The Curious Case of the Y Combinator Bookmarklet

I frequent the /new page of Hacker News, usually to find interesting articles that were missed by the masses¹. In recent years I noticed that people were submitting “Y Combinator Bookmarklet” at least several times a week. From time to time, this would get a small number of upvotes.

After a while I started wondering why people were submitting this so frequently. Reviewing the bookmarklet page, it suddenly became clear². Logged-in HN users were clicking the link which would then submit the bookmarklet page itself to Hacker News. At some point these links were simply automatically marked dead whenever submitted.

But, there is a better (and simple) solution! Just add javascript to prevent the default behavior. The yellow highlighted text below shows the change.

This allows users to drag the bookmarklet to their toolbar while preventing them from accidentally submitting to HN. An ancillary benefit is that, due to how YC titles their pages, it will no longer be known as “Y Combinator Bookmarklet.”