marrone

I was finding it a little hard to find when someone replied to a comment I made, or to quickly view if there were any new comments on a post I may have submitted.

So I made this little firefox extension to tell me when someone has replied to a comment I made, or posted a comment on a thread I submitted. A little YC icon will appear in your statusbar (ala Firebug) which will highlight whenever you have a new comment. Clicking opens a pane (again, similar to firebug) listing the comments with the ability to click to go straight to the page with the comment (and highlight the new comment if you so desire).

It can be grabbed here if anyone is interested: http://wildstabmedia.com/hackernews

If you want the source to modify it to your own needs or add to it or whatever, just save the .xpi to disk and unzip it.

It was not meant to steal page views from HN, so it really is very simple, and amounts to pretty much just an rss feed to comments related to you. Some notes:

- it does not attempt to display comments in any nested hierarchical way

- column header colors are gimped on Windows (if anyone cares Ill try to fix that)

- the comment tree is currently a fixed height

- without an api, I resorted to a page-scrape of the fetched response, making it brittle (in the event HN changes layout). I made a feature request: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151926

it should work for ff 2 or 3, linux or windows

What are your views on what the aim of a company should be;

a) a target size or

b) continuous growth of some rate.

Also, should it be relative to what else is out there?

For example, should Microsoft continue its pursuit of Yahoo! (at the costs of its stock value)? Once upon a time MS was probably happy with their size, but since Google is a bigger kid on the block now, they feel they need to grow more simply to be #1 again.

Someone else recently asked why YC startups don't strive for even grander visions of Facebook proportions (the fact that is easier said than done is a different issue).

So my question is, should you as a company decide a target size/market-share to reach at which point you will be happy, or is it a continuous growth that matters more regardless of your current size (or lack thereof). And does the existence of a bigger competitor mean you must do whatever it takes to outmatch them?

Somewhat related, is the question poised by Michael Arrington as to whether YC News wanted to grow or stay under the radar.