What does it do exactly?

Displays a Hacker News icon on your browser that changes color when the top story changes.

How does it do it?

The extension opens a websocket connection to the Hacker News Firebase (https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/) so it can detect new top stories in real time.

Source code at https://github.com/robbiewain/hack-the-news

I really just made it for myself but others have found it useful so I'm posting here. Enjoy!