I got tired of deleting tracking parameters from URLs
PlainLink is a macOS menu‑bar app that removes tracking parameters from URLs copied to the clipboard. It monitors the clipboard, strips known tracking parameters using a Rust engine, and preserves the original URL for restoration. The project is open‑source, runs locally without network requests, and seeks community contributions for rule sets.
- ▪PlainLink watches the macOS clipboard and removes known tracking parameters before URLs are pasted.
- ▪The cleaning engine and related components are written in Rust, while the UI is built with Swift/AppKit.
- ▪Only parameters covered by explicit rules are removed; unknown parameters remain untouched to avoid breaking links.
- ▪The app stores the original URL to allow restoration via the menu and is distributed as an Apple Silicon developer preview.
Hacker News (Ask HN) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 40 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49064775 |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:07:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T05:52:33.456Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T05:52:33.456Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | JQUzd9aaRKzA · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Hey HN, I built PlainLink around a simple idea: the clipboard is a better place to clean tracking links than the browser.Links get copied from browsers, Messages, Slack, email, terminals, and native apps. A browser extension only sees one part of that. PlainLink watches the macOS clipboard and removes known tracking parameters before the URL is pasted anywhere else.The menu bar app is native Swift/AppKit, while the cleaning engine, clipboard watcher, installer, diagnostics, and restore functionality are written in Rust. It runs locally, makes no network requests, requires no account, and does not depend on a browser extension.The part I cared most about was avoiding broken links. PlainLink only removes parameters explicitly covered by a rule.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.