Contrarian

Words worth sitting with.

Contrarian is a Chrome extension. It replaces your new tab with a single idea from Paul Graham's essays and the minds he reads. One quote per tab. No feed. No noise. Just a thought and its source.

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The corpus

125 quotes from two sources:

• Paul Graham's essays: lines from his published writing. Each line links to the source essay on paulgraham.com.
• His curated collection: quotes he gathered from others on his quotes page: Feynman, Churchill, Perlis, Knuth, and more.

Every quote links to its source. Click the essay title or press O to read the full essay.

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Features

Key	Action
Space or →	Next quote
←	Previous quote
O	Open the source essay
F	Save to favourites
L	Open favourites sidebar
Esc	Close sidebar

• Swipe left/right on mobile
• Favourites sidebar: save quotes, return to them, export as markdown
• Daily shuffle: the date seeds the order, so it stays the same all day and changes tomorrow
• First-time onboarding: a two-step walkthrough on install. It appears once, never again.

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Design

Dark background. Dot grid. System sans-serif. No serifs, no gradients, no decoration. Just the words and the accent.

The interface disappears. The quote stays.

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Stack

Zero dependencies. No React, no build step, no bundler.

manifest.json        → Chrome Extension Manifest V3
newtab.html          → New tab page shell
newtab.js            → All UI logic
newtab.css           → All styles (dot grid, animations, sidebar)
quotes.json          → Static corpus — 125 quotes with author, source, and URL
icons/               → Extension icons (16, 48, 128px)
generate-icons.html  → Canvas-based icon generator utility

Key decisions:

• Static JSON corpus: no backend, no API, no tracking. The extension bundles the quotes, and they never leave the browser.
• Seeded shuffle: the seed is Math.floor(Date.now() / 86400000). Everyone on the same day sees the same order, and the order changes daily without a server.
• Chrome Storage API: favourites and onboarding state persist in chrome.storage.local.
• No framework: vanilla DOM, a single JS file, custom CSS animations.

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Install

1. Clone this repo
2. Open chrome://extensions in Chrome
3. Enable Developer mode (top right)
4. Click Load unpacked and select this directory
5. Open a new tab

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Credits

Built by ohm.