Contrarian

Words worth sitting with.

Contrarian is a Chrome extension that replaces your new tab with a single idea — drawn from Paul Graham's essays and the minds he reads. One quote per tab. No feed. No noise. Just a thought and where it came from.

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The corpus

125 quotes from two sources:

• Paul Graham's essays — lines extracted from his published writing, linked directly to the source essay on paulgraham.com
• PG's curated collection — quotes he gathered from others on his quotes page: Feynman, Churchill, Perlis, Knuth, and more

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

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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, jump back to them, export as markdown
• Daily shuffle — seeded by date, so the order is consistent per day and different tomorrow
• First-time onboarding — two-step walkthrough on install, never shown 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 quotes are bundled with the extension and never leave the browser.
• Seeded shuffle — Math.floor(Date.now() / 86400000) as seed ensures everyone on the same day sees the same order, and it rotates daily without any server.
• Chrome Storage API — favourites and onboarding state persist via chrome.storage.local.
• No framework — vanilla DOM, 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.