could also use that bookmark data and similarly send it to a central site, to build up a new social news site based on comments. (it could end up looking like http://hackerbra.in/links http://hackerbra.in/links and http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments). Headlines are linkbait now, stories are poorly written, but comments can and do have insight. Another use would be in hovering over shortened links. OTOH, it could be something webmasters install. The Backtype API would be useful for this, but it is too limited at present (no url lookups.)