Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

by pg • 19 years ago

262 1590 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

pg51• 19 years ago

I noticed a several people suggesting features in other threads, so I'm starting one explicitly for that. I know there's a lot that needs improving; the site is pretty bare-bones at this stage. So propose whatever new features you think we need, and vote for the ones that you want most.

sharpshoot3• 19 years ago

This is more a content issue but to really build the community is have more fully fledged profiles - with location, bio - make it one or two lines max and a website or blog link. If we are what we think/read then it would be a great starting point in finding cofounders or people who are on the same wavelength. I would also agree on seeing the latest comments - and maybe highlighting posts which you've commented on/ or submitted showing if there were new comments that you haven't read. So show "7 comments | 3 new" so it would be easy to come back to your home page and see how the discussion has evolved.

davidw4• 19 years ago

Yes! That's something I don't like about reddit - I spend my time giving them free content, and I don't even get a link back to my own web site:-/

jwecker12• 19 years ago

I find myself marking up comments of the same 2 or 3 users more often than others. They don't have ultra-high karma or anything- they just are interested in the same articles and discussions I am. It would be nice to learn more about them.

pg51• 19 years ago

Ok, we have profiles: click on your name and put whatever you want in the "about" field.

notabel4• 19 years ago

More important, I think, than displaying the number of new comments is making it possible to /find/ them. The reordering of comments is usually a great thing, but in a relatively involved discussion, it can become quite a chore to find that new comment.

I'm not sure what the best way to implement it would be, from either an algorithmic or HCI standpoint, but it certainly would be nice if you could come up with a way to make new comments stand out in threads. (Preferably with new defined by when the user last viewed the page, rather than being a static global definition.)

brett11• 19 years ago

You wrote on reddit that an RSS feed is coming. If you're prioritizing that would be my first choice.

akkartik13• 19 years ago

Counterpoint to all the calls for an RSS feed: Do others find reddit's front-page feed useful? Nobody at a social news site has yet figured out how to do the RSS feed right, IMO. I find myself using my browser to read reddit a lot more than my aggregator. For example, it's hard to capture the action on a comment thread, or to create filtered feeds by user. Here's one idea: http://features.reddit.com/info/xjvr/comments If user-specific feeds are infeasible (for server bandwidth or computation reasons) it seems RSS feeds are low-priority.

bootload2• 19 years ago

'... Nobody at a social news site has yet figured out how to do the RSS feed right, IMO ...' How about RSS feeds for individual users comments? Who likes checking into 'roach motels'? I don't. The number of sites I've added content /., use.perl, perlmonks, reddit only a few allow you to extract *your* insight. '... RSS feeds are low-priority. ...' possibly true, but why should you have to go back to a site/page when you can just grab the data & use it as you like?

danw12• 19 years ago

I would quite like RSS feeds.

Specifically I would like an RSS feed for individual users so that if I like all the links submited by a particular user I can follow them easily.

wbornor• 19 years ago

I read reddit almost exclusively through their RSS feed. Its a critical function for any site... what site owner wouldn't want to broadcast to an Opt-In audience of passionate users?

mogston2• 19 years ago

RSS was actually the first feature i looked for - so very glad to see it working. I use netvibes to scan around 50 feeds every morning and afternoon, so the availability of the feed is critical if i am to monitor what's posted. Thanks!

pg51• 19 years ago

done

etfb• 18 years ago

Half-done, at best. Just getting a title is not much use: RSS feeds are supposed to save you time, and give you all the content where you want it (ie in your reader) not just give you a bunch of links that are no different than the HN "new" page.

Or is there a third-party technology that I'm missing that will solve that flaw?

dpapathanasiou3• 19 years ago

I'd like to see an "announcements/feedback" section where people can tell this community about their projects and get comments back, i.e. similar to what happens (less formally) at Joel Spolsky's "Business of Software" forum.

akkartik13• 19 years ago

Why not submit a blog post the normal way? Is this a separate kind of post?

dpapathanasiou3• 19 years ago

Well, people tend to dislike it if you submit your own blog posts (you're biased, too wordy, trumpeting your own horn, etc.). So this would be a place to hold virtual design reviews: ask people to look and provide objective feedback; the comments thread would function as the Q&A part between the hacker and the community of reviewers.

hayeah• 19 years ago

I would second this.

In my mind, however, what would be more useful for us budding founders is a place where we can share our ideas and projects in their early embarrassing states. It would be nice the be able to get feedback right at the beginning when I have only the the vaguest idea, and then to be guided by feedback as the project develops and matures. I would not be comfortable to share my pre-pre alpha project on reddit. And people would not be interested.

I believe that the search-space is too great that we should ever worry about other people stealing our precious idea. Starting from one point, different people would diverge and develop in different ways.

I don't know. But I would really welcome more openness. I think when an idea is interesting, and new, people would rather cooperate, and help along. Competition only happens (I hope) when people are chasing after the roughly same fad.

akkartik13• 19 years ago

I think comments are where the action is. Three simple things that get most of the bang of markdown IMO: Working permalinks for comments, paragraph dividers and clickable links.

wicked2• 19 years ago

There should be a page which lists the submissions that have recently been commented on. Otherwise, it's essentially meaningless to make thoughtful comments on old threads. Having a *hide* option would be welcome too.

pg51• 19 years ago

there is a prototype of this at news.ycombinator.com/active

rmack0053• 19 years ago

For the time being, I'd settle for just converting newlines to br's. Adding hyperlinks before there's solid infrastructure for dealing with spam would be a mistake. I'll be surprised if more than few days go by before spam shows up, even without hyperlinks.

pg51• 19 years ago

Spam actually showed up the first day. Fortunately we already had good tools for dealing with it.

pg51• 19 years ago

done; we now have all three of these

manuel• 19 years ago

maybe allow people to add a short, one-line description for each submission, so one has more more info to decide whether to check it out or not.

danw12• 19 years ago

Quick and dirty solution is to add a quick description to the end of the title

pg51• 19 years ago

I'm considering doing this for questions (i.e. submissions with blank urls). I think it would be a bad idea for stories.

BrandonM8• 19 years ago

This could be possible with a mouseover description, simply throw the description into the "title" property of the <a> element.

e.g.

url: http://howtowriteagoodemo.com/consider.html

title: How to make a demo that people will truly consider

description: Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.

This would result in --

<a href="http://howtowriteagoodemo.com/consider.html" title="Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.">How to make a demo that people will truly consider</a>

jwecker12• 19 years ago

marking a comment up or down should use ajax- especially so browser history is preserved (pressing the back-button to get to the front page). I assume comments can be marked into the negative range for those hopefully rare occasions where it's needed? [please don't test it on me!]. Other than that I love the minimalism.

papersmith3• 19 years ago

>marking a comment up or down should use ajax

Without ajax I'm sometimes discouraged from voting at all, because it's difficult to find my location after a refresh, especially on long pages.

eli8• 19 years ago

It doesn't even really have to be AJAX. You could solve the problem just by setting up an #anchor so that when the screen reloads after voting, it just the user back to where they left off.

Goladus2• 19 years ago

I'm just going to point out that this really makes me only vote on topics I really care about. It doesn't really bother me.

BrandonM8• 19 years ago

I agree with this suggestion, but for another reason. There have been a few times when I'm writing a reply and I stop to think for a moment. Occasionally, during this pause, I will glance up and notice that I haven't voted the article up yet. Unfortunately, when I do vote the article up, everything I have written up to that point gets cleared. I have tried pressing the back button, but it tends to take me back to where I was before I started writing my comment.

I understand that this is an error on my part, but that doesn't alter how frustrating it can be.

Hexstream9• 18 years ago

What about a separate feature requests page for those that already have been accepted and implemented like this one? And maybe another for formal rejections.

I think it can get confusing reading suggestions for features that have been implemented since the request was made for less obvious features than ajax voting. And they're not particularly relevant anymore. Of course I wouldn't simply delete them so a separate page would be a good compromise.

abstractbill• 19 years ago

How about an area where we can submit startup advice and vote on it, for example: "don't use bank of america for your business banking", "do incorporate as a C corp in delaware", etc. I think the advice submitted and comment threads generated could be quite valuable.

ecuzzillo3• 19 years ago

So, the community that talks a lot about startups is a good idea, but taking community advice directly seems a little iffy. It may be that this group happens to be mostly composed of people who could successfully run a startup, but I doubt it, and if it were true, it certainly wouldn't last very long. If you take any random set of people interested in startups, it's not likely that a majority of them would vote up the right pieces of advice. I prefer the more general submit-links-and-comment model, since the links tend to be more useful data than pure advice.

corentin3• 19 years ago

1. Change the color of the "comment" link please (or use a button). At first, I wondered why all those messages had the word "comment" in them :) And then I tried to respond to this message and searched for the "comment" button and I was enlightened! 2. Document before writing new features :) I'm really curious to know what the "showdead" option is (I don't want to try it because the name is so scary). 3. A URL (or free text) field in the profile. 4. Keep it simple. I think it's nearly perfect as it is (the sign-in form is great). 5. We want to see Arc and the source code of this app :)

corentin3• 19 years ago

litepost2• 19 years ago

Showdead (and related "new deletion feature") clarification from pg fyi:

Most relevant excerpt (MRE): "You can still see dead stuff if you set showdead to yes."

The rest of the comment for context: Your comment is still alive

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969

even though the post you commented on was deleted.

I just added deletion. When something is deleted, it really goes away. This is different from marking something as dead. You can still see dead stuff if you set showdead to yes.

Deletion is for submitters who change their mind; marking stuff as dead is for editors to do to spams and offtopic submissions.

litepost2• 19 years ago

What's interesting is that I can only delete this, most recent comment/post. (Older threads and comments I have made I am no longer able to delete.) This is an FYI.

I wonder what the exact time-window is, because I am also unable to delete previous posts (since pg made this mini-announcement).

I wonder when/if it's going to be possible to delete your YC account (and all related information).

Digg promised this feature at "The Future of Web Apps" but it has yet to materialize (on Digg), I believe.

Does anyone know what the situation at reddit is wrt control of "your own personal information"? :)

I really am curious as to when the Web will evolve policies and products that adequately address this concern/"feature request."

rmack0053• 19 years ago

I know this is an early version and things are still a bit rough, but just for the record: 1) The number beside my user name (top of the page) is a bit confusing. At first I thought maybe it meant I had some sort of message waiting to be read, or perhaps that I'd made one comment, which didn't make sense because I'd just created the account. Perhaps a label before the number would clear things up: (karma: 1). 2) I didn't realize at first that the arrows were used for voting. The main page (http://news.ycombinator.com/) had only "up" arrows. I figured they were used to collapse/expand additional content, so I ended up inadvertently trying to vote for several arbitrary items (I hadn't created an account yet, so the votes didn't count - I don't think). Once I saw the "up" and "down" arrows together I got their purpose. Perhaps, instead of removing one (or both) of the arrows you could simply display a ghosted one? Or perhaps replace the arrows with thumb up/down icons? 3) "7 points by pg 1 hour ago | 7 comments" reads like you (pg) added 7 points an hour ago. Is this meant instead: "7 points | by pg | 1 hour ago | 7 comments"? New feature: Why not combine the scoring with Flickr like tags. Instead of just being limited to increasing/decreasing an items karma, give me the

rmack0053• 19 years ago

4) Tell me there's a character limit, and what that limit is :) New feature: Why not combine the scoring with Flickr like tags. Instead of just being limited to increasing/decreasing an items karma, give me the option of increasing/decreasing tags, and the ability to add a new tags of my own which others could then vote on. This would probably be a good feature for Reddit as well. They could do away with the handful of subreddits they have and use this tagging scheme instead.

jwecker12• 19 years ago

I think this is a great idea. It would let things like slashdot's "funny" and "insightful" happen organically. I've been toying with doing something similar for a political blog for a while.

jwecker12• 19 years ago

Here's one: get newlines working. Either allow <br /> elements or translate the newline before applying the comment. It'll make the comments a lot more readable. I know it can be abused, but I don't think that's really a worry in this forum. You can always turn it back off later, right?

jwecker12• 19 years ago

Nitpick. I noticed this is working now when you type two newlines, but when it's just one newline it translates into a space. I'm probably the only one who cares though...

johnmartin78• 19 years ago

Add in URL based duplicate recognition.

danw12• 19 years ago

When you submit a duplicate URL it sends you to the original submissions page instead

ch• 19 years ago

It would be more interesting if news.ycombinator.com also checked if a URL was directly linked from a previously submitted URL; the URL was from the same site as the previously submitted URL.

Before you could commit a new submission news.ycombinator.com would present a list of matches (in descending order by date) so that you could compare what you are about to submit versus what is already submitted.

leoc• 19 years ago

Please let users add a few words about themselves on their userpages. It's a useful way to learn a little more about an interesting commentator. And isn't that the main purpose of the site? Links to homepages can of course be useful too.

wicked2• 19 years ago

Possibility to delete comments and submissions.

pg51• 19 years ago

you can now delete a comment if it has no children by editing it blank

pg51• 19 years ago

Now submissions and comments have a delete button, and you can delete comments even if they have children.

mattculbreth• 19 years ago

1. AJAX for the voting arrow(s); 2. RSS; 3. Search

acheung• 19 years ago

search! Sometimes I want to ask a question but I feel like it's one of those things that's already been posted, but it's kind of hard to find it.

Elfan• 19 years ago

- Some way to mark as read/downvote/hide. I prefer to be able to go through the "new" section and do this. - Comment history in profile. - "Best of" history. - This is a silly little thing, but make the X comments/discuss link larger. I usually go down the page and open that page for any interesting article in a new tab. - Someway to format posts so ones like this don't look silly and return to the main page thread after editing.

bluemoo2• 19 years ago

Definately return to the main page after editing a comment please. I think I hit 'update' 3 times before even thinking about why I hadn't switched back.

phil2• 19 years ago

bookmarklet! I would submit more links if there was a bookmarklet that submitted the page I was on.

danw12• 19 years ago

EDIT: I should have said this is a submit article bookmarklet. I'm working on trying a like/dislike.

I've just made a realy quick and dirty bookmarklet. It's only tested in firefox 2 and it's not quite how I would like it to work but it's a start. I'll hopefully update it later to work better.

Just add the following URL as a bookmark:

javascript:(function(){var d=document;var b=d.body;var c=b.insertBefore(d.createElement('center'),b.firstChild); var dv=c.appendChild(d.createElement('iframe'));dv.id='ifrm'; dv.height='30%';dv.width='100%';dv.src='http://news.ycombinator.com/submit'; d.getElementById('ifrm').scrollIntoView(); })();

Let me know if it works.

brett11• 19 years ago

The main functionality I would want out of a submit bookmarklet is prepopulating the url field so I don't have to copy and paste it. Showing the submit page in context of the page I am on does not help as much.

eli8• 19 years ago

Which brings up another feature request: tweak the CSS so that really long text in a comment (without any spaces) doesn't cause the whole page to expand beyond 1024 pixels.

pg51• 19 years ago

done (by you, in fact)

mynameishere• 19 years ago

Start this trend, please: TWO sets of arrows. The first set indicates: Yes, I agree, or No, I don't agree. The second set is only ONE arrow, pointing down. This means, "This comment is spam/offensive/offtopic."

ralph19• 19 years ago

So the second set, the down arrow, could really just be something like an exclamation mark?

wastedbrains• 19 years ago

I would love a save feature... I someone already said this and I missed it, my bad. I check sites like this often while I have a quick minute at work, but if I notice a really good article I want to read I don't always have time. I would like to save it so at the end of each evening I could log in just to read over things I thought looked interesting. I do this in reddit all the time, and expect that I would like doing the same here.

pg51• 19 years ago

We now have this, in the sense that you can see a list of links you've upvoted.

reitzensteinm3• 19 years ago

I'd like to see the source code, or at least a part of it, to see what Arc looks like in action.

pg51• 19 years ago

Not logging users out when we restart the server. (If you find yourself suddenly logged out, that's why. Sorry, will fix.)

jwecker12• 19 years ago

(he finished this)

brett11• 19 years ago

a list of all of a user's comments on their user page would be nice

pg51• 19 years ago

done

akkartik13• 19 years ago

And it's great too. As soon as I can see a list of my own comments it becomes relatively easy to check recent ones for responses, and automatic notification becomes less important. It's interesting how these features interact.

staunch8• 19 years ago

Definitely search. I use reddit's search feature all the time to find old articles.

akkartik13• 19 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15041

dougw• 19 years ago

I'd like to see a list (RSS feed?) of my comments that have been replied to so that discussion can continue.

brett11• 19 years ago

Bare bones API-like stuff could go a long way. Add a url parameter to the submit page that prefills the url field and anyone can create a bookmarklet for submitting. Add a status page that takes a url and returns whether or not it is in the system, its current rating and the id to pass in for modding and someone's on their way to a low rent firefox extension.

vikram• 19 years ago

Though restricting the site to invitation only isn't a good idea. Letting people invite friends that they know would be interested from inside the site would be convenient.

omarish• 19 years ago

We'd like to see a geographic search so that founders can meet other founders based on where they live. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=445

danw12• 19 years ago

I've heard many people give this wonderful piece of advice:

"Ignore your user's requests. They'll ask for every feature under the sun apart from the one that they really need. You'll spend all your time adding new features rather than making your site genuinely usefull"

Unfortunatly I cant find any citations. If only quotationsbook.com was ready!

sharpshoot3• 19 years ago

Dan thats probably jason fried of 37signals

danw12• 19 years ago

Aye, sounds like chapter five from Getting Real possibly, "Start with No":http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Start_With_No.php

BrentCastle• 19 years ago

This is utterly nonsense. I'm even a basecamp subscriber (used in small side projects). Many have requested GANTT charts be added to basecamp, but jason et al. don't use them in their pm process so they refuse to ever add them no matter how many people request them. I know several companies that have been unable to use it due to this lack of a feature. It's not that we like GANTT charts, but there is a BIG difference in project management between a small design shop (ie 37 signals, most yc type companies, etc.) and a large regulated proprietary engineering company (like my current employer).

harb• 19 years ago

Could we add a domain name that each post refers to. That way we could tell blog posts, from PG essays, from e-zine articles.

pg51• 19 years ago

done

adamd• 19 years ago

Atom or RSS support.

altay2• 19 years ago

ideas.yc.com.

we've all got more ideas than time, and it's a shame to let them languish in our individual imaginations. so how about creating a public clearinghouse for ideas where they're a) subject to reddit-esque competition, and b) "open source" -- available for anyone to pursue.

it'd be a meme pool.

altay2• 19 years ago

hey, look at that... line breaks! =)

danw12• 19 years ago

You might want to try http://www.cambrianhouse.com/ as a place to throw ideas around.

Alex39175• 19 years ago

I support this suggestion. I have a bunch of problems I'd like people to solve that might potentially make a great startup for someone.

RichardPrice2• 19 years ago

This is a totally awesome idea IMHO.

danielha6• 19 years ago

I believe I mentioned this in the other thread, but I'd like to see my comment after submitting it instead of it just jumping to the top of the page.

An ajax implementation for the comment voting would be nice too. This was mentioned along with some other great ideas, but it's something I'd personally love to see.

danw12• 19 years ago

A similar users list. Show me all the users who like the same stories as me and comment in all the same places. I've already noticed some users who are similar to me and a nice system for making sure I don't overlook any would be great.

pg51• 19 years ago

Now that is an interesting idea. I'll mull over ways to do it.

danw12• 19 years ago

jamiequint• 19 years ago

It would be nice to see articles you have commented on as well as ones you have posted in your profile

pg51• 19 years ago

we now have this

Alex39175• 19 years ago

I'd like a way to differentiate the startup tips from other discussion topics. I am really interesting in participating in the community, but I don't want to have to wade through stuff I've already read in my RSS reader. Already the front page is filled with mostly stuff I've already read, which is drowning out potentially interesting discussions.

Ninjamonk• 19 years ago

another one for rss here. I love this its just what I have been searching for.

maybe the stories to open in another window also.

mogston2• 19 years ago

I'd like to see profiles display the owners' url/blog. It would give a great insight into the mind of the poster.

epall• 19 years ago

I'd like to see an option to view all articles I've upmodded, downmodded, or commented on. It makes a great place to go back to if I want to find something I said or read a while back and can't quite put my finger on it.

gustaf• 19 years ago

I'm having issues with cookies, I have to keep logging everytime I visit, this does not happen on reddit, anyone have an idea or experience similar behaviour?

jwecker12• 19 years ago

This might be a pain, but could you make this topic sticky for a while?

jwecker12• 19 years ago

linked at the bottom of the main page. n/m

jwecker12• 19 years ago

Bug or undeveloped feature? Go to edit a comment- above the text box there is a "comment" and "edit" link. The edit one just refreshes the page. The comment link, though, shows... ??? It looks like I can comment on my comment- had a nice "nil" sitting there. I didn't have any replies to the comment I was editing, though, so maybe I would have seen something more?

reitzensteinm3• 19 years ago

I think this was mentioned by pg earlier (I'm putting it here so it doesn't get forgotten), but auto generating a link when an URL is posted would be very handy.

iamelgringo7• 19 years ago

Tags.

It's one of the features of Slashdot that I like. The flip side of tags is that they make search a lot easier to implement.

joshwa10• 19 years ago

On the user pages it'd be useful to see their comments as well as their submitted articles...

pg51• 19 years ago

done

iamelgringo7• 19 years ago

As far as I can see, there are two tar pits that Digg and now Reddit are stuck in:

1. Lack of focus and quality:

In my experience, users frequent a site because it has quality content and they leave when the quality of the content declines. Digg and more recently Reddit, are experiencing a loss of focus and quality and as a result are losing their initial users. Diggs quality is so bad it is now pointless to read and much to my chagrin, Reddit seems to be following suit. Reddit seems to be drowning in a rising tide of noobs. Apparently, there arent enough old users around to down-vote the crap posted by the noobal hoard. From a quick read of comments, it seems many long-time users are angry and feel disenfranchised. Its because of this that those users whose content made Digg and Reddit popular in the first place are now leaving those sites and taking their great ideas with them.

2. No troll guards:

Nothing poisons an online community quicker than a few nasty trolls. Another one of the reasons that Im pulling away from Reddit is because it is getting mean. Both the links that are posted and the article forums are being destroyed by trolls stomping around unchecked. I hope Reddit can fix this problem. If not, Im going to stop spending my time there.

The impression that I get, Paul, is that your goal is to make this YC News a start-up news site and a community of potential founders; not simply another social news site. The only way that I can see to maintain quality content and to filter out the trolls is to institute some form of moderation. Straight democracy leads to anarchy; thats why I think a news site needs to be a republic. I dont think, by any stretch of the imagination, that Slashdot is perfect, but they do have a system where moderators are selected from heavy and moderate users on a rotating basis. The system filters out new and spam accounts and gives preference to high karma users. It seems to keep the trolls in check. It also encourages people to take more ownership and to participate in the community.

Slashdots FAQ explains their moderation system here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520

There is also a brief discussion of their anti-troll rules here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm2000

Thanks for setting up the site. It scratches an itch that Ive had for a while.

iamelgringo7• 19 years ago

As far as I can see, there are two tar pits that Digg and now Reddit are stuck in:

1. A lack of focus and quality in the content. 2. No troll guards.

1. Lack of focus and quality In my experience, users frequent a site because it has quality content and they leave when the quality of the content declines. Digg and more recently Reddit, are experiencing a loss of focus and quality and as a result are losing their initial users. Diggs quality is so bad it is now pointless to read and much to my chagrin, Reddit seems to be following suit. Reddit seems to be drowning in a rising tide of noobs. Apparently, there arent enough old users around to down-vote the crap posted by the noobal hoard. From a quick read of comments, it seems many long-time users are angry and feel disenfranchised. Its because of this that those users whose content made Digg and Reddit popular in the first place are now leaving those sites and taking their great ideas with them.

2. No troll guards: Nothing poisons an online community quicker than a few nasty trolls. Another one of the reasons that Im pulling away from Reddit is because it is getting mean. Both the links that are posted and the article forums are being destroyed by trolls stomping around unchecked. I hope Reddit can fix this problem. If not, Im going to stop spending my time there.

Slashdots FAQ explains their moderation system here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520

There is also a brief discussion of their anti-troll rules here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm2000

Thanks for setting up the site. It scratches an itch that Ive had for a while.

herdrick• 19 years ago

Search - and it needs to have the reddit feature where if you search for an URL, you get the submit page when nothing was found. That's how I submit all my links in reddit. This site doesn't have that, so I wonder if I'm wasting my time when thinking up or typing in a title for a submission - since it may already have been submitted.

Also, I need the "save link" feature.

Good site so far.

dngrmouse• 19 years ago

1. Have it so you can be automatically logged in. I have to manually log in every time I visit the site (using Safari here).

2. Just like Reddit does, show the domain each link belongs to. Reddit has this in brackets after the headline, which works fine. Since I don't have much free time, there are some sites that have sub-par content which I avoid reading, and it helps to know where I would end up without having to hover over the link.

volida3• 19 years ago

Bug: I think there is a bug when you edit one of your comments. Instead updating seems there is a new entry?

volida3• 19 years ago

BUG: If you submit a comment, you are returned to the page you were commenting. But if you refresh that page, the comment is re-submitted. A "no-cache" and an expire header of the submit request page would avoid this problem.

pg51• 19 years ago

This is now fixed. Every form now does a redirect afterwards.

(It turned out to be a lot of work. The software used to think in closures and I had to make it be able to think in urls as well.)

Chingy• 19 years ago

You should be able to vote down bad stories. I thought this wouldn't be needed but we're starting to get off-topic submissions, so we need to be able to bury them.

eli8• 19 years ago

Maybe the rules could even be tweaked to keep good stories with a minority viewpoint from being buried. At the very least, maybe have down votes count as only 1/2 a vote. (So there would have to be greater than 2:1 of people against a story to bring it down below 0 points)

Alex39175• 19 years ago

Can you change the CSS so that the links that have already been visited turn a different color?

Alex39175• 19 years ago

Also, in Firefox on OS X some of the comments are gray and others are black. Why is this?

joshwa10• 19 years ago

it corresponds to comment score

joshwa10• 19 years ago

option to open articles/comments in a new tab by default?

bookmarklet set (I often use my "reddit this" bookmarklet to get back to the comments page for an article I've clicked)

nilobject• 18 years ago

I second this. I have this option turned on in reddit, and it keeps me from accidentally navigating away from reddit. I keep clicking on links here and by the time I read the article, I forget to press back instead of close, causing some frustration.

danielha6• 19 years ago

I did a search and didn't see this mentioned.

In any case, a very useful feature would be a way to track your comments in the different submissions and the stories that you voted up.

There are a lot of really great stories on here and sometimes I don't have the time to finish reading some. I'd like to be able to find the stories again quickly in my recent history.

joshwa10• 19 years ago

Would love to see the "inbox" feature of reddit, so I can see when one of my comments has been replied to.

Or simply an email or RSS notification... you wanted to spark the discussion, right? So give me a way of knowing if I've sparked anything!

Also, it'd be nice to see on the list pages something along the lines of "N comments (most recent M |minutes|hours|days ago)"

eli8• 19 years ago

I just wanted to emphasize how important this is to building a dialog (and a community!). I don't want people replying to my comments, so right now I basically have to bookmark each thread that I've commented on and remember to come back and check.

joshwa10• 19 years ago

Yay! Witness the new "threads" feature! Thanks, PG!

eli8• 19 years ago

After you edit a comment, it's very difficult to figure out how to get back to the discussion. This is a problem with posting a comment or performing other actions too, but it's particularly annoying when you edit a comment.

pg51• 19 years ago

This is now fixed: try the "parent" link.

danielha6• 19 years ago

The parent addition is helpful, but to find the origin of discussion, one would have to keep following parent links. Having a link to the main discussion would be nice.

reitzensteinm3• 19 years ago

Would an implicit +2 for every unique user that posts a comment in the thread be a good idea? Or maybe number of characters in comments / 10, where only those comments posted by people with Karma of >10 are counted? Or maybe there should be a longetivity modifier, where a topic that was heavily voted up and discussed at length should stay for, say, twice as long as a topic that was just voted heavily up?

Or there could be a 'Top Discussions' side by side with 'Top' so there's a different filter for people looking for news (which you want to be recent and not obscured by long running threads) and people looking for discussions (which I'd argue will be more valuable if the popular ones are kept around for a while).

Open for abuse, most definitely, but if the purpose of this site is to build community, I think those topics that get discussed should be more easily accessed. Ideally people would appreciate some valuable discussion and upvote the thread, but this thread here is a perfect example of one that should probably stick around for a while, but has nearly 3x as many comments as upvotes.

Just throwing ideas out - tell me if I'm crazy.

danielha6• 19 years ago

When submitting a link, sometimes I want to add a text in addition to the title. Usually I just add a comment in the discuss/comments section, but it'd be nice to have a field for that specifically.

This works especially well if you're submitting a link and want to add a remark about why it might be relevant for others to check out.

ralph19• 19 years ago

Adding a comment doesn't work because it can easily drift down the page. There needs to be a way to supply an initial comment with a URL that remains tied to it at the top of the page. It doesn't need to be votable.

ralph19• 19 years ago

As I use news.yc more I think this is more and more vital. Not only so the OP's comment stays with the URL, but that comment also needs to go into the RSS feed, otherwise I just get a load of one line titles which give little clue as to whether I want to read it or not. I end up wasting time on crap.

comatose_kid• 19 years ago

Hi,

Like many others here, I read a lot. Consequently, I find that I have already seen many of the links on this site.

With this in mind, you should consider providing a link next to each article that a user could click if he/she has already read this article elsewhere.

This info could then be used to give an idea of how old the article is, and would also perhaps help prevent overlap with reddit/digg, thereby improving the value of your site.

rms21• 19 years ago

What happens to old posts? I would like a way to browse the archive.

Also, threads you comment on should show up in your profile so you can keep track of ongoing conversations.

ed• 19 years ago

Second the thread archive. I heard there was a secret YC video posted in an old thread but can't find it anywhere! :(

pg51• 19 years ago

There's now a "best ever" page: http://news.ycombinator.com/best

RichardPrice2• 19 years ago

I think an archive of all previous entries would be really helpful.

imp• 19 years ago

I would like to have the option of changing my vote on articles and comments. There are times (on reddit) when I vote an article up and then read the comments and find that the blogger was actually full of crap.

jgamman• 19 years ago

i like the 'friends' option. i unfortunately didn't use it enough at Reddit when it was new and now i can't filter for the users that consistently matched my tastes (or challenged them) - the noob tide has risen... i like reddit but a filter that lets everything in isn't filtering anymore. i guess i'm looking for a way that allows me to create my own 'recomendations' type algorithm. i think if it's on and clear at the beginning, it might allow the system to scale if/when it hits a major growth curve and allow that community vibe to remain.

vegashacker3• 19 years ago

Better display of source code in comments

vegashacker3• 19 years ago

Something like a "code" tag that you can put around sections of your comment, and within these tags, the formatting will be left alone. This is supposed to be a technical news site after all, so I think this should be pretty high-priority. Thanks!

pg51• 19 years ago

You can now include code in comments:

 (def codetree (file)
   (trav + 1 (readall (infile file))))

Anything that appears after two newlines and a blank space is treated as code, till there's a line that doesn't begin with a space. This is like the markdown convention, but you don't have to use four spaces; one will do.

Incidentally, the code above tells me the number of nodes in the code tree of a file. Not just leaves, which would be

 (len (flat (readall (infile file))))

but interior nodes as well. To me this is the best measure of how long a program is. I used to go by lines of code

 (def codelines (file)
   (w/infile in file 
     (summing test
       (whilet line (readline in)
         (test (aand (find nonwhite line) (isnt it #\;)))))))

but I found this was encouraging me to do the wrong things.

(This kind of test matters because I'm constantly trying to make news.yc shorter as a way of pushing functionality down into Arc.)

Here's trav, btw:

 (def trav (f base tree)
   (if (atom tree)
       (base tree)
       (f (trav f base (car tree)) (trav f base (cdr tree)))))

It traverses a tree, doing something at every node. So e.g. CL copy-tree would be

 (def copy-tree (tree) (trav cons (fn (x) x) tree))

If you're wondering how the second argument to trav in codetree could be 1, it's because a constant when called as a function simply returns itself. This turns out to be quite handy.

minimalcriminal2• 19 years ago

I have some questions about arc if you don't mind :)

Why 'whilet instead of 'while and why 'aand instead of 'and? I thought one of your aims was to produces a minimal set of "axiomatic" operators (functions, macros, special forms) which gave the maximum utility. So couldn't these be generalized into a single operator?

Also, isn't ")))))))" overkill for such a simple function, Can reader macros be defined within lisp? (like if you wanted to make } close all parenthesis up to the top level for example)

henning2• 19 years ago

Is Arc going to support concurrency and/or manycore systems?

The original writing(s) on Arc assumed a free lunch that would continue for decades (justifying a lack of emphasis on scalability and efficiency in implementation, I thought), which already seems kind of naive. You can already buy 8-core systems from Apple, mang. It's the future.

emmett2• 19 years ago

I like the abbreviations you're using. "w/" in particular is extremely readable. And who wouldn't love a function call (isnt it #\;) in real code. #\; looks a little bit like Perl walked into the middle of your Arc program though.

shiro3• 19 years ago

> constant when called as a function simply returns itself.

I thought a sequence at a procedure position acted like aref, e.g. ("abc" 1) => #\b, right? So the automatic promotion of constant to constant-function occurs only for non-aggregate types?

mr_luc4• 19 years ago

See, THIS is the only reason I come to news.yc.

I love the idea of startups, but I've got the wanderlust. During the part of the year where I have net access, I watch ycombinator closely, and I'm not really hoping to see startup news.

mr_luc4• 19 years ago

Stupid questions alert. ____________________________

In On Lisp, you mentioned that implementing continuations with closures via transformation to CPS could be accomplished by writing a code walker, but that this would be a "serious undertaking" in Common Lisp.

This struck me at the time and ever since as painful, but understandable. Macros aren't first-class objects in CL, so the code you're walking through could be very complex due to macro-expansion, and I could be wrong, but I don't remember if the resulting code would necessarily contain clues that tell us what macro generated it, etc.

Could one assume (and it is definitely an assumption, or speculation, not a deduction from what you've given us here!) that it would be much simpler in Arc? Say, a page or so of code?

aston4• 19 years ago

Automatic creation of the numerical lambda return. Clever...

Why "atom" instead of "leaf"? Especially since you acknowledge it's a "tree"?

Zak4• 19 years ago

Looking at the expression

 (isnt it #\;)

I'm assuming "it" is an implicit variable meaning the result of the last expression. I'm also assuming since you have "isnt" you also have "is" and it's used like this:

 (when (and (regex-match "[0-9]" foo) (is it 4))
    (print "it is 4"))

Does boundp exist in Arc, or are unset variables null? I've always thought making them null would make code shorter, though it might cause more problems than it's worth.

plinkplonk• 19 years ago

Very Interesting ! - especially the idea of using a count of the parse tree to optimize the language. Can you tell us anything about how well (or if) Arc is converging to a potentially releasable state?

cwarren2• 19 years ago

Figure I might as well post this here as well:

Numbers _are not_ functions! This kind of attitude is what gets you python's list formatting operator:

>>> "%s" % ("a string",)

'a string'

>>> "%s" % ["a string"]

"['a string']"

I've been burned by that before, and I'm not exactly stupid.

(I don't think this posted the first time. Forgive me if this turns out to be a double.)

edit: Bah, I can't get this code to format properly. How's that for ironic ;)

gyro_robo• 19 years ago

A truly advanced Lisp dialect will infer parentheses.

danw12• 19 years ago

Oooo, a new shiny update with RSS. Thank you!

create_account• 19 years ago

Make urls in comments clickable, ie. automatically wrap markup around them, or let us type the markup ourselves.

cbthiess• 19 years ago

I'd just like visited links to be more different from unvisited links. Right now I have to look closely to distinguish between the two.

ecuzzillo3• 19 years ago

Feature request: remember me being logged in with this browser.

akkartik13• 19 years ago

How can I find pages that are in the no-mans-land between top and new? I saw a submission for Trevor's article on languages: http://tlb.org/busywork.html but now I have no way of finding the discussion about it. On reddit the submit bookmarklet would find it with its dup-detection.

Dup detection seems brain dead to implement; is there a deliberate reason news.yc doesn't have it?

akkartik13• 19 years ago

Ah, I just realized that it had already been in for a week before parent :}

This was one of those features I was reluctant to experiment on to check on the status of. Perhaps news.yc needs a status page for new features or responses to feature requests here?

I suppose an RSS feed for pg's comments would be one fix.

papersmith3• 19 years ago

Maybe feature requests should be a subreddit of its own? There's so much going on here, I can't tell if the feature on my mind is already mentioned.

papersmith3• 19 years ago

I'd be nice to have permalinks of comments in the profile page, and ideally a notification when there's a reply.

danw12• 19 years ago

Can we get the ability to see what we've liked and where we've commented from our profiles please? I keep forgetting where I've commented and what that awsome article I liked was.

Also bug report. When I enter some characters in comments such as and it goes a bit funny.

jwecker12• 19 years ago

Please, if I'm on this site for more than an hour or so a day, please pop up a message that says "Get back to work, slacker!" and don't display the page for the rest of the day. Thank you.

dfranke7• 19 years ago

Ability to view my own comment history. When I click on someone else's user id, I see their comments. When I click on my own, all I see are my preferences.

Edit: correction, I guess the user pages show just submissions and not comments, for any user. So I guess I'm requesting comment history.

dfranke7• 19 years ago

And there was much rejoicing! yaaaaaay. Thanks, Paul!

juwo2• 19 years ago

1) no way to tell which are new posts - I cant believe it didnt occur to you to color old or unread posts differently! Idea - change the color of every post title as it ages, from Yellow to black. (or light gray to black). 2) poorly organized. I had to reply individually because I wasnt sure they would see it. See here http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1890 3) what is showdead? 4) there seems to be a clamor of links to articles.

TryAndTry• 19 years ago

a "subscribe to feed by email" option will help !

Hardly takes any time to plug the feed to FeedBlitz/FeedBurner.

akkartik13• 19 years ago

Which page is this comment for? http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2028

Please add a link from a comment's permalink page to the page it was commenting on.

pg51• 19 years ago

We now have this: the "parent" link.

akkartik13• 19 years ago

Absolutely awesome turn-around, thanks!

ralph19• 19 years ago

I dislike clicking "parent" multiple times in a row. Can we have a "root" as well to go straight to the top.

danielha6• 19 years ago

I am very much in favor of having a "top discussions" section. I tend to be more interested in active discussion than just popular submissions.

pg51• 19 years ago

prototype at news.ycombinator.com/active

shara• 19 years ago

A search please.

jwecker12• 19 years ago

These ideas need some refinement, but:

If an article you submit reaches the end of the "new" page with no up votes it decreases your karma by a point. Yah, it would affect me too, but that's irrelevant.

Related, submitting a new article by someone with negative karma not allowed- or maybe the article is assigned that same negative karma that it must overcome...

juwo2• 19 years ago

I cannot see when someone has added a new comment to my question or link. Please color unread posts differently.

notabel4• 19 years ago

From an HCI standpoint this would be tricky, but it would be great to have a system for handling dupes and near-dupes by merging their comment pages. For instance, right now there are two articles about the recent demo of Metaweb/freebase. I commented on one of them, returned to the mainpage, and realized that the other (which also had no comments) was now higher ranked.

This raises a quandry as to whether I should cross-post, or just move on and hope that the discussion happens in the one I picked.

(Note, this is the harder case, of near-dupes: the two articles are different, but \begin{precog} most of the discussion will be about the product they reference.\end{precog} Hence it is semantically reasonable to merge their comment threads.)

So, as a oneliner: add a way to merge duplicate articles.

smackaysmith• 19 years ago

A way to 'share' stories like I can on Google Reader.

wendyp2• 19 years ago

Yes, yes! Me too!!

zaidf• 19 years ago

When displaying list of stories, it would make readability much easier if alternate rows were white. Current listing of stories requires too much mental engagement for me personally.

Alternate row coloring would increase page scability for story listings.

-Zaid

domp• 19 years ago

I have no idea if this has already been brought up (considering I just skimmed over the responses in this discussion) but I'd like to see another tab on top that maybe is for questions that people are curious about. I see that people are posting in the news areas not links but a single question that they're looking for people to respond to and create debate. They're not necessarily news worthy contributions but important none the less in fueling conversations.

bootload2• 19 years ago

Couple of suggestions on urls

* clean urls (because they are cool) ~ http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

- ie: '/comments/363' instead of '/comments?id=363'

- '/user/bootload' instead of '/user?id=bootload'

* ability to view posts by date

- ie: '/2007/mar/12' or '/2007/03/12' (eg if I use YYYYMMDD format)

* inline urls such as 'http://foo.com/bar' interpreted as links

- ie: http://foo.com/bar becomes a clickable url

* long urls are automatically converted to tinyurls

- noticed twitter doing this automatically now

joshwa10• 19 years ago

Please, when visiting already-submitted-stories via the bookmarklet, DON'T consider that an upvote. I'm just using it to find the comment thread.

pg51• 19 years ago

If other people agree with this, please upvote joshwa's suggestion. If you want to keep things the way they are, upvote this reply.

joshwa10• 19 years ago

I should note that this is the way the reddit bookmarklet works... they're the ones who have set my expectations/habits.

You could also make a like/dislike bookmarklet the way reddit does...

jadams• 19 years ago

Local subdomains, or groups, a-la craigslist. E.g. toronto.ycombinator.com, or somesuch.

I understand YCombinator's rationale for having founders move to Boston, or the Valley.

That said, it might be great for you guys to get local footholds, where people can meet, organize, find co-founders, etc., before deciding to seek YC funding.

dfranke7• 19 years ago

On 'self' posts, have the submitter's own comments always be listed first.

duds• 19 years ago

Please use a link rel="alternate" to let us know faster that you have a feed :)))

BrandonM8• 19 years ago

This is a simple request. How about making the Y in the upper left corner of the page be the shortcut icon? Nearly all of my bookmarked web pages have a representative icon, and it couldn't hurt anything, right?

BrandonM8• 19 years ago

Thank you :).

dougo2• 19 years ago

I want a way to change my password. Or is there one and I'm just blind?

dougo2• 19 years ago

RSS is nice, but spammy. There should be a way to subscribe to an "N-point feed" that only includes stories above a certain threshold.

LeBleu2• 17 years ago

I second the idea that the RSS needs a way to be more filtered to the quality articles.

Also, having something more than just a title and link in the RSS feed would be nice, but I suppose that you don't really have summaries anywhere yet anyway.

Perhaps you could include the points in the title of the RSS feed entry? Google Reader seems to allow RSS feeds to update already sent articles, I dunno if other RSS readers support that well though.

jdamato• 19 years ago

Is there a way to change my password? I don't see a form for it anywhere, but maybe I missed it. If it doesn't exist, this would be a great feature to add for sure.

abrs• 19 years ago

Can you please add a link to the comments page to the RSS feed with each Article. Then the article's link would go the the site and the content would include a link to the comments. Also, the number of comments should be displayed. This would integrate the RSS more tightly into the site.

jmtame• 19 years ago

A Digg feature that checks if you've already submitted a link twice, or one similar to it (base it off the title of the article, or base it off the description entered by the user).

inklesspen• 19 years ago

AJAX-based upvoting: I click on the up arrow for a comment, and the page totally refreshes, and I'm at the top of the page. Then I have to scroll back down and find where I left off. Annoying.

Link to the news.ycom page in the RSS feed, rather than the external link, or in addition to the external link: If I want to comment on the external site, or read what other people have made, I have to go to the main news.ycom page and find the comment thread. This wastes maybe 30 seconds of my time, which can be important when I'm still formulating what I want to say and don't need the distraction.

Sam_Odio2• 19 years ago

Regarding links to the comments in the RSS feed, it would also be nice to preview the comments in the rss reader as well.

sf2007• 19 years ago

Is there a separate holder for reporting bugs?

Here is the problem I am facing. I m trying to post a link to http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/earlystagevc/2007/03/web_20.html - but when I submit, it takes me to another posting for which the URL is http://earlystagevc.typepad.com. So, baasically othe system thinks that I'm trying to update the old posting or something, and it ends up not showing my post.

Try submitting this.:

URL: http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/earlystagevc/2007/03/web_20.html Title: Web 2.0 Bust?

Alex39175• 19 years ago

I noticed that news.YC isn't letting me log in using opera 9.1 on OS X. I can't figure it out.

keven• 19 years ago

Bug: not all comments by pg is shown

Thanks for answering my question, I noticed your comment http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9074 did not show in pg's comments page http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

I assumed that comments displayed on the page are sorted by time

aston4• 19 years ago

I'd appreciate the page title including the caption for the news story you're viewing. When I've got a bunch of tabs open, it would be nice to know which story is on which tab beyond "Y Combinator Startup News."

pg51• 19 years ago

done

BrandonM8• 19 years ago

Right now, the threads page is sorted by the creation time of the leftmost comment (I think). Could it instead be sorted by the creation time of the most recent comment in the thread?

Example:

I write a comment (1)

I write another comment (2)

I write another comment (3)

I write another comment (4)

Someone replies to (1)

I write another comment (5)

Current sort order:

- reply to 1

Proposed order:

- reply to 1

BrandonM8• 19 years ago

Bug report: In order to include a < or > sign in your post, you have to write < or >. This is fine (although a bit cumbersome), but when you later want to edit the comment, instead of placing < in the text box, < shows up instead, so that every time you want to edit the comment, you have to change every < to <. (The same thing occurs with >, too.)

I'm thinking this problem would be easy to fix, but I'm also curious: why can't we just write e.g. < and have it be converted to < at post-time? Of course, it would still need to be converted back at edit time, but I think it would make posting code or html snippets much simpler.

Ironically, I just edited this post for about the 3rd time.

BrandonM8• 19 years ago

I would like to see a convenient way to see my upvoted comments (in order of most recently received upvotes). The motivation is this: after seeing that my karma has gone up, I'm curious which of my comments was deemed interesting. Currently, I have to scroll down the threads page until I notice one that looks higher than I remember. This is so clearly inefficient and error-prone that I think a software solution is necessary.

This is not completely motivated by narcissism :). I feel that by noting which of my comments are appreciated, I can see which aspects of my writing styles and my thinking are found to be interesting by others.

BrandonM8• 19 years ago

A way to view comments to a submission by the time they were posted, preferably as some kind of toggled option at the top of the page. One use case is clearly in this thread, where finding new feature requests can be very difficult. Another is just keeping up on the comments to my submissions; once a submissions comment thread gets substantially long, it can be difficult to keep up on reading the new comments.

I think the ideal way to reorder would be to consider a comment's post time to be that of its most recent child. This means that when someone replies to a thread, the entire thread will now be the first on the page, with each sublevel ordered in the same manner. Of course, I knew reply to the submission itself would show up at the very top.

This functionality could be extended to the threads page (which relates to a suggestion I made a little while ago) and even to the Startup News page itself, so that we could see which submission has been commented on most recently (because as a parent, its child would have the most recent reply).

brett11• 19 years ago

Make urls in parens link right by ignoring the final paren in the href

see:

(http://bugbear.com)

extantproject• 19 years ago

pg51• 19 years ago

fixed: (http://ycombinator.com), and for that matter http://ycombinator.com.

brett11• 19 years ago

and http://ycombinator.com"style="font-size:30px ?

cdr• 19 years ago

Parsing link parens is broke in a different way - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottler_(IRC_client) chops the (IRC_client) from the link.

gibsonf1• 19 years ago

Add Classifications:

With the speed that articles drop from the system, and the probable increase in discussions that may have already happened, it sure would be nice if articles could be classified (i.e.: Funding, Infrastructure, Programming, Startups, etc etc), so that users could hit on the class their interested in to see what was discussed in the past. The startup bar could get an added heading like "categories" that would then let the user select. You could allow user based classification at the article and comment level to feed the categories. Maybe you could let the leaders add new categories (preferably a hierarchical structure)

far33d• 19 years ago

Blank url posts are sometimes hard to follow because the order of the comments is not chronological -- hence, It's hard to find the first comment, the actual question.

It might be nice to have a chronological sort, or maybe, for just blank url posts, to have the first comment always appear first.

motoko• 19 years ago

Maybe self-ref posts could submit a text description that always stays at the top?

erik• 19 years ago

I would like to see an rss feed of individual user's comments. An rss feed of http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg etc.

staunch8• 19 years ago

Would be very nice if a users's profile page said when their account was created.

keithfrost• 19 years ago

A full-text search facility for postings would be nice.

jey9• 19 years ago

Bug report: deleting a comment from a thread does not decrement that thread's comment count by one.

brett11• 19 years ago

a good way to put chunks of code in comments. ideally some wrapper notation around the code that does all or some of the following for its contents:

-uses a monospaced font

-newlines get turned into <br> so that lines show up next to eachother

- < and > get html escaped

- extra spaces and tabs get turned into  s to preserve indentation

ralph19• 19 years ago

Documentation on the mark-up allowed, e.g. italic, some way to post normal ASCII characters for code snippets, which in turn require line breaks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13261

benhoyt• 19 years ago

Do you know if this is now documented anywhere? Even on a third party site?

Testing: italic bold [link](http://benhoyt.com/) -- hmmm, can you do named links?

ralph19• 19 years ago

The HTML header's title should have more page context in it so the browser's Back menu isn't a list of identical titles making selection difficult.

Cheers, Ralph.

ralph19• 19 years ago

The page showing the comments of a user should only show each post once. At the moment, if I have a conversation, me1 - you1 - me2 - you2 - me3, then m3 appears first as the most recent, then later me2 downwards, then later still me1 downwards. It's redundant clutter. The only benefit of this arrangement is my most recent posts are first instead of the most recent chain of my posts. I'd prefer the latter.

Cheers, Ralph.

jey9• 19 years ago

Feature request: a way to escape an asterisk. Sometimes you do want to write a literal asterisk. (E.g. to say "a times b")

ralph19• 19 years ago

How about * yielding *.

Cheers, Ralph.

jey9• 19 years ago

This hack worked great until the recent change that stopped the evaluation of sequences of * and &. Again there's no way to get a literal asterisk that I know of.

ralph19• 19 years ago

Using character entities, e.g. & to give an &, works on submitting the comment, but editing the comment populates the form's area with an unescaped ampersand causing corruption on submitting the form. Encoding and decoding needs to be symmetrical.

Cheers, Ralph.

sabat• 19 years ago

Search! Search!

jey9• 19 years ago

http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/

nivi2• 19 years ago

1. Mark all items as read. 2. Avatars.

thumbarger• 19 years ago

tags and tag clouds

brett11• 19 years ago

Prevent this kind of nonsense: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15630

brett11• 19 years ago

here's a more interesting example:

http://google.com"style="display:block;background-image:url(http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif);height:110px;width:276px;font-size:0.000001px"

pg51• 19 years ago

fixed

nickb• 19 years ago

Request: More meningful tag text. Paul, could you copy the text from the title of the article and palce it in between title tags?

jey9• 19 years ago

Bug report: When I am logged in, http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=evgen shows that evgen has made no comments, but http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=14943 is written by evgen. The parent comment to this comment is one written by me. When I'm logged out, http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=evgen shows the thread where evgen responded to a comment I made.

pg51• 19 years ago

Does this still happen?

jey9• 19 years ago

Appears to be fixed. Thanks.

whacked_new• 19 years ago

My karma shot up mysteriously sometime in the past few days. I thought people were replying to my posts but no, my posts were still lonely.

If this isn't a bug, the request is for a more transparent karma system.

presto102• 19 years ago

RSS of best list, not only new. Thanks.

usablecontent• 19 years ago

Ability to find out if the new article that I am posting has already been posted in the past or not. I wanted to post a few articles from venture blog but before posting I searched on Google using "title of article + news.ycombinator" as a query.

ralph19• 19 years ago

More stats on the leaders page please. Karma breakdown by submissions and comments. Number of submissions and comments. Mean, mode, median? A means of entering a username and seeing the table +/- 15 around it.

npk• 19 years ago

I second this submission. I'd like to know the mean/mode/median of (karam/# submissions) for example.

willarson3• 19 years ago

I'd also love to see the stats. As ralph mentioned elsewhere, having an API for accessing the entirety of the stats would be great. But something else like a weekly dumping of the posts table from your db would be great too.

mojuba2• 19 years ago

Show the number of responses to my posts/comments next to my name, let's say: mojuba (44/120), where 120 is the total number of messages in all threads I'm involved in. This will give me a chance to know if someone replied in a thread I started by just looking at the number. What I'm doing instead is I'm checking my "comments" page regularly, from top to bottom to see if anyone replied to me.

I saw this feature on other social sites, it works pretty well.

pashle• 19 years ago

A "change your password" feature.

kogir• 19 years ago

So, it might be my browser, but whenever someone uses a British pound or a Euro currency symbol in a comment, it shows up as two ascii characters rather than the desired unicode character.

You might wish to: 1) verify your database and code support unicode 2) use the utf-8 charset for your pages instead of ISO-8859-1

byrneseyeview• 19 years ago

On the 'submit' page, adding a note about the feature request thread would save us lots of "Upvote this if you'd like news.yc to..." posts.

nivi2• 19 years ago

I commissioned a Firefox extension to add a "Mark as read" button to news.yc: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=19816

ralph19• 19 years ago

Originally at http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=19920

Paul, might you modify the submissions page to have some guidelines?

Point people to the Feature Requests thread as they clearly don't notice the link at the bottom of the page. Remind them that this is Startup News so it would be good if the posting was applicable. Tell them where to find Slashdot if that's what they want. And explain that they are not the only ones with RSS feeds so they don't need to just copy links from there to here.

Personally, I think news quality has degraded since karma came along. Some people are clearly keen to move up the leader board and starting a new thread is one way to do that. How about not rewarding karma for a thread's score? It can still be voted up by others to show it's interesting but karma must be earned by quality comments on the thread. Either that, or let us down vote threads to penalise non-applicable threads.

Better statistics may help show some light. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18085

rms21• 19 years ago

Long URLS break the page.

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp...

pg51• 19 years ago

fixed

wendyp2• 19 years ago

I would really like ycombinator to be supported by the Sociable plugin - I don't think it takes too much to get it added, and the plugin is automatically updated every week on WordPress blogs.

I hear it is easy to do:

http://push.cx/sociable

euccastro4• 19 years ago

I found no place for bug reports, so I'll abuse this thread instead.

I tried to write 'cliché' (cliche with acute accent) and it appeared garbled in the forum. Some problem with unicode?

I have found out you can use escape characters here: cliché - cliché. I don't know if you intend this.

Some tests:

´a - á

´e - é

´i - í

´o - ó

´u - ú

^a - â

^e - ê

^o - ô

~a - ã

~o - õ

~n - ñ

¨i - ï

¨o - ö

¨u - ü

thorn - þ

eth - ð

,c - ç

Some tests of random html:

bold italics This Is A Big Header!

This may or may not show up between horizontal lines.

This is separated by nonbreaking spaces.

euccastro4• 19 years ago

Funny; when I edited the parent comment, the confirmation page showed the correct characters. When I went back to the thread view, the chars were garbled again.

A test of unescaped angle braces: Usage: foo

If you fix this and you want me to retest the funky chars after that, just let me know: <my username here> at yahoo dot com.

euccastro4• 19 years ago

Oops.. sorry for the repost; I should have imagined that abusing a feature request thread for bug reports was not much more original than the converse. :P

Sam_Odio2• 19 years ago

Comment URLS don't support the https protocol. https://DoesNotWork.com vs http://DoesWork.com

pg51• 19 years ago

fixed

ralph19• 19 years ago

A taller text area box for entering comments. Say double the current height.

nirs9• 19 years ago

10-15 lines would be nice.

ralph19• 19 years ago

Is the order of comments stable? Sometimes it seems they change without the number of points altering. A stable ordering would be good.

ralph19• 19 years ago

I'm now sure it isn't stable, which makes re-finding your place and making sure you've read everything more awkward than it need be.

ralph19• 19 years ago

The article's domain displayed in parenthesis afterwards has an occasional leading period, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=24263 and .brainspl.at.

brlewis4• 19 years ago

a tool for admins to move feature-request submissions to comments here

mhartl2• 19 years ago

Add a password reminder, and also password confirmation during registration. I mistyped one of my standard passwords when registering, and as a result I was locked out of YC News until I noticed that the password was stored in the Firefox on my laptop's Windows (blech!) partition.

jeremychase-2• 18 years ago

No doubt.. I have an account that I can't access because I don't know the password.. So.. now I'm jeremychase-2 .. sigh.

ralph19• 19 years ago

The /threads page doesn't show recent comments. I replied to an old comment of mine on the Feature Requests thread to add more information. That new comment should then have appear at the top of my /threads page, possibly with the other one above it as context. It didn't appear at all, presumably because the parent wasn't displayed. This is wrong. It's a problem that there's no pageing on /threads so I can't view all my posts, but at least the recent ones should be visible.

davidw4• 19 years ago

markdown enabled comments.

earthboundkid2• 19 years ago

#And a preview button couldn't hurt.

willarson3• 19 years ago

I would love markdown, when I rewrote my blog software I switched everything to use markdown. The worst part is that YC news does accept much of the markdown syntax... but then does different things with it. Humbug.

tvon4• 17 years ago

a small subset of markdown would be enough, namely blockquotes...

ralph19• 19 years ago

The HTML produced has errors, e.g. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fthreads%3Fid%3Dralph

palish8• 19 years ago

They use the <center> tag which, as far as I know, isn't valid HTML. So they'd have to restructure the page, which is more trouble than it's worth.

lupin_sansei2• 19 years ago

A Podcast channel on YC News so we can submit and upvote good podcasts. See here for more info:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29039

lupin_sansei2• 19 years ago

Please delete/collapse threads on here for features that have already been implemented.

pg51• 19 years ago

One of the features that is (I hope) coming soon is an actual feature request list, rather than a comment thread used for one.

greendestiny• 19 years ago

Why? I don't think it helps the site to segment it like that especially when its not that high traffic.

davidw4• 19 years ago

YC.news idea - category/tab for "our sites/startups"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29606

dpapathanasiou3• 19 years ago

For the "comments" page, how about putting each comment in context, by indenting it underneath the submission to which it belongs?

I know you've got a "parent" link there already, but it's not something people are going to click for each one (and the comment text alone is often not enough to figure out what it's in reference to).

joshwa10• 19 years ago

For some reason, the submit page isn't doing dupe checking anymore-- it doesn't take me directly to the discussion page of the article being resubmitted. This means I have to go back to the homepage and find the article I clicked to find the discussion page.

Also, there's no link to the homepage from the submit page-- clicking the icon takes me to the YC main page, not the news.yc main page.

iloveyouocean• 19 years ago

Add a way to contact another user directly, not necessarily Personal Message, maybe something along the lines of sending an email address from one user to another privately.

The current method seems to be posting your email address in the comments with something like, "Hey, email me about that . . ."

prakash3• 19 years ago

------------------------------------------------------------- Can we build a local community out of YC news? Currently YC is focus is the US. For the RestOfWorld, can we have a country/city page that links to a local startup website or a yahoo/google groups page?

This would to some extent help facilitating potential co-founders -- since that's a constant them on this board.

-------------------------------------------------------------

ralph19• 19 years ago

news.yc doesn't validate its parameters properly, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479)foo

mark-t2• 19 years ago

1. Make it clear that feature requests are not welcome as threads on the submit page. Provide a link to this thread.

2. If no URL is given, prompt the user to submit a comment before creating the thread. If given, always display that comment at the top of the page.

jey9• 19 years ago

Meta-Feature Request: Release the interpreter and source to news.yc so that we can implement Markdown, fix the &foo; conversion to not happen on the server-side, and fix the multibyte encoding problems. :-)

falsestprophet2• 19 years ago

I would like the ability to save stories in situ. But, most of all I would like for all of our comments to be saved. Unless I missed the next button, I noticed that only relatively recent comments are stored.

pg51• 19 years ago

They're all stored. More button for comments coming soon.

johnrob2• 19 years ago

A place for people to share information about web hosting vendors would be very useful. For many hackers, this is the only fiscal expense on route to a first version.

aaroneous• 19 years ago

It has been mentioned a few times below, but I'd love to see search implemented. It'd be useful for knowing what has been submitted, as well as make the wealth of information already on news.yc more accessible.

prakash3• 19 years ago

Can we build a local community out of YC news? Currently YC is focus is the US. For the RestOfWorld, can we have a country/city page that links to a local startup website or a yahoo/google groups page?

This would to some extent help facilitating potential co-founders -- since that's a constant them on this board.

staunch8• 19 years ago

Allow users to choose to either add a comment or add a sub-link to the primary link. It's amazingly common to have great links burried in the comments. It would be great if there was a way to have them show up near the top, under the primary link.

willarson3• 19 years ago

Recently I have seen the proportion of weak submissions become very high, high enough that I think a down vote arrow for submissions to help weed out content would be beneficial.

laxkin2• 19 years ago

BTW, How to restore forgotten password? I didn't find that feature on the site.

epi0Bauqu4• 19 years ago

Separate ask.yc from news posts. The questions often generate good discussions, but die too quickly because they get pushed off too quickly.

epi0Bauqu4• 19 years ago

View/search YC users by location.

aggieben2• 18 years ago

Yup. For us hackers that don't live in the Valley or the Alley, it can be hard to find peers.

staunch8• 19 years ago

Detect and prevent someone from running through a user's threads down voting a lot of them in quick secession.

Goladus2• 19 years ago

I'd like a reference page for the markup syntax used in comments.

staunch8• 19 years ago

Create a syntax for referencing "items" within the site.

[item://363|Feature Requests] or similar.

ivankirigin10• 19 years ago

I often look to the comments of a particular user, like people I know or PG.

It would be nice when looking at a comment to immediately get the full context with the submitted story and top level comment. I find myself hitting "parent" many times, when a "root" button would be useful.

jey9• 19 years ago

Bug/Misfeature: When I type the pound sign, it gets replaced with "GBP".

Keios• 19 years ago

Can you put a page views number in front of each submission?

champion• 19 years ago

I really wish the RSS feed had a link to the news.yc post about the link and not only to the link itself.

Often I want to jump to reading the thread on news.yc after reading the link itself, without having to find that story again on the news.yc page.

rms21• 19 years ago

One thing I like on reddit _is_ the arbitrarily long title names, because it is easier to come up with a good long title than a short title.

Regardless, you can get around the 100 character limit on news.yc by editing the title after you submit.

eposts• 19 years ago

Spell check. Its always nice to posts with less mistakes.

palish8• 19 years ago

If you use Firefox, you'll enjoy the benefit of a spell checker built into all <textarea> boxes.

mark-t2• 19 years ago

You should have to enter an explanation when you downmod something. Then the recipients won't be left confused, and it will enforce responsible use of the privilege. I feel this is a better solution to the abuse problem than only allowing downmods for 24 hours.

palish8• 19 years ago

Yes! Seconded.

Alternatively, cap downvoting at 1 karma, so that comments can't go below that threshold.

(Repeating from my previous post): Letting karma go below 1 adds bias to the comment for future readers, but that bias doesn't reflect how they might feel.

rms21• 19 years ago

Mark completed features as dead

nirs9• 19 years ago

Vote down for any user, because it more useful to vote down, and for ranking it does not matter how a link count is reached, by voting down or up.

palish8• 19 years ago

Not sure I've parsed your grammar correctly, but rewarding the community for participation by letting them downvote only when they reach 20 karma is a good thing.

Also, downvoting past 1 karma in general is a bad thing. It adds bias to the comment for future readers.

It really seems like downvoting in its current form is fine, and if any changes need to be made then capping downvoting at 1 karma might be a good idea.

nirs9• 19 years ago

You mean down-voting past 1 points? Why it add bias for future readers?

I also don't see why you need to reward the community. The right to down vote is not different from the right to up vote, and any user should have it. Up vote is simply "I want more of this", and down vote "I want less of this".

The same machinery used for up-votes of bad links can be applied to down-votes of good links, so you can protect the site from general stupidity.

nirs9• 19 years ago

100% font size for body text, relative size for other text. A user should get his preferred font size set in the browser.

nirs9• 19 years ago

Use black text color for author comment text, the current gray is hard to read.

nirs9• 19 years ago

Undo for voting, see reddit implementation.

palish8• 19 years ago

Not needed.

nirs9• 19 years ago

It is. When you make a mistake, you should be able to fix it, and there is no reason to prevent this.

vlad3• 19 years ago

Bring back down arrows on story submissions, but instead of voting the story down like before, enough down votes would show the community disagrees with that type of submission.

palish8• 19 years ago

It doesn't seem like that's very useful. Anyone can read the story and form their own opinion...

vlad3• 19 years ago

I didn't say the opinion, I said the type of submission. Also, the story and points would continue to appear unaffected.

What's going on with the hostilities on this site for the past two days? You could have easily said, "I have another idea about how this could work" with your link.

rms21• 19 years ago

There are a lot more posts on the front and new pages now... can I have the option of viewing 60 or more posts at a time?

epi0Bauqu4• 19 years ago

On the profile page, break out the components of a user's karma.

puneetht• 19 years ago

How about a keyword based search.

rms21• 19 years ago

Next to the email area in user profiles, add a checkbox for display/don't display email in profile.

If the user enables this option, their email address is shown as an image (or otherwise spam proofed) in their profile to other logged in users.

ecommercematt• 18 years ago

Many users aren't aware that the email field isn't public because it is visible when they view their own profile page while logged in. While your suggested solution is better, it might be an easier and quicker fix to simply add a note next to the email field indicating that the email address is only visible to the administrators. Then, if a user wanted to make his email address available to readers, he would think to pop it into the "about" field (perhaps with some obfuscation).

brlewis4• 19 years ago

Ability to check if one URL is submitted already, but then submit another.

E.g. you want to submit http://example.com/#part2

But first check if someone has submitted http://example.com/

Right now you either have to submit your less-preferred URL, or browse around and use google to see if the less-preferred URL has already been submitted.

dfranke7• 19 years ago

Provide a reply indicator similar to Reddit's red envelope. Make it a #part link to the most recent new reply on my threads page.

euccastro4• 19 years ago

Render text between asterisks as emphasized only if there is no space between the asterisk and the contained text, and only for pairs of asterisks. If there is any space, or for unmatched asterisks, assume the author really meant to place a star there. This is to prevent things like the following

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137

where the author meant to use the asterisk as a multiplication symbol.

joe• 19 years ago

I think a formatting cheatsheet would be quite useful. I was just commenting a few minutes ago, and I wanted to put some rather large URLs in my comment, but I couldn't figure out the markup to link a text string to the URL. (It's just occured to me that perhaps I should have just tried HTML. If that's the case, I'm stupid.)

jey9• 19 years ago

Please add a wiki. news.yc has become a "community" and we need a way to store stuff longer-term.

Or, if someone else sets up a wiki, could a link be added to it on the navigation bar?

ayc• 19 years ago

Can't locate a 'SEARCH in news' function.

juanjose• 19 years ago

We NEED search, unless you don't want to have a page that serves as reference for people, but only to make them consume articles.

Please, give us some way to be able to check past entries.

gojomo6• 18 years ago

http://searchyc.com works pretty well; as does searching Google with [site:news.ycombinator.com YOUR_QUERY].

epi0Bauqu4• 19 years ago

Delete from saved page (when one is "done" with that item), or at least strike out.

lojic2• 18 years ago

+1 I'm surprised this feature doesn't exist. I don't have many saved items yet, but I would think it could clutter up rather quickly.

julian• 19 years ago

What about a help page with current and in progress and rejected features? (give us a wiki and we'll write it)

I wish a way to sort|filter comments by points, date, etc. exists, but I don't know if I'm the only one. I've tried to search in this thread but I've found nothing looking for "filter" as searching by "points" is impossible (well, possible but futile)

ecuzzillo3• 19 years ago

Undo-able votes, or an are-you-sure on votes-- accidentally downmodding random comments is unhappy.

yamada2• 19 years ago

A phoenix-like quality where ongoing arguments are pushed up according to popularity ... or at least featured on the side in a box somewhere, like, "most active discussions".

yamada2• 19 years ago

A phoenix-like quality where ongoing arguments are pushed up according to popularity ... or at least featured on the side in a box somewhere, like, "most active discussions".

ivankirigin10• 19 years ago

Privately expose the voting power on account profiles.

I think it would be bad for the community to know how powerful someone else's votes are, as folks would bias voting according to whether the poster had high or low voting power.

But I'm curious how much my votes influence hotness and match the oracles.

queensnake• 19 years ago

Ability to spawn a link in a frame, like reddit, so that you can vote up or down, while or after you go read it.

chmike3• 19 years ago

A way to signal offending comments. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58389

falsestprophet2• 19 years ago

or this one: "tu es betes comme tes pieds"

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59074

chmike3• 19 years ago

The comment I was referring to is called racism. Now you write that I am stupid.

What's the point ? What is this suppose to demonstrate ?

dejb• 19 years ago

thinq4yourself• 19 years ago

rss feed just for jobs

;-)

plusbryan• 19 years ago

PG - i use news.yc on my cell phone from time to time. it seems that something changed in the last few months that makes it quite unreadable at least on my phone - all the text is centered, not left-aligned at all. Perhaps the mobile browser doesn't support whatever CSS you're using to left-align things, and taking the <center> tags literally. I don't know how much of this was my fault either. :-)

cstejerean• 19 years ago

RSS for the newest category, not for the front page. this way i can keep an eye on what's new without having to constantly refresh the page. the current RSS feed is pretty useless to me.

joe24pack• 19 years ago

when creating an account, please have a second password field for confirmation. Without that, it is far too easy to fat finger the password when creating an account.

yearsinrock• 19 years ago

private messages to other users

nirs9• 19 years ago

It could be nice to have a way to change your password.

pg51• 18 years ago

Fixed (long ago).

hollerith2• 19 years ago

I really appreciate the procrastination preventer, but would like one change.

It is not enough that the reader does not spend too much time reading and commenting on Hacker News. Because willpower is a depletable resource, it is also necessary that the reader does not expend too much willpower resisting the impulse to spend too much time reading and commenting. When the "get back to work" page comes up, I find that I have to expend real willpower not to click on the override link (anchor) at the bottom of the page. To balance that change, you might simultaneously put a link to the reader's user page, so if he really needs to, he can go to his user page and turn the procrastination preventer off. (A logout link on the "get back to work page'd be nice too.)

SamanthaG• 19 years ago

Looking at the all the positive responses to the Hacker News post "Are you a UK- based hacker..." posted by "dood", it seems readers of this site might well appreciate a forum area on the site for networking other YC readers or YC seed companies. There is a huge amount of goodwill amongst YC readers and this may be better accessed through a new part of the YC site rather than "Hacker news", eg perhaps you can build something in to allow readers to describe their skills/ideas and the type of YC readers they are either hoping to contact or happy to help etc.Just a thought.

zeantsoi• 19 years ago

tongans. lots of them.

breck4• 19 years ago

It would be nice to see your current rank on the leaderboard(if you're not in the top 30).

joshwa10• 19 years ago

please let me undo my votes! I'm reading on an iphone now, and it's really easy to hit the down button instead of up, or vice versa.

chaostheory4• 18 years ago

yeah i accidently click on the down button all the time on my windows phone too; just did it today again...

gojomo6• 18 years ago

Putting more space between the up and down could help -- for example putting the down vote on the other side of the total or even further right.

windsurfer2• 17 years ago

I would say that's more of an iPhone problem. I like the design as it is right now.

mudge• 19 years ago

Per the http standard header responses are terminated with \r\n\r\n, however the headers on Hacker News are terminated with \n\n. See: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec4.html

NonEUCitizen• 19 years ago

Is there a way to subtract points from a post? Or at least to undo an addition by mistake?

dag2• 19 years ago

Inclusion of every new post or exclusion of every post from a particular website at user's discretion. Regexp based? Just to prevent the site from effectively becoming an RSS reader.

dag2• 19 years ago

A kill file.

vasudeva• 19 years ago

RSS feed that sorts by age, not popularity. The current RSS feed is all sorts of chatty, showing me a ton of repeats. Its annoyance factor is about to eclipse its usefulness for me.

If what I'm looking for already exists, I can't find it.

pchristensen2• 19 years ago

I've never been able to handle the RSS feed. The best things I've found is http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/

wheels4• 17 years ago

Just submitted a patch for this:

http://scotchi.net/2009/03/patch-to-fix-rss-feed-for-newsyc/

jonnytran2• 19 years ago

Add a page to http://news.ycombinator.com/lists that lists the sources/domains of submissions sorted by most-submitted (or highest voted among all submissions from that domain).

jonnytran2• 18 years ago

Close enough. http://searchyc.com/top/list

edu• 19 years ago

I would like to be able to put quotes (blockquotes) on comments.

cperciva6• 19 years ago

Make it possible to lose karma by submitting garbage stories, either via downmods or (IMHO the better option) by making submitting a story "cost" a certain number of points of karma (which of course will be regained if the story gets voted up).

Recently I've seen two trends, both of which significantly diminish the value of Hacker News:

1. Some users are flooding Hacker News with submissions (in one case I counted 18 submissions in one day), and even though most of their submissions aren't being voted up, enough submissions are to make them accumulate lots of karma (which I assume is why this is happening).

2. The same stories are being posted many times by different users. I'm sure this is partly the result of #1 -- with the floods of submissions users might not realize that a story was submitted before -- but the fact that there's no "penalty" for useless submissions probably contributes as well.

pchristensen2• 19 years ago

I like the idea of submitting "costing" karma, but maybe you get a couple freebies a day. Maybe an escalating cost schedule so it penalizes people who submit their 15th story as opposed to their 5th.

Re #2, I always thought there was a unique url filter on submissions, but I've seen a couple repeats recently.

cperciva6• 19 years ago

I think there's a unique URL filter on submissions; but not a unique story filter on submissions (which would be a rather difficult AI problem).

Even with different URLs, there's really no need for 10 different stories about the MacBook Air to be posted here -- it would be much better to have one Hacker News item and have URLs to other articles posted in comments.

ptm• 19 years ago

Can the RSS feed have a link to the yc comment thread as well as to the submitted story ? Often I find the comment threads a lot more useful than the story itself.

timburks• 19 years ago

The comments links in your RSS feeds appear to be broken.

http://news.ycombinator.comitem?id=101047

slim2• 19 years ago

BUG : the RSS feed is broken here :

http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

links to YC are like this :

http://news.ycombinator.comitem/?id=101703

must be a typo.

Hexstream9• 19 years ago

Possibility of marking a story as "not interested".

Marking a story as "not interested" means it will never appear on your pages anymore. It doesn't count as a downvote.

I tend to keep up with hacker news but I'm getting tired of eyeballing the titles of all the old articles I already decided I didn't want to check out + the old ones I already checked out and know I won't want to check out again just to find the new ones.

ilmare• 19 years ago

Add link to YC comments in RSS feed, right now RSS entry contains just a single link.

lojic2• 18 years ago

Now that a comments link exists. It would be nice to have points displayed also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118589

shawndrost• 19 years ago

Put a link to the markup syntax next to all text boxes.

axod• 19 years ago

Fix unicode. (pi) shouldn't be replaced with an 'X' and other unicode characters should work.

boucher• 18 years ago

BUG, for the record: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105464

Hexstream9• 18 years ago

I think it could be interesting to see the "karma-change tally" (don't know how to call it) on stories, people and comments.

The rationale is that to me, there's quite a difference between a comment that has 1 karma because there was no upvotes/downvotes and one that has 1 karma because there was 20 upvotes and 20 downvotes.

So, we could have something like:

5-3=2 points by username

mnemonik• 18 years ago

A greasemonkey script could probably do this, it was done for reddit: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/31002

MikeW• 18 years ago

Broken Links: There are many older links in the comments in the form of http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=<num>; which returns an error (like the many comments on this page).

Those old links really should be transparently re-mapped to /item?id=<num> instead.

mojuba2• 18 years ago

For consistency of the interface I think "threads" could be renamed to "my threads" in the top bar.

kennytiltontoo• 18 years ago

clb22• 18 years ago

A lot of times i couldn't login because I just forgot my password. Send Password recovery email is a must!

bprater• 18 years ago

Search.

kirubakaran7• 18 years ago

Can we have a way to sort by karma the links currently in the front page?

imsteve• 18 years ago

"Add comment" page does not use the custom color.

Also, having the Y icon match the custom color would be great.

parenthesis3• 18 years ago

Also, the "submit" page has no custom color.

johnrob2• 18 years ago

Incorporate the age of the most recent comment next to the comments link:

52 points by pg 355 days ago | 432 comments (2 hours ago)

or something like that. It's nice to know if a comment thread is still active. On the flip side, I am less likely to comment if all of the other comments are several hours old.

thorax2• 18 years ago

Avoid having links expire all the time, or redirect to a relevant page. I see these 3-4 times a day.

delackner3• 18 years ago

Without "mark all unread articles as read" (per-page, say) the flood of articles is unmanageable without reverting back to an rss reader. Yet doing so adds a level of indirection that removes any impulse to rank items, diluting the quality of the article ranking .

Please, I love this UI. Just please add Mark as read/ignore all unread articles on this page

jdueck• 18 years ago

I'm enjoying using news.ycombinator.com, but I fear it will eventually suffer the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. The problem on the internet is a lack of scarcity. I'm beginning to think the only way to really solve the problem is through submitter fees. Without fees, I fear it will turn into a self-promoting free-for-all.

Think about the problem in terms of email spam. If email cost $0.25 to send, the spam problem would be gone. If a submission to Digg cost $10, their spam problem would mostly go away.

When everything is free, it's just one big race for the bottom. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

delackner3• 18 years ago

Think about the incentives you are creating. This fee would just get written into the contracts of viral ad companies, while enthusiastic users would be deterred by the psychological barrier of spending money to do something that feels like just saying "hey guys look at this".

yagibear• 18 years ago

Link to http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc in the submit page & beside the "add comment" button, as is done with "help" on the profile page.

This is claimed in the "Formatting fixes" entry in http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html , but doesn't appear to me now.

joshstaiger• 18 years ago

I read Hacker News via the RSS feed in Google Reader.

Looks like the comments link disappeared yesterday.

Not sure if Hacker News changed or Google Reader changed, but I think this can be fixed by putting the comments link inside a <description> element in the HN RSS feed.

yters4• 18 years ago

I would like to access all my comments. I use this site like delicious to store interesting links that I find, and share them with others.

iamelgringo7• 18 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yters

yters4• 18 years ago

Split the main screen so external links are on the left and internal links (polls, posts) are on the right.

akkartik13• 18 years ago

FWIW, this is how I separate out the two. Only internal links: http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?ask

Only external links: http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?-ask

yters4• 18 years ago

A little greasemonkey and it'd probably be equivalent to what I said. Hmm...

Breath• 18 years ago

SEARCH..PLEASE.. (not searchyc.com)

vikas5678• 18 years ago

search for posts! give us search!

initself2• 18 years ago

I second a search feature, which would be particularly helpful for some of the interesting "Ask YC" posts.

OpenWebU• 18 years ago

I third it. I can't code, but I'd be happy to help design a search -- my contribution to the community.

rms21• 18 years ago

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

lacker• 18 years ago

the easiest way to set this up would be to use some third-party service, like one of google's custom search engine things.

mattmcknight2• 18 years ago

like this? http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=017583303058397250984:tme3...

rms21• 18 years ago

http://www.searchyc.com/

technoguyrob2• 18 years ago

When submitting a form (like editing a post), my reflex is to hit tab and then enter, since this exits the textarea and then immediately submits. However, where the help link is now, this causes me to be sent to the Help page each time. This is a minor thing, but I think Hacker News should model usability and move the help link to after the submit button (or set the tab index on the submit button).

technoguyrob2• 18 years ago

Hexstream9• 18 years ago

I think it would be nice to have explicit support to mark groups of duplicates as such... When a certain threshold of users agree that they're indeed duplicates, the two or more submissions could be "glued" together so that they always show up in a tight group on the page.

The different comment threads could be merged in a sensible way, possibly by reallocating threads from comment sections with few comments. Any comment sections that have no more comments or never had any would be disabled. This would avoid having an unnecessarily split discussion of the same topic between multiple comment sections.

huhtenberg6• 18 years ago

This is probably a dupe, but still .. it's a widely accepted notation outside of this site that enclosing the word in * implies 'bold' decoration, in / - 'italic' and in _ - 'underscore'. Seeing that here * italicizes the word strikes me as odd.

I realize that bold and underscore decorations go against clean appearance of the site, but it'd be nice to add standard slash notation for italic.

chaostheory4• 18 years ago

mark www.website.com and website.com as dupes

earle• 18 years ago

0) API 1) obfuscate email addresses in comments 2) an effective way to enter code in comments and submissions and have it render nicely (this is HACKER news, right?)

adammichaelc2• 18 years ago

I'd like to see a search feature. There's so much useful information on this site and I'd love to be able to find items that I can't quite recall the details on.

breily• 18 years ago

collapsible commenting, ala reddit

randomwalker• 18 years ago

The RSS feeds are pretty primitive -- they have only the title! This makes them almost useless. It would also be nice to have a lower volume feed of only the highly ranked posts.

Glimjaur• 18 years ago

The ability to hide a story, to make it possible for me to just show what i haven't read before.

slim2• 18 years ago

a better CSS that highlights the person name in the thread.

it's such a pain to follow a conversation when you must scan a sentence like "7 points by vikas5678 11 days ago" to know who is talking.

systems• 18 years ago

sort: I want to be able to sort by date, by mod points, by poster and of course if search is added, sort on my search result:

Views: count the number of time an news item was viewed and also allow me to to sort on this number

views can complement mod points, if an item is viewed like 1000 times and got 55 mod points and another was viewed 55 times and got 55 mod points, well, this is a nice indicator

aquateen• 18 years ago

There are quite a few "Ask YC" posts. How about creating a forum, or list a separate 'ask yc' section at the top?

Steggles• 18 years ago

[Invalid Date] is shown on each item in the RSS feed (using a tabbed gadget in iGoogle)

schneiker• 18 years ago

Bug: The "More" link (at bottom of page) ususally gives this error message on most days (in Firefox 2.0.0.11): "Unknown or expired link".

tim2• 18 years ago

Bug:

Steps to reproduce:

go to your comment page -> edit comment page -> delete comment

Directs you to "No such item" after the comment is deleted.

strey• 18 years ago

Upvotes should save comments too, in a separate section.

JamesMitchell• 18 years ago

I find it totally confusing as to how to post a comment. You really need to have some instructions, it is completely unobvious. I ended up posting the same thing three times because the comment never seemed to show up and then deleted the second and third ones.

anescient• 18 years ago

Set the global/outtermost background color. I've got F6F6EF only in the innermost content area; it's all framed by my default bg color.

LogicHoleFlaw• 18 years ago

When posting a reply to a comment, have the page center on your new post via an #anchor. This refreshes the other reply links on the page and makes it easier to find your place again on the page.

jakewolf• 18 years ago

Please, please, please eliminate the ability to post duplicate links.

iamelgringo7• 18 years ago

It's already a feature. Problem is with companies that have multiple URL's for the same page, like NYT.com

chaostheory4• 18 years ago

yes and no. www.yahoo.com and yahoo.com still isn't treated as a dupe even though both URLs point to the same page (it's only a consistent 4 character difference), and I don't know how the same URL was able to be re-submitted without it becoming a dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183903

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177270

I'll probably start submitting links twice from now on

dstillz• 18 years ago

Just because I upvote something doesn't mean I want to save it!

johnyzee2• 18 years ago

Make new comments stand out (comments made since you last read the post). Makes it easier to revisit a discussion and see what's been added.

johnyzee2• 18 years ago

Please cull this list. New suggestions are drowned in stuff that's already been implemented (sometimes years ago!).

adammichaelc2• 18 years ago

Plesae add a feature that shows "Top ten articles" as in "Top Ten This Week" and "Top Ten This Month" and "Top Ten This Year." Heck, maybe even a "Top Ten of All Time."

LewRockwell.com does this and I really enjoy the feature. Especially if I haven't had time to take a look this week, and I'd like to see what the best submissions, discussions, etc have been lately.

There are some really good articles from years ago that new users would really enjoy (like me, since I wasn't here a few years ago but have just heard that those were the glory days). It would be cool to see those articles organized into an easy to access format like the Top Ten approach.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

I wish there a way to tell when someone has added a new comment to one of the threads I'm involved in. This would be especially useful for threads that are more than a couple days old (too old to be worth checking specifically). Just because activity has died down doesn't mean I don't care if somebody says something. On the contrary, after-the-fact comments are often more thoughtful because the writer really cares about the topic.

xlnt2• 18 years ago

Rate limit down (and up) voting, so you can't vote on a bunch of stuff very fast, but you won't notice the rate limit if you are reading the stuff you vote on.

aston4• 18 years ago

I think it'd be awesome to have a mode in news.yc where I can paste in a quote, mark it off with like a "|" and have it turn into an indented blockquote with some special styling.

As much as we copy and paste snippets from articles around here, I think it'd really help readibility of posts and encouraging debating quoted points.

'cause feature requests go here.

ericb2• 18 years ago

I edit posts extensively before submitting, so I frequently see "Unknown or expired link."

This error is a minor tax on carefully worded, carefully considered posts. I've lost posts following this error due to back button/refresh mishaps. I could post, then edit, but then people are voting and replying to content that is changing.

LPTS• 18 years ago

I second this.

initself2• 18 years ago

Third.

mpardasu• 18 years ago

Also a nice (although minor) feature would be to add a link back to news.yc when the expired link error occurs. It's not that important but it would be nice not to have to delete the url parameters in order to get back (or find the bookmark again)

gojomo6• 18 years ago

PG recently suggested that just going back recovers the composed comment. However, here's a reasonable sequence of events which, in Firefox, causes unrecoverable loss of a submitted reply:

(1) open the 'reply' link in a new tab

(2) compose the reply

(3) submit, getting the 'unknown of expired link' error

(4) go back -- you still have your comment, but...

(5) hit reload, figuring that will refresh your reply form's fnid validity -- after all, this works when commenting at an article's top level

(6) get the "unknown or expired link" error now on the reload, with no place to go further "back" to, and "forward" just leading to the same error. Your comment is unrecoverably lost.

I'm now in the habit of a textarea "select-all, copy" before ever hitting a submit button at News.YC. Thus, I can reclick a path from a fnid-less URL to a new reply box if necessary. But that's a pretty user-hostile workaround to expect of people.

pg51• 18 years ago

This is now fixed: comment forms now last for 30 minutes.

huhtenberg6• 18 years ago

What was changed recently in this department ? I know the timeout was increased, but I used to be able to work around the "expired link" message by going back to the "Add Comment" form and refreshing the page. Now this also yields "expired link" and destroys the post text in the process ! I just lost good 30+ minutes of typing, and I ain't going to re-type it, so it is everyone loss .. :)

Please do something about this, it was a minor annoyance before, but now it turned into a pretty major headache.

Also, the 'Preview' button would be very nice to have. I know there's a delay setting, but that's not it. I want an ability to privately preview what I've wrote, before posting anything.

marrone• 18 years ago

A simple api would be nice.

An api to a user's comments or submitted threads would be handy. The output could simply be an RSS feed to make it serve two purposes, but JSON output would be especially nice.

dood4• 18 years ago

Ability to read all the comments you've made - i.e. More link on user comments page.

pg51• 18 years ago

We have this now.

dood4• 18 years ago

Thanks!

sprig• 18 years ago

I would like to be able to delete an account

Tichy• 18 years ago

It would be nice if all posts would still be linked to the main page somehow. OK, it would be nice for people pondering to crawl Hacker News. Even better would be a zipped download of all the posts...

Still, would crawling be OK? Since the old posts are not linked anymore, I consider crawling by id (check all ids up to 150000 - ugh...). I would try to minimize requests (one topic contains several ids in one go), but still...

henning2• 18 years ago

I think this is a bug.

My browser keeps caching the "get back to work" maxvisit screen, resulting in "expired link" when you click on "override".

rms21• 18 years ago

Tagging

rob• 18 years ago

Not sure if this has been asked before, but I'd like to see a feature that alerts us whenever someone either 1) posts a reply to a submission we made (should be optional) and 2) posts a reply to a comment we made on any submission (again, optional). An "alert" can either be an email or a message indicator on the site in the top right corner.

indiejade• 18 years ago

Glad I found this thread. Didn't realize it existed at the time of my original suggestion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156530

for an optional dark skin. Anyway. Here is the style made specifically for the Stylish addon in Fx, as per suggestion of PieSquared.

http://userstyles.org/styles/6381

muszek• 18 years ago

Liferea (linux feed reader - http://liferea.sourceforge.net/) is unable to parse your RSS feed. I posted a bug report (https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=581684...) and they started to take care of it. Apparently, it's something with new line characters.

I've used Liferea for 3 years and AFAIR I didn't have any similar problems.

Reddit's feed is fine (in case you share the code - I'm not from around here...).

pfisch• 18 years ago

A search function....or maye i just don't see it....

If one exists it should be more visible

xenoterracide3• 18 years ago

Categories. HN is getting a little out of hand on my rss and I'd like to be able to seperate content more.

xenoterracide3• 18 years ago

bold usernames. I have trouble noticing who is saying what sometimes. colors or something could also work.

davidw4• 18 years ago

It would be nice to be able to have a 'more' button on our own comments pages.

xirium3• 18 years ago

As a stopgap measure, try http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?...

kashif• 18 years ago

Collapse comment trees.

apotheon5• 18 years ago

. . . as an option, but not by default.

DougBTX• 18 years ago

Fuzzy dates for times > 30 days. For example, instead of "126 days", say: "4 months".

yters4• 18 years ago

Karma should be a function of whether highly rated posts (either submissions or comments) also have highly rated responses. This would encourage good dialogue and minimize the influence of anonymous knee jerk voting.

slater• 18 years ago

How about a flagging option, like "flag this as spam". Lately, /newest is being used more and more to flog whatever site (currently web design in newcastle upon tyne, of all things)

pg51• 18 years ago

Ok, we have this now.

dhs• 18 years ago

Out of habit - most blog comment systems I know allow for it - I just used a couple HTML tags in a comment, to no good effect. I think that changing the little label I discovered afterwards on the profile page from "help" to "formating options" could help prevent such mishaps, since "help = formating options" in this case. Also, making the gray of said label a tad darker would make it easier to see - it's a bit "hidden in plain sight" the way it's now, to the right of everything else on the page.

Hexstream9• 18 years ago

I just noticed the comments link is grey, whether or not you already visited it. Lately, I start by looking at the comments thread in case there's an upvoted comment saying the article is a waste of time, in that case I don't even bother clicking through to the actual article. But since I only followed the comments link, I can't tell later on if I had checked the comments and then decided to skip the article.

So the feature request is obviously: Make the comments link black and then grey, just like article links. But seriously, an even better feature would be if we could mark an article as "Not interested" so that it permanently falls down from our own main page. And to avoid that our main page gets filled with lower-ranked articles as a consequence of deprecating articles, maybe the page should just become emptier and emptier instead.

jshap• 18 years ago

HOW DO I POST A JOB TO HACKERNEWS?

wheels4• 18 years ago

Just got my first down-vote bombing. It'd be nice if there was some sort of detection so that one person could only down-vote another person a couple times within a short period. I had somebody that down-voted everything that I'd posted (in separate threads) that still had down-arrows.

babul• 18 years ago

search.

aggieben2• 18 years ago

here it is: google "site:news.ycombinator.com <insert terms here>"

fallentimes• 18 years ago

or www.searchyc.com

j2d2• 18 years ago

I'd like a link to any replies people make to my comments. Like the red envelope in reddit. I sometimes make comments asking questions or simply brain-vomiting and would like to know what people's reactions are.

vkd• 18 years ago

This site seems restful, but the more link doesnt act so. My typical use case on n.yc: rt click-open new tab on interesting posts on the main page, read through each new tab, then return to n.yc, and click on more to get to the next page (i visit irregularly, there're more'n one page of posts on some days). its probably half an hour or so when i return to click that more link, and its gone by then. irritating.

none of the other news sites have this problem. you're a news site, not an application; act like one.let me flip my page without have to buy the paper all over again.

ps: i see someone has raised the same concern wrt posting, but my use case is even simpler and just shouldnt happen.

DTrejo2• 18 years ago

I recently tried to reset my password on the account D_T . I mistyped the password, making it impossible for me to log back in.

I would greatly appreciate the ability to reset my password using the email that I entered.

PS Please send that email (My old account was D_T).

yangyang42• 18 years ago

I would like to see an option for opening links in new windows (or tabs)!

awt2• 18 years ago

User vote/comment RSS feeds in order to allow integration with friendfeed.com.

twism3• 18 years ago

http://ycfeeds.com/

awt2• 18 years ago

This is really cool. I'm subscribed to pg's feed now via FF. It would also be cool if I could post my upvotes to FF as well.

twism3• 18 years ago

Comments on 'Ask HN' (self) submissions that are directed to your question now show up on your reply feed.

rms21• 18 years ago

Collision detection for www..com and .com in the dupe checker.

rms21• 18 years ago

Allow duplicate stories after 365 days.

rms21• 18 years ago

asterisk support

starstar maybe?

wumi• 18 years ago

ability to follow users

pmjordan• 18 years ago

Better dupe filtering. There's only so much that can be done, but it would have helped in this case:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214046

walterk2• 18 years ago

Copy and pasted from here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213943

I'd suggest requiring everyone who submits a story to justify its relevance via the text box, ignoring all story submissions that don't have accompanying text (the exact opposite of how it currently works). That should deter a lot of impulse submissions, requiring users to think about why a story is worth posting here. And it should cultivate voting practices that maintain a stronger eye towards community relevance, as opposed to general interest. I.e., don't upvote unless the submitter successfully argues their case.

Restricting upvoting controls to a story's dedicated comments page would also deter impulse upvoting and force users to check out the justification.

xirium3• 18 years ago

Search box in top right corner like http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/browse.cgi with user selectable back-end.

rw2• 18 years ago

Enable word-wrapping on code snippets, and other weird "stretch out the page" behavior. Example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214975

msg3• 18 years ago

Comment ranking seems to be according to freshness and quality of the top-level comment, but a good comment responding to a crappy top-level comment sinks with it. I find that sometimes good discussions are deep on the page with their +0 to +2 initial comments, which makes it less likely that I will discover them.

I suggest that you use the freshness and quality of the whole comment subtree (normalized by the number of comments in the subtree, eg mean) to get those gems higher. Something like the square of points (negatives counting as zeroes) would raise the effect of good comments and lower the effect of bad comments and low-point side discussions.

xlnt2• 18 years ago

make it so comments can't be modded below -5 (or -10). there's no value after that.

ComputerGuru2• 18 years ago

Get rid of Scribd.com integration.

nadim2• 18 years ago

I'd like to see nicknames anonymized on submissions and comments until you vote them up or down. This would make votes count more on the merit of what they are saying than who is saying them.

anon9023• 18 years ago

How about allowing the poster to mark their submission as anonymous (perhaps you forfeit any up vote credits this gets).

nadim2• 18 years ago

Unflag feature, after flagging. Alternatively, an undo flag link.

Xichekolas• 18 years ago

The flag link is appearing on [deleted] posts. Just thought you'd want to know.

Hexstream9• 18 years ago

A way to find all your comments that are above or below (> >= < <=) a certain karma value. Or at least, a way to see all your posts that have less than 0 karma.

rw2• 18 years ago

Please force wrapping to the width of the page.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228233

gojomo6• 18 years ago

A previous fix for FF2 had been applied after this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92629

Unfortunately, I don't think that fix ever worked in FF3 or IE7.

Also unfortunately, after some tinkering, I can't find an easy way in CSS to get the same effect in FF3 as in FF2.

The best I've achieved with a simple change is to cap the expansion with a 'max-width' on the PRE rule, like so:

  pre { max-width:60em; overflow: hidden; padding: 2px; }

(And this still is glitchy, compared to the FF2 behavior.)

I think the main difficulty is in how TABLEs expand to the size of their cells -- it's easy to fix with a DIV-based layout, in my tests. (DIV-enclosed PREs are clipped the same in FF2 and FF3; TABLE-enclosed PREs are clipped in FF2 but grow the page in FF3.)

So my long-term suggestion: drop TABLES, move to DIV-based layout. (This might be a simple change in the ARC HTML-writing code.) In the meantime, add the 'max-width' to the PRE rule to minimize the annoyance in FF3/etc.

ComputerGuru2• 18 years ago

When editing a post, pressing <tab> from within the text-input box changes the focus to the "Help" link instead of the "Submit" button. Can this please be changed, because it's slightly disconcerting and not <strike>user</strike> hacker-friendly?

Anon84• 18 years ago

I think it would be good to be notified, say by email or a separate section of HN, when someone replies to one of my submissions/comments. It would also be nice to be able to have some submissions monitored and be notified whenever someone comments on it.

I believe this would make the discussion and exchange of ideas flow much better.

apotheon5• 18 years ago

I just don't have enough time in my day to scroll through pages of discussion for every discussion here at news.ycombinator every day, checking to see if anyone has replied to anything I said. It is primarily for this reason that I don't come back to news.ycombinator very often, but I'm on reddit all the time. After all, pound for pound, I actually find the topics here more interesting than those at reddit, but it's just too damned much work to stay abreast of new developments in discussion.

paulleviss• 18 years ago

There should be feature to add friends so that it becomes more social

d0mine4• 18 years ago

Please remove up-vote buttons from the main page for unvisited links. An absence of these buttons could enforce a vote-after-read policy.

Titles are easily abused therefore It is not a good idea to vote based only on title without reading comments and/or a linked page.

It could diminish a number of bait-like sensational titles too.

taw• 18 years ago

I'd love to see it on Reddit too. Not very difficult to implement with socialhistory.js (http://azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/)

JoelSutherland2• 18 years ago

It would also be good to cap the number of upvotes at 50 or so. Now that submissions are getting 100-200 upvotes they are on the front page for days.

ajiho• 18 years ago

Basically I'm repeating my idea from below, but what about moving the most successful stories to the new page? Couldn't that attract attention to it?

CalmQuiet2• 17 years ago

I don't have a problem with such active discussions being on front page for days... Since, for my part, I can't necessarily make it here daily.

prakash3• 18 years ago

Gestation period for new users based on time/comments/karma:

A lot of spam/spammy submissions are submitted by new users, users that create an account just to submit these links. I guess a lot of them do it to generate google juice since google indexes the site in minutes.

In addition, the number of relevant submissions are not see on the new page thereby reducing the quality of the content on the forum.

Can you introduce a gestation period for new users -- this could be based on number of days since they created their registration or the number of comments or their karma. Once they pass this threshold, these users can submit stories.

pg51• 18 years ago

There is already a rate limit for new accounts. Banning submission entirely would discourage legit new users.

BTW, they don't get any Google juice, because links are all nofollow unless they have a certain number of points.

fharper1961• 18 years ago

Add a footer to the comments page.

Justification : When I page down and hit the end of a page of comments, there is no visual cue in the page telling me that I'm at the bottom. Since I think I've gone down a full page, I lose track of where I was reading; which is annoying.

na• 18 years ago

etag header for rss?

currently working on my own reader and it looks like this is not implemented: so i need to parse the feed every time, instead of fetch from the db when etag is unchanged.

mattmcknight2• 18 years ago

Feeds with summaries or whole articles.

Giorgi• 18 years ago

Could you disable double posting? I mean not to allow duplicate content to be submitted.

iamelgringo7• 18 years ago

I'd like it if a duplicate submission could be counted as a vote.

I often submit articles that have already been submitted. There's no vote button on the "this has already been posted" page, and it's often hard to sift through the "new" page to search for the article link to vote it up.

13ren• 18 years ago

a reddit-style toolbar (ie. so you can easily comment/vote after reading).

Is there a way to do this already?

EDIT I just read that some use the bookmarklet for this: apparently, when you submit a site that has already been submitted, it takes you to the comments on it. Actually, that method is more general, because it also works for article you found in non-hackernews ways. Thus, the hackernews comments become annotations of the article.

However, the bookmarklet requires that you submit the article. This is bad because (1) it's an extra click (2) it will submit the article, in the case where it has not been submitted already. I guess that second point is not so bad, but it would be nice to have a goto annotation bookmarklet, which went directly to the comments. I hereby request this as a feature.

This requires an operator like:

  http://new.ycombinator.com/gotolink?u=[someURL]

that does a lookup to find the URL's id, and builds the following with it:

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=[URL's id]

(i.e. the code that is already present in the submitlink operator. It just needs to be exposed as an operator in its own right).

And an annotation bookmarklet like:

  javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/gotolink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22

shamelessly editing Phil Kast's bookmarklet

apotheon5• 18 years ago

The fact the standard bookmarklet takes you to the discussion for an already submitted article when you click "submit" is not at all obvious from the interface. There should really be some way to find out whether an article has already been submitted without any more than one or two clicks and without having to submit it yourself in the process.

What if I just want to see if it's on news.ycombinator to read any relevant discussion, but don't want to submit it myself?

mroman2• 18 years ago

I would like to see a search feature pg, I have seen searchyc, however I would like to see search integrated. Today for example, I used Google to search (I learned of searchyc while searching for "search" :) in this discussion - after trying Google) and it brought up what I was looking for (discussion of your History of T essay) in the results, however, Google did not provide a link to the discussion, apparently only a link to the main page was indexed. It was only after using searchyc that I found it . . . and a link to the essay as well, as I did not see it under essays on your site. I was looking for both because I saw them yesterday or the day before yet was in a hurry . . .

soundsop2• 18 years ago

Allow users to make their story upvotes public.

osi• 18 years ago

indicate the number of comments on a post in the rss feed

xenoterracide3• 18 years ago

Have links to Poll and Search on the front page, they were painful to find.

d0mine4• 18 years ago

  google: create poll site:news.ycombinator.com

First link leads to the post with http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

  google: search ycombinator

First link is http://www.searchyc.com/

cdmoyer• 18 years ago

Man, I know there was an uproar when all PDFs were sent to scribd... but having a feed reader link randomly link to a PDF is really obnoxious. For some reason, those links in google reader decide to embed acrobat, rather than opening in sumatraPDF like all my other PDFs.

Can the headline at least warn you? Or link to the comments, and include a PDF link in the body?

d0mine4• 18 years ago

Please move the comment form to the bottom of the page.

It frees up space at the top of the page for already posted comments and It would encourage reading or at least skimming through previous comments before adding a new one.

TJJones• 18 years ago

I can no longer submit stories to y-combinator, it just takes me to a blank page-anybody else have this problem??

maxwell• 18 years ago

A link to "top" (full thread) alongside "link," "parent," and "flat" on comments. It's really annoying to click through generations of "parents" from random individual comments.

Edit: I just realized SearchYC has this feature. An advantage over feeds and Google.

tjr• 18 years ago

Suggestion: It seems reasonable that some comments will be accurately valued at 0, or -1... maybe even -5. But from time to time, comments get forced down to -10, -15, -20... and that just seems to be taking it too far.

Perhaps have either a hard lower limit, beyond which it just doesn't make sense to go, or, have a soft lower limit, beyond which moderator must have some minimum karma score to be able to downvote further.

msg3• 18 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277112

This comment was at -8. Its text was invisible in this thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277053

No problem. However, I expected to see the text when I clicked on the link for the comment. As it is, I can't metamoderate (by upvoting, disagreeing with the -8 if it was in fact unfair) or read an Evil Comment that spawned an interesting thread.

An option to turn off (or adjust) the fading/invisibility for negatively modded comments, or a default to show text when a comment's link is clicked, would leave the current system relatively unchanged but allow determined users to read the forbidden content.

JayNeely2• 18 years ago

Text-wrapping, or text scroll-boxes, for overflowing code.

Example of broken HN page here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=279251 because of overflowing code here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=279640

ivank• 18 years ago

I think all this needs is overflow:auto and a max-width. I've been solving this problem with a Greasemonkey script.

rms21• 18 years ago

I believe this is fixed in Firefox 2 but for some reason the fix doesn't work in FF3.

msg3• 18 years ago

The following thread didn't wrap text properly. It ran past the right edge and required a horizontal scrollbar. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282844

Curiously, I could not duplicate on other comment threads on today's (08/21/08) front page.

IE 7, Win XP Pro, 1024x768, Start Bar on left side of screen.

edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282950 in the thread has a long blockquote.

st3fan• 18 years ago

iPhone-friendly css

dmfdmf• 18 years ago

search tab to go with header new/threads/comments/leaders/jobs/submit

DabAsteroid2• 18 years ago

Negative Karma-points for each duplicate post.

DabAsteroid2• 18 years ago

Charge money for voting. For example: every 2 votes costs 1 Karma point.

umangjaipuria• 18 years ago

I'd like to change my user id. Is that possible?

iigs• 18 years ago

When replying to a comment in a thread (the parent being a comment, as opposed to a comment like this, where the parent is the article) it would be neat to have the article link available above the reply box (as in the article-parent case).

Several times in the past week I have clicked on a thread, read the thread for comments, clicked the article link to read, clicked back, and then hit "reply" on a comment. Half way through formulating a comment I think "oh, I wonder if the article touched on $foo" and then have to either unwind the stack or open a new tab to news.yc and retrace my steps. Being able to control-click from the comment page would be ++handy.

Thanks for the site, really enjoy it.

rms21• 18 years ago

Bug report, see this story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317983

pphalen• 18 years ago

Your RSS feed is broken. The comments field is empty. Please add abstracts or (better) full posts to your feed!

utx00• 18 years ago

+ collapse threads + passwd recovery + search + ability to bookmark interesting articles/posts + rss/per user subscriptions + rss subscriptions for the different lists

mroman2• 18 years ago

I would like to see the following recurring problem fixed: when adding a comment, once one hits the submit button, the app just hangs, then displays a blank screen

aurora72• 18 years ago

The RSS feed must supply at least one day length of Hacker News. I live in middle east and maybe because of the time difference, I can not get the RSS feed of the night before, into my FeedReader and to see those missed news I have to visit http://news.ycombinator.com just to browse those news that I have missed in my FeedReader.

So the coverage of RSS Feed must be longer than currently it is. Preferably it must be at least one day (24 hours) long.

Thanks a lot.

rlm• 18 years ago

Would it be possible to get a public RSS-feed of my saved posts (for Friendfeed :) )?

hackhn2• 18 years ago

Your site is not having any ajax enabled features... very poor site in term of it's UI. Include ajax enabled tabs in the top navigation atleast.

hackhn2• 18 years ago

Provide help on mouse over of each link

makecheck9• 17 years ago

In particular, simply adding the "title" attribute to the HTML "a" tag is enough for many browsers to display a description on mouse-over (i.e. no JavaScript magic required).

pjharrin• 18 years ago

Ability to save links, just like on reddit

lagenar• 18 years ago

Add a carriage return before the line feed in http responses

bloch• 18 years ago

Remove override option from anti-procrastination feature.

ciscoriordan• 18 years ago

Please include subdomains in the domain section next to article titles. (blogs.nytimes.com) has a much more accurate connotation than (nytimes.com) for posts from blogs.nytimes.com.

breck4• 18 years ago

I want to see what posts I upvoted.

ph0rque• 18 years ago

Fix links with parantheses in comments. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_(1999%E2%80%932002)

Hexstream9• 18 years ago

Three related feature requests for the comments section of articles:

1. Give id's to comments so we can #reference them (I looked for it but didn't find it, surprisingly).

2. Add a "parent" link to each of a comment's children, referencing the aforementioned id, so that it's much easier to locate the parent of a comment when it's offscreen because there are lots of replies. To peek at the parent we'd just have to click the link then hit the browser back button. Perhaps use some javascript to make this parent link appear only when the parent is offscreen.

3. When we post a reply use the anchor in the obvious way so we don't have to find our comment manually. Usually you want to continue reading the comments after the one you just posted.

IanJ323• 18 years ago

how about a site formatted for the iPhone?

kwamenum86• 18 years ago

When I add a comment the edit link expires after a certain amount of time but I can still edit the comment (in a roundabout way). This is more of a bug than a feature. There is a hole that allow people to edit comments even after the link has expired and even thought the edit link no longer appears.

rms21• 18 years ago

Javascript buttons to collapse comment threads.

aaronblohowiak• 18 years ago

Add an 'Ignore' link on a user's profile, and then hide or otherwise diminish that user's contributions.

delackner3• 18 years ago

Seriously, it is becoming taxing to read through the comments when on certain topics (global warming, for one) some users show a complete lack of civility.

I would rather just be able to say "this person is rude and unpleasant, never show me their comments again".

trickjarrett2• 18 years ago

As posted in another thread: Please add a view of only startup / site review threads.

Also please change the way 'threads' view is sorted to bring the most recent thread to the top, meaning my most recent post in a thread of comments rather than my most recent root comment.

theantidote• 18 years ago

Can you make the read links darker? I'm having some issues seeing them on my new laptop because the screen is glossy and the contrast isn't as good.

BitPerfect• 18 years ago

Please add item summary abstracts (or better yet complete text) to your RSS feed. Publishing headlines only doesn't convey enough information to decide whether the article is worth clicking through to.

pmarin4• 18 years ago

Keep It Simple¡ it's the feature that I want.

mlLK• 18 years ago

Paginate by value, if not the main page, at least include this feature in our profile.

zacharydanger• 18 years ago

I'd like to be able to login from my G1. It seems like it works, but the session doesn't want to stay active. When I upvote something it calls for a login, and then upvotes the item, but then I'm no longer logged in.

makecheck9• 18 years ago

I see this problem in every social news site, and also here: it seems that over a few days, 3 or 4 posts will eventually refer to exactly the same "news". But unless the duplicate submission has the same URL, the redundancy isn't detected.

Users should be able to flag new posts as duplicates, and identify the "older" headline to use instead.

If enough users agree that a post is redundant, then it would become "merged". The oldest submission on that topic is then rewarded all vote-up karma points from all duplicates, and displays all comment threads. In addition, the duplicates either go away or are displayed side-by-side with the original in all lists, avoiding the problem where the "same" story is front-page news under one title and page 5 under another name.

walterk2• 18 years ago

To encourage more people to visit the 'New' page and upvote stories, give users one point per day for visiting it.

gscott• 18 years ago

When viewing messages on the Threads page often you have to click parent multiple times to see what the thread was in it's entirety.

Putting in a link maybe called thread start and making it go to the beginning of a thread would be a good idea.

Example:

5 points by vaksel 2 days ago | link | thread start | parent | flag

parent brings you up one message, thread start would put you at the beginning of the thread.

pollux• 18 years ago

It would be great to have a RSS for the saved items. Just to aggregate them in FriendFeed. If it is already possible, I'm sorry, I don't have found it.

snprbob863• 18 years ago

In the spirit of accountability and openness, please add a "history" link next to headlines or posts which have been edited. Version control is a good idea for source code, so why not for discourse?

CalmQuiet2• 18 years ago

Or maybe make viewing it optional? I really appreciate the cleanness of the pages under the current system.

snprbob863• 18 years ago

I don't think it would be much clutter if it only shows for edited posts. It would probably also cause an overall reduction in the number of edits.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

Counterpoint: if we had a "history" link, we'd just be encouraged to talk about what appeared on it, and that kind of navel-gazing discussion is something we're trying to avoid, right?

skorgu• 18 years ago

Some indication that a comment of yours has been replied to. Reddit's little orange envelope is the obvious example.

Alternatively, an RSS feed of your "threads" page might work but I'd prefer an icon personally.

hernan7• 18 years ago

The "Hacker News |" part at the beginning of the page titles is redundant; please remove it. 99% of the time, the Y-combinator icon is enough to identify the tab as belonging to Hacker News.

On a tabbed browser, a sequence of HN tabs looks like this:

(Y) Hacker News | Aa... (Y) Hacker News | Bb... (Y) Hacker News | Zz...

Where (Y) is the Y-combinator icon. So, I can see which tabs are HN, but I can't see what they are about (save for the 1st 1 or 2 letters of the title of the discussion, and a little browser-provided ellipsis).

If the "Hacker News |" was removed from the beginning of the title, I would still see that the tabs were HN, because of the YC icon. And I would also be able to see the first 15 or so characters of the title of the discussion, which would help the navigation.

graywh• 17 years ago

What if it was shortened to just "HN" or "News.YC"?

ivankirigin10• 18 years ago

Posterous.com and Tumblr.com should both have subdomains listed in the domain details.

For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446438 posterous.com -> tom.posterous.com

vegashacker3• 17 years ago

I've noticed that sometimes the domain name shown in parens next to the link is kind of useless. Take, for example, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449670. "tumblr.com" is not useful in this case, but "titocosta.tumblr.com" would be more helpful--"oh, it's someone's personal blog named Tito Costa." Interestingly, it looks like sometimes you already do show more than just "domain.com", as in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449221.

tvon4• 17 years ago

That's been bugging me too, primarily with google.com.

To prevent wasted space you could ignore certain prefixes (www), or you could have a whitelist for hosts to show the prefix for (tumblr.com, google.com, etc).

pj• 17 years ago

Disable submit buttons after clicking once to prevent accidental double posts or do it with code on the backend either way or maybe both.

tokenadult9• 17 years ago

Based on an example that appears to have been removed from the front page just now, I'd like to see an easy way to flag a user who is spamming up the site as well as the current way of flagging particular submissions.

uberc• 17 years ago

Reddit just added a feature that puts a dotted-line box around the headline you just clicked on, to make it quicker to find the headline to either up or downmod or comment on when you return to Reddit after reading the piece.

A nice feature which would encourage interaction after reading pieces.

Fuca• 17 years ago

save threads and a most voted links section by month

Great site anyway

kirubakaran7• 17 years ago

When we mouse-over a username, please display karma|member-since.

brett11• 17 years ago

This worked for me:

  (attribute a          title          opstring)    
  (def byline (i)
    (pr " by ")
    (let u i!by
     (tag (a href (user-url u)
             title (string "karma: " (karma u) 
                           " | created: " (text-age:user-age u)))
          (pr u)))
    (pr " " (text-age:item-age i) " "))

I didn't really look into the performance cost of calling uvar for every byline; that's probably not ideal.

damir• 17 years ago

When browsing with mobile it's annoying to scroll all the way to the top to be able to click on 'New' link.

Could you put 'up' or 'top' link at the bottom, next to 'More'?

wheels4• 17 years ago

I'd like to have a setting on the users page to ignore all non-link submissions. I enjoy more of the news / discussion aspect of news.yc than the emerging message board aspect.

joshwa10• 17 years ago

Or shunt them to a separate silo, like Metafilter does with Ask Metafilter and MetaTalk.

snprbob863• 17 years ago

There appears to be a caching bug when I access HN from work. Sometimes, when I first browse to the page, the top right corner where my user name should be shows another user name and karma score. I've dropped that name into the global address list in Outlook and more than once it has come up as a valid alias for someone in a totally different building. If I click a link, the error corrects itself and I am logged in as myself.

giles_bowkett• 17 years ago

API

Shamiq• 17 years ago

A setting in my profile which specifies the maximum width a line of text can be. Reading the long lines is annoying, but i like to keep my browser maximized for other purposes.

windsurfer2• 17 years ago

Can we get rid of the direct URL to log out?

http://news.ycombinator.com/logout

dreur• 17 years ago

Have the name of the sneder in RSS and the Karma.

moe• 17 years ago

How about adding a rate-limited amount of "bigpoints" to the voting system?

E.g. each user would receive one "bigpoint" per week. The bigpoint could be given out to any story/comment and would count like 5(?) normal votes. Unused bigpoints should not accumulate (or only to a small backlog of maybe 2 or 3).

I imagine this might help to make the extra-ordinary content stand out more.

What do you think?

rms21• 17 years ago

Submissions and saved don't work for anyone beyond a certain number of items.

releasedatez• 17 years ago

One feature that I think will make a difference visually is to hide the items you've saved so everything on the new or home page will only show items that I haven't read before. I think it creates a better flow for screening through the topics. So a reader doesn't need to stop for a microsecond to skip over a saved item.

fizx• 17 years ago

I'd like to see the comment ordering algorithm reflect the interestingness of the replies subtree. I'd like to see a 1 point comment with a 20 point reply above a 3 point comment.

makecheck9• 17 years ago

There are some abuses with new accounts posting self-serving links, e.g. they've existed for 20 minutes and have 1 karma, and have already posted 2 links to exactly the same web site.

New users should be put on a waiting period, and/or need a minimum comment karma level, before being allowed to post.

ack• 17 years ago

rss/atom. really, I'm sure there's a good reason there isn't one...

thepanister6• 17 years ago

I am not sure if someone asked for this before...

But I want to write a comment on someone's page... to contact him/her or ask about something.

Something like the "Wall" on Facebook.

And users would choose if they want to enable their "wall" or not... so they would have control over this... if they want people to write to them or not!

d0mine4• 17 years ago

This functionality is already present.

If an user wants to enable his "wall" then he can add his contact info on the profile page e.g., http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=d0mine

thepanister6• 17 years ago

I am not sure if someone asked for this or not..

To prevent any abuse to the story's title... why don't you make a curl/wget request to the URL that a user is submitting, and get the title of that URL/page automatically?

So... user won't have any control over the title when submitting a link.

In fact I need this feature.. because I am tired of copying the title of the story that I submit! :( What do you think?

thepanister6• 17 years ago

Hey, This story has more than 660 comments on it, it takes many seconds to load, and it does not load completely!

I can't see the whole comments...the page stops loading!

Why don't you devide the comments to several pages? So you would display something like 100 comments per page.. and you click next to display the next 100, if any!

That would be better... page would load faster... and things would be fine!

thepanister6• 17 years ago

There is something funny that I really wish to see here... but it's not essential.

I want to see kind of analytical tool for my karma.. and see how I am doing!

Let me explain: Can you program a tool that would draw charts of your karma history... so you can see if your karma is raising or not? And it would be great if you can let the users choose to display their karma in specific dates!

There is something more advanced also... Can you analyze the topics that user is writing about that helped him in increasing his karma? Also recommend a stories for the user to comment on... that's related to the user's interested topics based on his/her previous comments.

I think this is hard somehow... because it needs so much of analyzing, data mining... and some logical factors to work with!

What do you think? :D

thepanister6• 17 years ago

I want to be notified when someone replies to one of my comments - not stories!

Just a message box that would appear on the page that someone replied to one of my comments.. and this message box should appear only when there are new replies... along with links to the specified comments!

What do you think? :)

tptacek3• 17 years ago

I think it's a bad idea. Threads basically "die" for me when they fall off the bottom of my "Comments" link --- or, at most, when they get one or two "More" clicks past that page.

This is helpful, because after a few days of participating in a thread, the quality of my responses degrades, and the number of people reading it declines.

I feel like time-limited discussions are part of the culture here.

(I'm aware of the irony. I just saw the timestamp.)

thorax2• 17 years ago

Turn links in a user's profile into real links. (I thought it used to be this way?)

dhimes3• 17 years ago

Consider killing dead links in the RSS feed.

DTrejo2• 17 years ago

Wikipedia style system for quality control.

Guidelines for comments shown beneath the "reply button."

Guidelines for submissions shown on the submit page.

culix2• 17 years ago

I would really like https encrypted login, so people can't see my password when I log in to the site. Is this feasible?

rms21• 17 years ago

Community voting on titles

stuntgoat3• 17 years ago

Allow users to subscribe to other HN users' synopses, such that I would only see my favorite commenter's synopsis. Simply place it to the right of the link, taking up all that space that is not being used yet; put the synopsis in a more transparent color than the other text- like the <0 down-modded comments.

We ( as synopsis authors ) would invent shortcuts for rating and summarizing the content that would fit to the right or be truncated. And when a user clicks on comments, the full synopsis is always at the top of the comments.

And maybe the descriptors that different users would implement ( like their own tags/ratings for the content ) would become unique to that user, eventually, and have contextual meaning to that author. Each synopsis author would have their own tags that they could reuse. Only people who subscribed to that author could see their synopsis so authors' silly or cryptic or worthless synopsis descriptors would not clutter HN readers' experience unless they subscribed to a particular s-author ( synopsis author ).

So each user could have a customized right-hand HN site by subscribing to other synopsis authors and each synopsis author would have their own ways ( tags, most likely to start ) for communicating concise summaries/likes/dislikes of the content posted on HN.

This is the thread that started this suggestion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503983

I wanted to move this thread here, since it is more appropriate.

thepanister6• 17 years ago

I want a feature that would allow me to ping a user, so I would get his attention [ to me or to a post].

You can make a karma threshold, to prevent/reduce abuse. Also you can let users have the option to enable/disable this feature.

mcxx2• 17 years ago

A lot of people submit "rate my startup" links. There are two ways to do this - either sumbit a link to the homepage with an appropriate title or submit a question-like post with the homepage link in the title and additional commentary in the text field. In the first case, the author must add a comment the regular way which may not be at the top/visible the whole time. In the second case, there's no direct link to the homepage, one has to copy it or type it manually. I would appreciate if HN would improve the UX with these kind of posts. I won't suggest a solution, I'm sure PG will come up with something clever if he decides to implement this.

martythemaniak• 17 years ago

I have a mockup of a feature that might improve voting on articles:

http://mld.dreamhosters.com/hn.png

Basically, new links open up in an frame, with a slim Hacker News bar at the top. The idea would be that as you're reading an article/finished reading an article, you'll be more likely to vote if the button is right there, rather than if you have to go back to HN and search for the post.

sam_in_nyc• 17 years ago

For verbatim text, please add an "overflow: hidden;" style attribute of the "<code>" element. Non-breaking spaces break the entire page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513183

noodle• 17 years ago

RSS feed of stories i upvote.

nathan82• 17 years ago

Simple usability suggestion -- add an orange footer line to comments pages. There is no visual indicator that I'm at the bottom of a page; I frequently find myself pressing page-down in futility.

tmadsen• 17 years ago

As far as I can see, no one has asked this before. It would be /really/ nice if I could subscribe to an RSS feed of stories that has earned a certain amount of points, for instance 30. That way I most probably wouldn't receive pointless news about how facebook should look like.

Edit: Btw, what about including a point link in the feed, it's not like you're earning money by ads anyway. Thanks for a nice service!

mitchm• 17 years ago

check for duplicate URLs when submitting or a confirmation page showing similar stories already submitted.

sho• 17 years ago

Please add full titles to links in the "title" attribute, especially in comment parents. Then, users can hover over the (often truncated) parent link and see the full title without clicking.

Just to be super explicit, what I am asking for is for a link instance like this:

  <a href="item?id=519555">Super last minute advice for startups applying for...</a>

to be changed sitewide to this:

  <a href="item?id=519555" title="Super last minute advice for startups applying for Y Combinator">Super last minute advice for startups applying for...</a>

jganetsk• 17 years ago

Ideally, I would always like to be able to up-vote a submission while reading it. Since most submissions are of off-site content, I don't always have the capability to do this. Instead, I have to come back to HN after reading, search the list to find the submission again, and then click the up-arrow.

It would be ideal if a link to off-site content opened up a viewport page, with the content in one iframe and various HN-related controls in another iframe. Users could opt-in (or opt-out) of this behavior.

dowskitest• 17 years ago

I guess hackers shouldn't fat-finger or forget their passwords once creating an account, but I'm pretty sure some user named 'dowski' did just that. Maybe he's not a real hacker, but he'd like to login again. So I'd like to request a reset password feature or something.

mike463• 17 years ago

a hide button.

asdfghjkl2• 17 years ago

Security Issue (Availability)

Disable the use of "pre" tags or enforce maximum line lengths for "pre" sections on comment threads. Long "pre" lines widen the entire page width so you have to keep scrolling right and left to read. In addition to accidental problems, you might also run into problems with trolls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam#Page_widening

asdfghjkl2• 17 years ago

It looks like this item is a duplicate of a previous one

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280852

The other post gives a nice example of where the problem actually occurs. Note that contrary to what the other item says, the issue isn't actually "code" tags per se, but "pre" tags.

lee• 17 years ago

Not a feature request, more of a bug:

I created my account about 2 months ago, however when I go check my comments, I notice that I have comments made from more than a year ago.

I'm guessing there's someone else with an account named "lee" who closed his account?

halostatue• 17 years ago

Simply saying "tumblr.com" isn't useful; better to say "startatspark.tumblr.com". Certain domains need more than just the primary domain listed.

dottertrotter• 17 years ago

pg, can you add a page that simply lists out the members that are currently logged in to the site?

gv0tch0• 17 years ago

that's more of a bug (or a misunderstanding on my part..) - if I try to upvote an entry without being logged in, HackerNews thinks that I already voted for it once I log in.

wheels4• 17 years ago

I'd like to see the New York Times and some other major outlets blacklisted from submission. At this point the front page is about 10% NYT most of the time, which seems silly for something that's supposed to be a focused site.

PaulMorgan• 17 years ago

Sorry, I put this in as a submitted question.

Could you add a media type categorization to the submit page? I'm on a work computer without sound. Would be great if I could pass over the video and podcast links and only go to the blog/news stories. Nothing fancy like a filter - maybe just some radio buttons on the submit page for text|video|sound| that would appear in the listing.

mel_llaguno• 17 years ago

How do you delete an account?

LeBleu2• 17 years ago

The ability to tell how you are logging in and request lost login information.

For example, I think I used OpenID to log in, but I might have used Google instead. I don't know which. I tried to log in from home, and I got the cryptic "Bad OpenID error". I don't know if this meant OpenID was down at the time, or that I was using the wrong provider. There was no way to request an email with my login credentials, not even to my already entered email address.

Even from my work machine, where it remembers I am logged in, I cannot tell if I have a real account or if I have used one of the many OpenID providers. So I still don't know if I'll be able to log in when I get home.

akohekohe7• 17 years ago

1. Search function, so i can search for a story-- over time, not just on a single page 2. please explain how the point system works. do the points go with the author or article,and how do some articles have more than others?

mcxx2• 17 years ago

I submitted the Ubuntu 9.04 story today, but the first link I tried to submit was already in the system, from when 7.04 came out. It will really be a problem to submit a link when 9.10 will be available, because it seems all 'good links' were already added. Can there be a recyclation system for links?

tokenadult9• 17 years ago

The suggestion was made

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575855

to have the title for the site be user-configurable. That could be helpful for people who don't want to display a title of "Hacker News" on a work computer.

My friendly suggestion is that if we must change the name of the site, which I like just fine, it would be helpful to call it "Helpful News," so that all of us who are habituated to calling the site HN could continue doing that without confusion.

deno• 17 years ago

Hacker News is great name! Maybe instead of adding such feature to webapp code Firefox extension / Greasemonkey script would be sufficient?

Raplh• 17 years ago

"showdead" should allow me to follow links in killed submissions. Right now I can see the title of the dead links, but there is nothing I can click on to actually go to the page which was originally linked.

Devils-Avacado• 17 years ago

kvh• 17 years ago

Can I write a recommendation engine for HN?

Simple item-based (hackers who upvoted this article also upvoted...) and/or user-based (hackers who upvoted similar articles to you, upvoted ... ) recommendations would be cool to see on HN, possibly as a way to access (relatively) older content that one might have missed. this assumes people are actually away from the site long enough to miss something -- unlikely. addicts!

Bluem00• 17 years ago

The exponential delay on the "reply" link's appearance means that sometimes the link is sometimes not present on the page. I believe that this reduces the ease with which someone can scan a thread, because it changes the layout and spacing of comments later in the thread.

My suggestion is that rather than not displaying the reply link, display greyed out text in its place that reads "reply", with hover text explaining why you cannot currently click it.

frosty• 17 years ago

get rss feed with minimum points threshold lets say 10 or 20. currently too many entries get pushed to rss feed :(

dood4• 17 years ago

Add the on: [root_hn_url] link to comment metadata when viewing a single comment.

Rational: when viewing a single commment for whatever reason, you often want to see all comments. Currently you have to click through the chain of parents, which is annoying.

breck4• 17 years ago

The Leaderboard should exclude points from url submissions (does it do this already?).

Only upvotes on comments and non-url submissions should count.

parenthesis3• 17 years ago

Why?

breck4• 17 years ago

I find reading the comment feeds of users with high karma to be very useful.

But if someone gets high karma by writing an RSS reader and autoposter for TechCrunch, that doesn't mean their comment feeds would be more insightful.

IDK, maybe it's a bad idea. I just think it would be interesting to see average karma per comment post and read those people.

kirubakaran7• 17 years ago

When a user flags a post, please immediately hide the story from them. This will help lower their blood pressure. They can see it again by turning on ShowDead.

marcusbooster• 17 years ago

rss feed for the "best" section would be nice.

weaksauce• 17 years ago

Maybe you might want to add a bit to the duplicate detection algorithm to remove the "www." before checking if it is a dupe. I only say this because an article was submitted by two different people with exactly the same title. The only thing that differs is the "www." prefix on the url.

The two stories:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594605

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594525

audionerd• 17 years ago

Possible way to catch dupes on user entry:

When a user begins submitting a URI we recognize as similar to one already entered, automatically ask "This might be a dupe. Sure to commit?" and list the similar entries we already know of.

Similar to the "this username is already taken" autocomplete box on many sign-up forms.

agrinshtein• 17 years ago

I get so engrossed in this site and it is turning out to be a major time waster. There are a lot of interesting articles but I really need to more productive and reading HN isn't helping with that.

Perhaps a solution.

I would like to have the option of reading the highest rated article of the day. Just one article on the page. The 'active' page has a lot of articles. I just want one article. Period.

What do you think about that idea?

tokenadult9• 17 years ago

The duplicate detector works well, but it would work even better if its string-matching were slightly less exact, so that printer-friendly URLs submitted after canonical URLs would be caught, and if more of the variants of Economist magazine URLs were caught as duplicates.

suliali• 17 years ago

please add FORUMS!

needsomehelp• 17 years ago

Password reset

dood4• 17 years ago

A hide option, to remove links from the frontpage.

Has been suggested a few time before, but not for a while.

With hiding users get to see more new content on each refresh, and get to ignore their pet annoyances (for me Twitter, Gladwell, the latest tech-net drama). A much nicer user experience all round. Works well on Reddit.

decavolt• 17 years ago

Please consider adding item excerpts/descriptions to your Hacker News feed. I love the feed and am subscribed to it, but without excerpts or descriptions for items it is not as easy to skim.

ralph19• 17 years ago

Not sure "[deleted]" posts are correctly indented from their parent. Also, the lack of space above them means they don't stand out from their parent. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624964 is an example. It's not immediately obvious from indentation or spacing that swolchok's two posts aren't a reply to himself.

stonemetal2• 17 years ago

A different story ranking algorithm idea: You can't vote stories at all. A story's count is determined by the sum of the comments made.

tralfam• 17 years ago

An RSS feed which takes me to the comment page of the submission.

Reason being that I like to use live bookmarks in Firefox, and the RSS feed which goes directly to the submitted link means if I want to read the comments left by HN users, I must go to HN's homepage to look for the article, and then click on comments.

Which is a lot of work compared to clicking on the live bookmark entry, then opening up the submitted webpage (in a new tab) from the submission's comment page.

tokenadult9• 17 years ago

Having the footer links found on the main page, especially "guidelines" and "library," be visible when composing a reply to a previous reply would be helpful for sharing those links when composing replies to users who don't know of those helpful resources. In general, it helps me find stuff if the footers are the same regardless of state, whether reading the main page, reading the new submissions page, posting a new submission, or posting a reply to a previous reply.

leecho0• 17 years ago

section for start-up related submissions -- must read articles for people that are just starting up start-ups

RiderOfGiraffes2• 17 years ago

Two feature requests, one question, one comment.

I am aware that occasionally there are great items that don't get a few upvotes quickly, and then get lost in the flurry of other submissions. Submitting something at a popular time is a lottery, and I think many useful items get lost, or go unnoticed.

I'd like to see an alternate ranking system based on votes, replies and page views. Let R be the current score as determined by votes, C be the accumulated votes on the comments, and V be the number of views of the page. Then let the ranking score be something like (R+C)/V. The idea is that pages without views will stay close to the top, encouraging them to be viewed and hence ranked. Pages that elicit no upvotes will then drop quickly, but at least they've been seen.

There probably needs to be a time component in there as well so that items slowly "fade" with time.

I can expand and refine this for anyone interested in seeing waht happens, but I can't produce a mock-up because I don't have access to the "page views" statistic.

Second thing, and much less of a priority, I'd like is the ability to retrieve a single item with its threading information, but not its threading content. My interests aren't entirely aligned with the majority, so I'd like to retrieve every item and then read them in thread for myself. Currently if I pull a given item I get all its sub-comments as well, which I then have to unpick. It's tedious, and I haven't bothered yet, but I can do it. It would be more value to me if I could just pull the text and ID of the parent.

Question: I'm interested to see if this comment gets read. This thread is now 2 1/2 years old. How many people read it, and what path to they take to do so?

Finally, the comment. Thank you for HN. I think it's a fantastic resource, and I look forward to contributing to it for some time to come. I hope I add value.

aarongough• 17 years ago

The ability to downmod, or at least retract an upmod on a comment you have upmodded.

Because people are able to edit their comments after you have upmodded them, the comment may change so that you no longer agree with them.

Having this would allow people who edit their comments after gaining attention to be moderated in a more effective manner...

thirdusername2• 17 years ago

Since the only way (from what I can tell) of retrieving your password is to contact pg it would be nice with contact information somewhere. I'd like to have the password reset for my account nop, to the email I put down in the info of that account.

stuntgoat3• 17 years ago

Hi.

Can you please make the comment textarea larger?

Thank you.

321abc• 17 years ago

Please allow anonymous comments.

yycom• 17 years ago

Can you link the RSS item to the HN page rather than the submitted story? (e.g. see reddit)

By linking to the story and not the HN post, when following the link one has lost access (like a dangling pointer) to the comments. Currently I must mouse-click the "comments" link in the RSS item instead of using my RSS reader's ability to follow the link, which is a PITA.

trickjarrett2• 17 years ago

Simple url filtering:

I know that we have to be careful how much we tax the servers for HN, but I thought of a simplistic and low-processing overhead for allowing users to block certain domains.

1) Allow us to input a list of domains we don't want to see links to.

Ex: csmonitor.com, godaddy.com, codinghorror.com etc.

2) Modify the item listings on the various listing pages to include a class that is the url's domain.

Ex: So if the link's url is http://x.com/asdfasdf the link listing would be class 'x.com'

3) Implement a basic css command generated on page load that adds our domains listed in part 1 and adds a 'display: none;' for them.

4) Win!

Obviously it's imperfect, you'll get less than the max items on a page, and users will notice numbers missing for the hidden links.

bretthoerner• 17 years ago

It would be great if the "# comments" links had a different a:visited color. Many times I can tell by the title of a link that I have no real interest in reading it, but if it has "30 comments" I think "Hm, I bet someone said something worthwhile in there." But if I read 10 comment threads like that and come back later in the day, I have no visual feedback as to which are truly "unread."

yread2• 17 years ago

a way to distinguish seen and new comments - HN is awesome especially because of the informative discussions that are going on so I often end up returning to a particular discussion over and over again.

wiillw2• 17 years ago

copy google reader....except don't delete things I haven't read that are 2 weeks old, and allow me to mark all items unread in a feed I just subscribed to...so I can read old posts when I have time....

wushupork• 17 years ago

I'd like to be able to search submissions

tokenadult9• 17 years ago

It would be good to see the "classic" view of the main page listed on the "lists" link available from the bottom of several pages.

extension• 17 years ago

Please convert newlines to <br/>s in posts/comments. This is nearly always what is expected and there appears to be no other way to insert single line breaks. It's been about a decade since I saw a browser that didn't line wrap textareas.

elidourado• 17 years ago

Please include the URL or domain of the linked item somewhere in the content field of the RSS feed.

rbanffy2• 17 years ago

Perhaps karma should decrease with time unless it's "replenished" by upvotes.

The idea is valid because one can "game the moderation system" by having multiple 100+ point accounts and use them do downvote comments they don't agree with while upvoting their own comments.

tvon4• 17 years ago

Is anyone ever going to fix the Facebook Connect login setup? Is there anywhere to report bugs where they are actually see or do we just rely on someone finding it here?

mhartl2• 17 years ago

Over the years, I've noticed a lot of people on Hacker News using underscores for emphasis, like _this_, instead of asterisks, like this. How about supporting both?

ks• 17 years ago

Perhaps there should be a separation between points for a comment and karma?

Now, a user's karma is the sum of all points, so it doesn't necessarily say much about the average quality. What if the maximum limit a comment could modify your karma was from -2 to +2?

I'm not sure how this should be calculated, but perhaps a score between 2 and 10 would add 1 karma point, and everything above would add 2?

pjvandehaar2• 17 years ago

Assuming that placement on the front page is determined by points/age, allow users to set the weight of age. If I were to set the weight to .3, I would end up with the "/best" page. Users might set this based on how often they visit, via a textbox in the upper-right of the news page.

jlgosse• 17 years ago

Why not do a Y Combinator feature similar to Kiva? Members of the community can post information about their startup idea, and then people can give out micro-loans or micro-investments.

I think that would be super cool.

nphase• 17 years ago

I'd love a point threshold thats configurable on the RSS, so that I can put hacker news back into my rss reader without worrying about massive amounts of pollution.

alanthonyc3• 17 years ago

Can you please increase the size of the 'Comments' links under each posting? I often click on the comments first to determine if I want to proceed to the actual article.

nudded• 17 years ago

Add an option to not show job listings on the front page.

People who are not looking for a job are just not interested

ch101• 17 years ago

Dos Hacks

Zev• 17 years ago

Could the title of items in RSS get updated to have "[dead] title here" whenever a story is killed?

kasunh• 17 years ago

A feature to search for submissions.

kirubakaran7• 17 years ago

Mention in the profile page that "email" field is not visible to the public and that the users have to type it in the "about" section if they want to publish it.

brg• 17 years ago

Allow resubmissions after XXX period of time.

My recent submission was "Who Can Name the Bigger Number?" This is a great article for anyone who has studied computer science, mathematics, or enjoys scientific history. It was last submitted about 180 days ago.

This article, along with other greats such as "Cargo Cult Science" etc are of interest to the community. Limiting their presence on the front page or via the RSS to a single point in time seems extra-ordinarily constricting. I would suggest that after a period of say 1 year an article is available for resubmission.

pjvandehaar2• 17 years ago

Do a bit of a merger between paulgraham.com and HN by moving comments for those articles over to each essay's page and inter-linking.

gruseom2• 17 years ago

It would be neat if there were a way to view the oldest comments that have been upvoted recently. Sometimes I read old threads and upvote things I missed the first time around. It would be nice to have a way, other than randomness, to see the oldie-but-goodies other people have dug up.

mmt• 17 years ago

A simple title word exclusion filter would be nice.

This week, it would be "erlang" and "_why"

startupcomment2• 17 years ago

Thank you for expanding the volume of posts displayed. Previously, you only displayed about 200, which meant that the user would probably miss some postings unless he or she consulted the site twice a day or so. By displaying many more "historic" posts, the user would have the assurance of not missing posts if he or she did not consult the site for a couple of days. Thanks again.

startupcomment2• 17 years ago

Nierengarten• 17 years ago

Quick Dapper Feed for the front page: http://www.dapper.net/services/HackerNews

rbanffy3• 17 years ago

There should be a way to cancel/delete an account. I am pretty disappointed with HN and no longer want to be part of it.

unalone• 17 years ago

You're entirely responsible for your own actions. Don't blame the community for your deciding to be an arse.

bhousel3• 17 years ago

He should still be allowed to cancel his account.

apotheon5• 17 years ago

A quick search didn't find anyone else suggesting this, so:

I'd like a link on the page for a particular discussion thread that takes me immediately to the top of the entire discussion (the initial submission, in other words). That way, I don't have to click "parent" twelve times to get there.

jmcguckin3• 17 years ago

is there a way to 'save' articles (like on reddit)? Articles tend to scroll off the bottom pretty quickly.

tokenadult9• 17 years ago

Any thread that you either upvote or comment on becomes a saved thread on your profile page.

MicahWedemeyer• 17 years ago

Top-level menu item for "Ask HN" posts. I like to help people spitball on ideas, review new apps, and the like. That's become my favorite use for HN.

ismarc• 17 years ago

BUG: I apologize if this is already posted somewhere here, or if I have failed to find where the bug submissions should go. There is a bug when submitting a post containing text (no URL). The form you are presenting when there is an error with submission converts multiple newlines to <p> tags, which are escaped on the next submission. To a naive user, it would appear that the substitution of those tags would be "courtesy" formatting, not invalid formatting that will be escaped and show up in the resultant post.

To reproduce: 1) Set title to "Ask HN: Attempting to confirm a bug... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaa"

Set text to: "here is text

Enter pressed twice, I have not inserted any html tags

If this doesn't error and instead posts it, I apologize."

Click submit. Observe text in the box "text" has changed to: "here is text<p>Enter pressed twice, I have not inserted any html tags<p>If this doesn't error and instead posts it, I apologize."

bhousel3• 17 years ago

Make the comment box bigger. It might inspire people to leave longer comments.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

It would be very handy to have a flag link right on the noobstories (and maybe even on the 'new') page instead of having to first click 'discuss', then 'flag'.

HN can be quite slow sometimes and that extra click could save a lot of time, especially if the 'flag' call could be made an ajax call, that way keeping the noobstories page clean would be simply a number of clicks on spam stories.

This thread seems quite dead, if there could be some kind of response that this suggestion is useful or that it won't be happening then that would be appreciated.

chasingsparks• 17 years ago

Karma is currently (roughly) calculated as the sum of a users submission and comment votes. I would be interested in seeing an alternative implementation that takes the sum of that users aggregate votes on each comment and article, raised to x.

For example:

If x was 1.2 and I had posted 3 comments with vote scores of [1,20,-10] my karma would be round(1^1.2+20^1.2-10^1.2)=22 as opposed to roughly 11 where it would stand now. I think it would encourage comments that are very thoughtful and discourage comments that are pure flaming.

tokenadult9• 17 years ago

It looks like the duplicate detector still needs more work. There are lots of duplicate submissions again.

hungdaddy• 17 years ago

Is there a saved section like reddit has?

boxofjunk• 17 years ago

An option to ignore submissions for certain domain names.

(Personally, I'd be happy if I never have to see another Techcrunch link again.)

joem• 17 years ago

Search.

jmcguckin3• 17 years ago

Can you test for browser type and make the upvote glyph larger if the browser is on a mobile device (e.g.iPhone)?

ajb• 17 years ago

For link-bait titles, I look at the comments first to see if other people considered the article worth reading. This information could be exposed by displaying the ratio of clicks on the link vs clicks on the discuss link.

markup• 17 years ago

The duplicate detection should be improved, I have posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830030 and it ended up being a duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828992 (the only difference is my entry pointed to the www cname)

justlearning• 17 years ago

"+/-" feature to show/hide threads.

Few times in a year there is an onslaught of "make hn as reddit" (which triggers the erlang effect). While this goes away after few days, there is a trickle of crowd who still persist on unimportant/distracting comments - which triggers more comments below. It would be great to hide these "unwanted" comments.

onedognight• 17 years ago

I'd like to see an iphone favicon, so that when one "Add To Home Screen"s a link to HN they would get a nice icon in the app list rather than an unrecognizable screen shot. A quick

   convert -resize 57x57 favicon.ico apple-touch-icon.png

would be blurry but would suffice. Of course, scaling down your original would be much better.

icey4• 17 years ago

I'd like to suggest a new category for killfiled sites / submissions - ones that get to stay live but don't gain karma when other people try to submit them.

The recent submission flood of "37signals valuation tops $100 billion after bold VC investment" shows how this kind of dreck ends up on the front page - it's not from people agreeing, but people submitting blindly.

sscheper• 17 years ago

makecheck9• 17 years ago

It may be nice to add scrollbars (with CSS, probably) to longer comments, so that "popular" threads take up less space. Or, just have a collapse mechanism.

This makes it easier to scroll past the end of the indented thread to find the next top-level comment.

makecheck9• 17 years ago

Make the up and down arrows slightly further apart, or make the up arrow bigger. I still worry that I might accidentally down-vote someone, which is made worse by the fact that the arrow disappears once it's done (and is thus not undoable).

akrymski3• 17 years ago

Ability to:

- filter news by date - order by no. of comments - order by poster's rating

eg I want to see the most discussed stories of last week (yeah I don't have time to check HN every day, sorry!)

akrymski3• 17 years ago

Categories or Tags (Python, JavaScript, Physics, etc...) so I can refine by them.

akrymski3• 17 years ago

google search

ez772• 17 years ago

Browsable archives.

chrischen• 17 years ago

Voting quota on hn 1 point by chrischen 55 minutes ago | 2 comments | edit | delete I was wondering if it would be a good idea to try up/down voting quotas per day or something like that on hacker news. So right now, assuming there isn't some transparent quota in place, someone more keen towards voting(maybe because he or she has more time) has higher influence on the ratings overall.

Instituting a quota can make votes more valuable and meaningful, and standardized in terms of value to each person.

So for example if I voted on ten comments one day because I'm more liberal in voting, and someone else only gives 3 votes, I end up having more influence because of my lower standards for an upvote.

A quota of 3 upvotes Per day means those 3 votes will be rationed by everyone for the top 3.

Obviously the problem would be to find the right quota and determining how to let comments posted at the end of the day get a share of votes.

This is not to make it so that people who read more get less influence, but so that people who tend to read less comments per vote do not become overrepresented.

This is more of an enhancement idea.

So let me know what you think. And if I have any holes in my reasoning.

a-priori• 17 years ago

I'd like a way to see which of my comments have recently been upvoted or commented on. There are times (like right now) that I see my karma jump, and I get curious what got upvoted, but I don't see anything different on my comments page.

mahmud• 17 years ago

Ability to escape stars (*);

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=864911

http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec...

mmaaxx• 17 years ago

ajax commenting.

Murkin2• 17 years ago

A little far from news. But after a few days using the site I find it to have an excellent community of users.

There are quite a few questions I would of loved to post for general discussion. Alas the discussions are limited to the posted news item.

Perhaps adding a general/daily discussion form where users can talk about general issues would greatly improve the experience.

Keep it up Boris

Murkin2• 17 years ago

A bit more browsing and I found that you CAN post a question for discussion already.

So my new suggestion is to add an option to delete your own suggestions from the suggestions threads :)

dfranke7• 17 years ago

I notice the new 'avg' column on the leader board. Can you add a breakdown into submission scores and comment scores?

riffer2• 17 years ago

Only recent comment scores are inputs into the average

jakecarpenter• 17 years ago

Can we get a mute button? For those discussions that stay at the top for hours and usually degenerate into name calling anyway?

hackworth2• 17 years ago

mobile stylesheet, plz!

ivankirigin10• 17 years ago

j.mp is a url shortener that should be removed - or whatever your policy is for url shorteners. You could just follow the link in the post submission process.

ivankirigin10• 17 years ago

Do you have a way of tracking new comments on this thread?

It would be interesting if you have special tools that let you "follow" stories or even people. If I had to choose, I'd rather see the recent comments from a few select people than the front page.

groby_b• 17 years ago

password recovery? Pretty please? With sugar on top?

abukres• 17 years ago

Please add some text in the body of the RSS feed. All I see is a subject line and an empty body. Sometimes that's not enough to determine if the post is interesting enough.

jraines• 17 years ago

I would like to see a "collapse" button to hide a comment's children, like on Reddit. With the new ranking algorithm, I do a lot more scrolling than I used to (good thing in terms of giving everyone's comments more visibility, but [-] would be handy)

cake2• 17 years ago

1) I would be curious to see an experiment concerning the karma system, a downvote would cost you (2 karma) an upvote too (1 karma). You gain 1 karma per day if you visited the site, this means as you get to know the community and its codes more and more you get more control.

I think it could increase the value of the karma system, I am seeing a lot of downvotes that I can't explain or that I find unfair. I am also seeing excessive points on some comments.

2) Not related : if you browse someone's comments you may encounter truncated posts titles :

12 points by pg 1 hour ago | link | parent | on: Announcement: YC alumni will help us read applicat...

It would be nice to include the full title in the "title" attribute of those links.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

That instantly limits you to 1 vote per day unless you yourself get upvoted.

I assume that was your intention ?

This in turn will give the few people that are very active lots of voting power.

The karma here is not so much 'quality' (though that is a component) as much as it is an odometer.

cake2• 17 years ago

Not exactly, you would have some capital to start. If you start with 50 points you get 50 upvotes or 25 downvotes, plus it evolves every day from your visits and the upvotes you received.

The main point is to force people to be more cautious with their upvotes and downvotes. My theory is that if you have to pay from your reputation (your karma), you'll mainly upvote/downvote what you're really convinced about.

jbr• 17 years ago

In the spirit of brainstorming:

  o Suggest users who upvote similar items.
  o Highlight items that have been upvoted by
    other users who upvote things that I upvote.

I'd love to write something like this, but would need the data. What are the impediments to publishing or sharing upvote data?

christopherolah• 17 years ago

LaTeX/TeX style math, syntax highlighting.

kristianp2• 17 years ago

Bug:

I've just started using the noprocrast function. I find the 'retry' link expires well before the 180 minutes of wait is up.

makecheck9• 17 years ago

Subtract 1 karma from yourself each time up-vote or down-vote is used; this effectively turns karma into "money" that can be spent on maintaining good discussion and high quality submissions.

This would make people think twice before down-voting. It would also reduce "knee-jerk" up-votes, as people would be more likely to reserve up-votes for things that truly deserve it.

It would also mean that long-time users will naturally do more of the moderation, as they have lots of points and may not be as afraid to use them.

rms21• 17 years ago

It's not a good idea to discourage voting, generally the more voting we have the better.

jriddycuz• 17 years ago

This also makes karma a zero-sum game. This necessarily results in a distinct winners-and-losers scenario, which would be antagonistic to the goals of the site.

dctoedt• 17 years ago

Tag and vote for articles as suggested founder reading - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923920

makecheck9• 17 years ago

Automatically up-vote parent comments based on the number of replies in a thread that they produce.

Sometimes, when a big discussion forms, comments deep in the thread gain 10 or more points while the original parent has just 1 or 2 points. The parent comment is usually "worthy" of the same points, but it's as if people forget to up-vote the parent. The parent should share in the karma for spawning interesting discussions.

bhousel3• 17 years ago

Don't you think that would encourage reddit-style pun and joke threads?

edw519• 17 years ago

Add 2 more columns to the leader board:

1. date/time or "minutes ago" of last comment

2. first 40 characters of that comment...

Most of the people I like to follow are already on the leader board. It sure would be nice to know who's on-line right now and what they're talking about without having to drill down 20 times.

Possible additional benefits of this enhancement:

1. People may take an extra moment or two to examine their comment's quality if they knew it would shortly be on a "master" page for all to see.

2. An additional route for people to join a conversation they're interested in.

kirubakaran7• 17 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936109

dhimes3• 17 years ago

I'd like an explanation of what all the things on your profile page do. I think it's mostly covered, but what does "delay" do? Measured in seconds, minutes, or what? Even just a mouse-over would help.

zck• 17 years ago

I agree that it could be more user friendly, but here's the function of delay (from http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html):

>There's a new "delay" field in your profile that lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them.

dhimes3• 17 years ago

Thanks! I thought I checked that page...

robotron• 17 years ago

Not a feature, but a bug. Trying to merge my Facebook account and my Hacker News account results in "Unknown" during the merge, which never completes.

gap• 17 years ago

Same here, with OpenID.

dashaff• 17 years ago

What is the fix for merging OpenID with Hacker News account?

jonsen• 17 years ago

Somewhere (obvious) to report malfunctions.

My upvotes have stopped working. Up arrow goes away and points increment, but on refresh before-points are back?! Consistently on comments, not always on submissions. (Downvotes not used yet :-) Safari 4.0.4, OS X

thirdusername2• 17 years ago

I have the same problem although I think when you see the submissions vote go up it's someone else since they get voted on a lot more than individual comments. For me it's both in chrome and firefox (in Win 7) so I don't think it's the browsers faulth and I noticed it for the first time maybe a 15-30 days ago. I'm guessing one of three things are happening:

1) We banned from voting as the moderators doesn't seem to tell people when they moderate.

2) pg is running an experiment.

3) It's a bug.

I agree that there needs to be a place to report malfunctions. It would also be nice to know when a moderator takes action against you.

netcan• 17 years ago

Same had happened to me. My guess is that not informing you that you can't vote is intentional. It's like making troll comments disappear but not letting the troll know.

_urga2• 17 years ago

Let me see all articles that receive more than [threshold] votes.

jorsh• 17 years ago

It'd be cool if you guys would figure out how to properly implement RSS

1. You should be including a LINK element pointing towards your RSS feed in the page's HEAD so RSS-hip user agents can pick up on it.

2. Serve your RSS feeds with a proper mimetype. text/xml instead of text/html.

ilaksh• 17 years ago

I should be able to fucking downvote things by now. This is bullshit.

_urga2• 17 years ago

"Best of Hacker News"

rythie• 17 years ago

I'd like a link to my submissions on the top navigation bar (instead of under my profile) or it should be combined with threads

drp2• 17 years ago

Showing subdomains on all google domains would be nice.

There are lots of submissions from sites.google.com that seem much more clickable because they end with (google.com). Similarly I'd be more likely to click a link from code.google.com.

ticktock• 17 years ago

lets be real, this site is all about the quality of the submitted links and the quality of the comment system.

I think you should focus on COMMENT system 100% and the quality of the links will improve as a result. For instance, i continue to be downmodded basically because i offer an opposing view to the whatever the current topic is. I try to not insult, and I try to back-up everything i write with facts, or state them as opinion if it is only such. If I was posting off-topic spam, I expect to get downmodded, or if I am shock-jocking just to get noticed (I don't see the point of that one) I would expect to get downmodded, but your 'Point' system is seriously broke.

mattheww• 17 years ago

Display the H-index of users on the leaders board: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

shmichael• 17 years ago

I'd like to build a FF add-on that overlays HN comments at the bottom of every page that's been discussed here.

I really need some sort of search API for that, otherwise the solution would be to do a fake-post of the article, just to see if anyone submitted it before, then delete it immediately if the submission succeeds.

EricBurnett• 17 years ago

Up-voting breaks after you sign in in a different page.

The situation is this: sometimes I open a number of pages in tabs when I am not signed in, then read and vote on them all. The first time I vote I get the login page and everything works nicely, but if I later try to vote again on a different tab that doesn't know I was logged in, I get redirected to a dead page instead.

Repro: 1. When signed out, open a couple pages in tabs. 2. Sign in on one of them. 3. Try to use an up arrow in the other tab.

You should end up on a blank white page.

scorxn• 17 years ago

Contextual private messaging.

Many threads on HN and elsewhere get burdened by 1:1 dialog that adds little or no public value. "Why am I being downvoted?" dialogs are one example.

I propose adding a "reply privately" function. A private reply is only visible to commenter and parent, and appears in-thread.

Effectively, this creates a new 1:1 communication channel, without having to add a PM engine, while preserving the message's context.

mooism22• 17 years ago

Please disallow submissions that link to private ip addresses.

For example, the submission at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015536 links to a page on 192.168.0.1. In this case the link appears to be benign, but a link could be crafted that changed security settings on a router, or even routed the router.

It seems that links to private ip addresses on HN could be harmful and could never be legitimate.

JayNeely2• 17 years ago

Please make it more clear that the e-mail field in your HN profile isn't publicly visible. Many people ( http://searchyc.com/comments/e-mail+in+my+profile ) leave comments like, "contact me using the e-mail in my profile", not realizing no one else can see that info.

Even better would be a "make public?" checkbox next to it.

hajrice• 17 years ago

I think that it'd be really cool to have email notifications when someone replies to our post/comment.

icey4• 17 years ago

In addition to a "flag" link on submissions, add a "spam" link so that we can start differentiating flags for inappropriate content and outright spam. I would imagine the algorithm could trust spam flags by users a little more since it's almost universally understood when a submission is spam versus just controversial.

gosuri• 17 years ago

Search dude..

davi• 17 years ago

http://searchyc.com/

tokenadult9• 17 years ago

A recent thread (currently near the top of the main page) suggests that it might be useful to have an optional hat tip field on new submitted articles. Sometimes the submitter learned about the article from another source, or another HN participant, and just wants to get out of the starting block to post the article, while also acknowledging the source of the suggestion that the article is good.

govindk• 17 years ago

I could not find a place where I could provide feedback with respect to your rss feedback. It returns text/html rather than text/xml which results in chrome misbehaving (adding all elements to <head> tag)

Govind

odna3ra• 17 years ago

Please include more useful info in the rss feed. Currently, it only displays the submission title.

cperciva6• 17 years ago

Testing a HN bug, please ignore this comment.

cperciva6• 17 years ago

bar

http://www.example.com/

baz

http://www.example.com/*

fizzle

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cperciva6• 17 years ago

When the ending asterisk of an italics block is at the end of a URL, the first asterisk gets converted to <i> but the ending asterisk is included in the URL rather than being converted to </i>, resulting in the rest of the comment being italicized.

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RiderOfGiraffes2• 17 years ago

Please consider enhanced duplicate detection as outlined and discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215

Simply compare the "title" field of the referenced page. If it matches, perhaps compare the domain name, ignoring any "www". Or perhaps not bother. The number of occasions the title matches when the page is different should be sufficiently small.

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alanthonyc3• 17 years ago

On a related note: somebody else suggested the ability to merge duplicates.

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tvon4• 17 years ago

Yeah, trying to prevent duplicates is an impossible battle.

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cjoh• 17 years ago

I think it is nice that we get submissions from older articles that are a few years old every once and awhile. They're healthy reminders of popular articles of days gone by. At the same time, there seems to be a lot of recycling of older posts going on lately in attempts to grab karma. I feel like this is a too-cheap way to gain these points-- instead of sharing new useful information with colleagues, the system can be gamed by sharing too much of yesterday's useful information.

Flagging something as [old] would be useful -- perhaps some of the folks who've been here for awhile can opt to ignore them a la a browsing interface like /classic/ while still having the option of getting to these useful artifacts if we want.

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ez772• 17 years ago

It would be great to have a history export feature. By the way, I must admit I sometimes upvote only to save the thread and read it later. A distinct Save feature could result in more strict upvoting...

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rms21• 17 years ago

As a first implementation of the tagging/flagging system, can you turn on the meta tag?

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yumraj• 17 years ago

One great feature would be the ability to mark/bookmark threads as favorites and then to view them listed under my avatar. I can use browser bookmarks for this, but this would really help IMHO.

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amichail2• 17 years ago

newcomments would benefit from better context (e.g., showing the parent).

Also, real-time updates in newcomments would be nice.

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teeja• 17 years ago

When I click the "More" link and the page is expired, I'd rather have it go to the latest next page than have to backup and refresh the page. Could be a pref.

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stuntgoat3• 17 years ago

Sort comments by hours or days ago.

Thank you!

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Alex63• 17 years ago

Keyboard shortcuts (like Google Reader) that work in Chrome, Firefox, or IE.

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lmkg• 17 years ago

Strip Feedburner campaign parameters (and other campaign parameters) from submitted URLs.

This doesn't have a functional impact on the website, since the link still works, but as a web analyst I have OCD about keeping data clean. If people are getting to the page from HN, then their visit shouldn't get credited to feedburner. There's also a benefit to HN in doing this: In google analytics, campaign data overwrites referrer data, which means Hacker News does not receive credit for the traffic it directs to those sites, if there's a campaign code stealing credit.

While the same applies to any sort of analytics campaign tracking query parameters, Feedburner is the only culprit I've seen on hacker news, and they generally have the Google Analytics tracking parameters, which all start with UTM.

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alex_c• 17 years ago

Allow a different "showdead" setting on the "new" page.

I like to browse with showdead on, because it's interesting to see what comments are being posted from dead accounts, or what frontpage stories are killed.

The "new" page, however, is painful with showdead on, because of all the spam.

My ideal would be to browse with showdead on everywhere except the new page.

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mike-cardwell• 17 years ago

More of a bug report than a feature request. When logging in with OpenID, it doesn't seem to like HTTPS urls. I tail my Apache access logs and see no requests...

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genieyclo• 16 years ago

Ability to change email address on HN and delete own account.

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Chirael• 16 years ago

Have a background lookup of the URL and/or title, so that before you hit Submit on an item, it can tell you in the submit page whether the item has already been submitted (something with the same URL or same/almost-same title).

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amichail2• 16 years ago

Automatically generated tag clouds for discussions would make it easier to find interesting parts (if any).

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hackworth2• 16 years ago

funny, i was thinking that auto-generated tag clouds for the day's hot topics might help reduce duplicate stories, too.

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grinich4• 16 years ago

Disable auto-capitalization for iProducts.

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icco• 16 years ago

Could you put the code for Hacker News up on Github, so we could all help towards a better code base?

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jurjenh• 16 years ago

The base code is available with the arc tarball ( http://arclanguage.org/install ) which will give you all you need to get started. However, any recent changes done to the current live news.arc won't be there, and I suspect there have been some.

The site seems to be working better, though this may be seasonal, so thumbs up pg and rtm for recent changes.

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psogle• 16 years ago

Just an FYI your twitter account isn't spitting out the url to the articles you post there

Example - Open Source Open World: http: Comments: http:

http://twitter.com/YCHackerNews

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gregwebs• 16 years ago

Make users more like people (to make discussions better).

Thought of this after watching a recent frontline: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/

One interesting thing that the creator of Second Life said: when discussions happen in a virtual work they are much more like real interactions. So if all HN discussions moved to 2nd life, that would help solve some of the issues with trolling, etc. This then begs the question: would other less drastic measures like avatars help?

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abc3• 16 years ago

A visual cue that indicates when a follow-up comment on a post is from the post's author.

For example, when someone on Hacker News links to a post by Mark Pilgrim, I'd like to be able to scan the comments to see if Mark has contributed to the comment thread.

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presto102• 16 years ago

Please consider making it possible to change your username.

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vajorie• 16 years ago

allow reader to upvote while reading the item in the same window the item is opened...

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Confusion• 16 years ago

Perhaps not really a feature, but: yesterday I submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173147 It sank pretty quickly due to a lack of upvotes. However, despite its low position, it did accumulate 9 upvotes over the last day, which I guess are due to seperate submissions of the same story. From this, I propose the algorithm that decides what appears on the frontpage can use tweaking to weigh submissions heavier than upvotes (perhaps it does?). If this story was truly submitted 10 times, perhaps it deserves a higher position?

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rms21• 16 years ago

I think this has been discussed before, but as you propose it, weighting submitting higher than voting is too subject to abuse. I also regularly submit things instead of upvoting them. Commonly I'll click on a story, then use the bookmarklet to submit it after reading so I don't have to go back and upvote it.

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soyelmango• 16 years ago

I'd like to log in with my registered email address and be able to change my username. And a long shot: Because I can't change my username, I've got a few accounts here under the same email address - I'd like to be able to merge those accounts to preserve my saved posts and points.

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idoh• 16 years ago

Hello PG, when you reply to a comment, can you put the focus onto the text box? that way you can start typing without having to click into the text box first? It would take about 2-3 lines of javascript to make this happen.

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stevederico2• 16 years ago

Comment Ranking filter. Rank by most upvotes, date ascending or date descending.

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aryounce2• 16 years ago

Password recovery. Please?

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stevederico2• 16 years ago

Podcast/Justin.tv covering top articles and ask HNs of the week, Showcases new developments or ideas from the community, interviews past/present YC founders.

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nitrogen• 16 years ago

Suggestion: make URLs in negative-voted posts light gray like the text (they are still black and can make a -4 post stand out visually).

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pixelcort• 16 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/openid_merge is coming back as Unknown. This is apparently the point where one would presumably link an OpenID to an existing HN username.

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johnwatson11218• 16 years ago

How about a way to see all the up votes and down votes for a comment. I would be intrigued to see if there are any comments with low points but only because they were somehow controversial. I'm not trying to be sensationalist but it might be interesting to see the most controversial comments on a kind of leader board format. Maybe themes would emerge to show big dividing lines in the way that the audience here thinks about problems.

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yankeeracer73• 16 years ago

A character counter for the title input box when submitting links since you're limited to less than 80 chars.

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rbanffy2• 16 years ago

Could you please use "monospace" instead of "Courier" for inputs in "http://ycombinator.com/news.css? It looks terrible on Windows.

And it would look just as nice on other platforms.

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grinich4• 16 years ago

Use & to escape ampersands on a story list.

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bigfoot• 16 years ago

Every time someone asks for a search function here, someone answers with http://searchyc.com. This is a perfectly valid answer, but you should rather ask yourselves, why are people constantly asking for that? Because you don't have a "search" link in the HN header, e.g. right next to "new". It'd be fine if it'd just point to searchyc.com.

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ck22• 16 years ago

I'd like alternate lines in the list to be slightly lighter, like (very) old-school computer paper, so it's easier to see the grouping.

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Jach• 16 years ago

We have the ability to save topics. (I'm still not sure how this works, or how I can un-save.) It would be great to also be able to save comments.

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jackowayed• 16 years ago

add GitHub to the list of sites that have subdomains expanded. Some people blog from theirusername.github.com, and it would be a lot more obvious that it's a blog post, not code, if you showed the subdomain.

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dmoney• 16 years ago

The "saved" page is slow and doesn't always load. Sometimes it just returns a blank white page.

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thomasreggi• 16 years ago

I would really like a rss feed of my "saved" links and "thread" comments.

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marbletiles2• 16 years ago

A way to see what's new in a thread since I last visited it: with the threading it's impossible to see what's new on a big thread.

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patrickk2• 16 years ago

Resource lists for Hackers. This would fit nicely next to "submit" above.

Over the last few days, I've looked for music/white noise that people listen to while coding, and this kind of discussion pops up now and again. It pisses off people who've commented on the older discussion, and possibly disenfranchises newer readers who see all the negativity on the repeat thread.

Net result: it's difficult to get a nice, complete list.

What's needed is a list of books/music/white noise sources/software tools/hardware/useful websites divided by topic/[insert stereotypical geeky obsession here] that people can upvote and comment their favourite.

My suggestion would be to scrape the past discussions on these topics and let the readers sort out the jumbled data, as a start. Crowdsourcing one of the brainiest audiences on the web, bound to work out.

Bonus for Paul Graham's wallet: more book sales.

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roryokane4• 16 years ago

A bug: upvotes are swallowed when initiated while logged out.

Details: If I click up-vote while not logged in and then log in using the form that is subsequently presented, I am returned to the original page. However, every time I try this, the item has the same number of points as before I upvoted it, though it no longer has an upvote arrow next to it, so I cannot upvote it again.

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andyjdavis• 16 years ago

I notice that a few others have complained about what is likely the same issue in regard to form submissions.

I generally have hacker news open in the background throughout the day. If I leave it for a while I inevitably get "Unknown or expired link" when next clicking on the "more" link at the bottom.

For example, (I assume this link will give the same result for everyone) http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=x4ipaJEME2

Why do the links expire? I'm sure there's a good back end reason but as a user it seems weird that the site dies if you ignore it for any length of time. Its like a Tamagotchi.

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dfranke7• 16 years ago

Every once in a while I come across a post or comment that's been deaded or a user who's been banned for no apparent reason, which usually turns out to be a mistake by an admin. When I see these I email PG, but there ought to be a more efficient way of going about this. How about a "contraflag" button for calling them to admins' attention?

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falava5• 16 years ago

I've just submitted an idea for HN:

Twitter-like Follow button + new threads-like page

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1298352

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KeepTalking• 16 years ago

- A respected users list; ie ability to track postings of a particular user.

- Sorting posts. ie Say I want to view only posts from New york times.

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falava5• 16 years ago

I proposed some days ago a Twitter-like follow button. Everyone could make his favorite user list. This don't have to affect to the current site if the follow button is only in the profile page of each user and your tracked user page link is in your own profile.

The complexity of the new tracked users page may be similar to the current threads page. If it's a private page is posible that don't waste too much server CPU.

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MykalM• 16 years ago

Password Recovery

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Alistra• 16 years ago

more significant difference between seen and unseen link

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russellbeattie• 16 years ago

Can you please add an item's publish date (<pubDate>) to the RSS feed? It's seriously low-hanging fruit. Just whatever the date in the DB says is fine - there must be a 'created' timestamp in there somewhere. Format it as RFC822 timestamp:

def _format_date(dt): """convert a datetime into an RFC 822 formatted date Input date must be in GMT. """

    #   Sat, 07 Sep 2002 00:00:01 GMT

    return "%s, %02d %s %04d %02d:%02d:%02d GMT" % (
            ["Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri", "Sat", "Sun"][dt.weekday()],
            dt.day,
            ["Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun",
             "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec"][dt.month-1],
            dt.year, dt.hour, dt.minute, dt.second)

-Russ

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kgermino2• 16 years ago

There's so many different HN pages (ie news.ycombinator.com/noobs, news.ycombinator/ask etc.) that it would be helpful if there was one page that listed all of them. It does't need to be nice, or accessible itself, but it would help make it so users don't have to try and remember each one or remember where links to the different pages are located.

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rdl4• 16 years ago

Somehow, hackernews handles certain transparent caches badly -- it's the only site I use which has a problem. I'm in Kuwait, unlike 100% of the other hackernews users, and can work around it using a proxy, but periodically I show as logged out, or expired link, or wrong user.

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yread2• 16 years ago

The detection of duplicate URLs could be improved, for example removing trailing # like in

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329998 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329090

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stretchwithme• 16 years ago

I think it'd be cool if the procrastination cutoff didn't work until after you've had a chance to edit a comment. maybe a "but at least let me edit existing comments" checkbox.

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Firstmate• 16 years ago

It's kinda hard to read comments and to what they correspond to when it gets extremely long. For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773106

Scrolling half way down makes it hard to see & read the comments.

Maybe a ajax thing that keeps the current comment scrolling with the page at the top.

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jacoblyles• 16 years ago

I would like to be able to delete or lock my Hacker News account in order to cut back on the number of time-wasting websites for which I have logins.

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inmygarage• 16 years ago

I would like the ability to see the homepage from a specific date - a "time machine" feature where you can enter a date and it shows you the home page from that date. TechMeme has this feature and I use it regularly (archives box, right column, bottom).

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bdickason• 16 years ago

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I would love to see some sort of 'submitted' or 'updated' feedback indicator when editing your comment.

I clicked edit, typed in my changes, and clicked submit. The page didn't really update so I wasn't sure if my edit even worked. I clicked submit again just for good measure.

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s-phi-nl• 16 years ago

I would like some way to "flag" a dead post for revival. Every so often I see a dead link that in my opinion should not be dead. You could use the flag link on dead posts for this.

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tewks2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure what the solution is, but it can be difficult to vote on a touchscreen.

Perhaps a mobile stylesheet where the vote arrows are to the left and right of the screen would suit, though I'm unsure of the aesthetics would be suitable. The current design is pretty attractive.

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jiaaro• 16 years ago

Totally agree. the voting needs to be a bigger click target when I'm on the iPhone/iPad

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parfe• 16 years ago

The help link on the edit post page comes first in the tab order following the TextField. I find myself hitting <tab> <enter> excepting to post the updated comment, but instead I end up on the help page reading an explanation about post formatting.

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metamemetics3• 16 years ago

Add downvoting to submissions as well as comments. Problems this will alleviate:

-users will have a way express that they feel a submission is egregiously off-topic or extremely redundant rather than leaving the off-repeated comment "This is Hacker News?" or "Here is a script to hide links with the word iPad" etc.

-Will improve the quality of submissions and prevent people from karma-fishing with linkbait titles on articles of little value.

-reduce multiple copies of the same story from sitting on the front page

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doc-film• 16 years ago

Feature Request: PG pls consider making the submitted urls which are listed to the right of the submissions as links which would take you to a page where all submissions from that site were listed desc.

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metamemetics3• 16 years ago

Flesh out "flag" feature:

I don't think adding downvoting to submissions will mean HN==reddit, but a solution for those that think so: have "flag" display the number of times something has been flagged and have this negatively affect page rank similar to downvoting.

Benefits:

-Adds the positive aspects of downvoting as mentioned below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366325

-Avoids downvoting submissions for mere disagreeance. Since the functionality is called "flag", rather than displayed as the complement to the upvoting action, it is explicitly only for objectable submissions and not because you simply disagree with something.

-Allows site to maintain status quo if moderators are busy/away. The site is self moderating.

-Allows better tools for moderators to solve problems quicker, for example they could filter submissions based on the ratio of flags to upvotes to see where their limited attention is needed.

-I don't think downvoting submissions with a karma prerequisite would be a major problem giving how well the comments system has worked. Set the karma requirement for flagging to same as comment downvoting could work.

-If you're still concerned about flag abuse of this new flag system, "flag (#)" would require the flagger to select a reason from a drop down-box of a limited lists of reasons that you decide are valid for flagging. This informs users of your desired direction for the community within an interface mechanic.

I think this is win win, it addresses the problem by simply expanding a current feature, but you probably have some ideas have your own in this area.

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nearestneighbor2• 16 years ago

STOP bugging me about my email address! When I signed up, it wasn't part of the deal. The same goes for you, Reddit.

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nearestneighbor2• 16 years ago

I don't know why I'm not allowed to vote up or down, but I do see both arrows.

If someone's not allowed to vote, how about a little courtesy of not wasting their time on voting?

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staunch8• 16 years ago

There's no good way to refer to a HN user by username and have it be obvious who you mean.

There should be a way to write a username and have it linkified. If I write @pg it should show up as simply "pg" and be a link to http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

Or something like that...

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cperciva6• 16 years ago

Bug testing, please ignore.

Text with asterisk

  Code with *asterisk

Failure to close italics tag?

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icey4• 16 years ago

The hellbanning algorithm seems to be overly aggressive lately. If you showed a link on dead items (where "flag" would be on a live comment) that said "Ok?" or something similar, the users could flag items back in to existence.

I feel like there have been a lot of good comments lately that have been autokilled because of a past transgression and we're missing interesting conversation.

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thunk• 16 years ago

An unintrusive page-load timestamp would help us self-limit obsessive reloading to decrease load on the server.

Edit: Also, it would give "n minutes ago" a reference point.

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Sujan• 16 years ago

There are lots of links like this one on HN:

<a href="...">Facebook is using a trick to make people use faceb...</a>

Changing it to include the complete, uncropped post title would be a nice addition:

<a href="..." title="Facebook is using a trick to make people use facebook">Facebook is using a trick to make people use faceb...</a>

Then you could see the complete post name on hovering the link.

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orlandu63• 16 years ago

Make threads more readable in elinks. Currently no thread depth is shown in elinks, making it hard to follow discussions.

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avlesh• 16 years ago

Well this is NOT a feature request. I wanted to report a bug and couldn't find a place to do so.

Hacker new site doesn't open in Firefox 3.5.9. Is this a known issue? The HTTP response headers seem to be the reason behind this bug. This is what the headers look like -

TTP/1.1 200 OK

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Cache-Control: private

Connection: close

Cache-Control: max-age=0

Notice the missing "H" in the first line. Firefox fails to understand this response and dumps the entire HTML as Text. I saw this bug 3 weeks ago and am surprised that it hasn't been fixed yet.

- Avlesh (http://webklipper.com)

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huhtenberg6• 16 years ago

An option of submitting a "better URL" would be nice. This is in the context of the blogspam, i.e. when the original submission links to a page that merely rehashes the content of another page.

One option is to allow users suggest alternative url and then have the submission URL automatically changed to a suggested one once latter was submitted N times. Perhaps add a "url" option next to the "flag", make it open a page with an existing URL in the text input field and let the user change and submit it.

I know this is being done by hand by mods at the moment, and I am suggesting automating this process.

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WiseWeasel2• 16 years ago

After clicking on either the up-arrow or down-arrow on comments, only that single arrow should disappear, not both. Then, you can always at least cancel out your vote if you clicked the wrong one.

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DanielRibeiro• 16 years ago

This has been said already on very old posts, but an API would great. General retrieving/posting/searching capabilities would be great. For authenticated users, being able to list the user's own up votes and down votes. Would make it easier to see what the user enjoyed/hated.

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huhtenberg6• 16 years ago

An option for having submissions of selected users to float to my front page even with a score of 1 (and perhaps staying there longer than under normal circumstances).

Call it "tracking" or "following the user" if you will.

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vollmond• 16 years ago

Alternative: highlight all posts by followed users, similar to how fark.com does it. I can quickly scan the page to see the people I'm interested in, and still easily see the context for their discussions.

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h1ro• 16 years ago

an rss feed for saved stories please

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ivankirigin10• 16 years ago

Let me follow people. I just learned about Bret Taylor's account. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154

I'd love to click "follow" next to that comment. Then I want my view on hacker news to be heavily weighted by the mods from the people I follow (you could make it a mod on the normal ranking, like a reordering of the top stories). A friend comment view would be even more useful - like the thread view for any user, but collected among friends. A synopsis view of the comments without the full thread and only the first 200 chars of the comment would be easy to digest.

Generally I think the solution to making HN not suck is to let me ignore completely the parts that suck.

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iamelgringo7• 16 years ago

Second the motion as well as upvote.

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patrickk2• 16 years ago

Hacker Friends:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpg...

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pjob• 16 years ago

I was wondering if you could add a link to the hacker news homepage to the "Unknown or Expired Link." response that you serve up. Often I'll click more on an old page or hit back on an article I am reading and get this response. My next action is almost always to navigate to the homepage.

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karanbhangui• 16 years ago

Can the stylesheet be tweaked to say font-family:Verdana, sans-serif; instead of font-family:Verdana;

Otherwise, systems without Verdana installed show a serif font.

Thanks.

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jeberle• 16 years ago

Gray text on a light gray background is very hard to read. See for yourself: http://www.fastnlight.com/contrast.html Black text on a white background please, or make the gray text/gray background style something I can turn off. Thanks.

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DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

I've got thousands of saved pages, and I was trying to find one I saved a year or two ago. It's a disaster. Having to page dozens of times, trying to physically spot the text.

Sure would be nice to have a single page with everything saved right there. Then I could just search the one web page for what I'm looking for. I could also put these in a spreadsheet or database for future reference.

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fezzl• 16 years ago

Filter by unanswered threads.

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KeroseneKid• 16 years ago

I would like to be able to sort new by points.

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boilers2006• 16 years ago

I would like to see the servce ingboo.com used on this site. Their tool allows you to take rss updates to any channel you want like facebook,twitter,email,igoogle,etc. Its a free tool and would make readers lives easier.

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MerlinDE• 16 years ago

Would be great, if you could include whole articles in the RSS feed. Making it easier to read it offline, on the go.

Also a more flexible layout, better suiting devices with limited screen sizes (read mobile, aka iPod/Pad/Phone) would be great.

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nabors• 16 years ago

I would like updates from Hacker News by texting the word Hacker to 90210. And then you all can send out personal messages to your fans! It would also be nice if you allowed me to be your agent to sign you up :). I just think it would be so cool to get Personal Updates from the DNA running Hacker News via 90210 :) Thank you so much for all of your support in the community! www.danielnabors.com explains it all i felt this would be an Exciting Deep Story and strong individuals like your selves would see the Vision :)

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karlzt2• 16 years ago

put http://searchyc.com/ as a search feature and ban google and other popular search engines from indexing HN. Please tell me why this is a bad idea.

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hackermom• 16 years ago

Couldn't find any better place... Bug report: when voting someone's entry down, the score stops at -4, but the poster's karma actually continues down beyond that point. This seems err to me.

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Twisol• 16 years ago

Echoing a lot of comments here, a following facility would be excellent. I haven't needed to follow specific people much, but I'd really like to be able to follow specific threads. Some threads interest me a lot and I'd like to keep track of the comments, but as the threads get longer it becomes a lot harder to tell which comments were recently added.

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wtf1• 16 years ago

disappointed that HN doesn't have some way to reset or recover forgotten passwords. (that I can find.)

forgetting a passwords happen, especially with remember password features in browsers as standard.

i'll just have to use this account until my next memory problem....when I will create wtf2.

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orky7• 16 years ago

the interface of the comment page should be more friendlier/organised. the reply comments should be folded/hidden so that if we like the comment and want to see what other people reply to this awesome/crappy comment i can do that by clicking a button and all the reply will be shown, everything should not be visible since it is very time consuming if there are more comments on a topic.

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jseliger• 16 years ago

This is a bug report, not a feature request, but I couldn't find an obvious place to put it. I appear to be able to upvote comments an infinite number of times: if I click the upvote button once, it disappears. But if I hit enter, the vote keeps climbing. I have some screenshots of this in action.

Unless Hacker News has an (undocumented?) feature that lets regular posters / certain karma thresholds / whatever have a large or infinite number of votes, this appears to be a bug.

I'm running Firefox 3.6.8 on OS 10.6.whatever is latest.

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corin_4• 16 years ago

It's a bug, but only with the front-end, only one vote actually gets remembered.

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mslate• 16 years ago

A list of all-time highest voted links--let me know if I'm mistaken and that it exists already

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muuh-gnu• 16 years ago

I would like an option to completely hide downvoted comments and the subthreads below them, slashdot-like, not merely grey them out. As HN becomes more and more popular, the number of downvoted bullshit one-liner postings and accompanying one-liner chat-like "discussions" IMO seems to grow. I dont want to see people "chat". Based on that, I also would like an option to hide/remove postings below a given number of words, again, to remove the one-liner bullshit postings.

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Tycho2• 16 years ago

I've noticed that HN users are often thoughtful enough to write short summaries of linked articles in the comments section. For instance

Summary: Wired.com graph shows that while the web continues to grow (in terms of bandwidth consumption), it is not growing as fast as other internet services such as P2P and video and consequently has a lower overall % of traffic than several years ago.

So my suggestion is, add a new HN section called 'Summary' which finds all these comments (which will be recognizable by the 'Summary:' text at the start of the comment) and lists them in one place for quick reading.

Obviously the more people that do it, and know to use the same 'Summary:' convention, the better it will work. Bad summaries will be handled naturally by the downvoting in the original threads.

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willheim• 16 years ago

I tried to submit a question and it came back "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down." I am not submitting too fast. I only submitted once. It's not clear to me what the issue is. Please fix this. If it's some sort of Fail Whale then make it clear that that's the issue. If it's something else, please make it clear. What I see is a puzzlement and an error on your side and that just causes me frustration.

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linuxtrek• 16 years ago

Atom/RSS feed for the best http://news.ycombinator.com/best

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joshfinnie3• 16 years ago

I would like the ability to note certain profiles of people for future review. Much like upvoting a story saves it for me, I would like to be able to do the same with a person's profile. Call it a "watch this person" feature or something.

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daniel-cussen• 16 years ago

Bug report:

http://imgur.com/jAg1J.png from http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=n8uYJzau87

In the image, there are two identical items called "The Top Idea in Your Mind".

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olepr01• 16 years ago

I am pretty happy in my job. Could you make a feature so that I could filter out all posts with the words "investor, investment, retirement, rich, killer app" or any other story that concerns the adolescent wet dreams of lots of money and the coolest private jet EVVAH!, and rather let me focus on storys on technology?

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metysj• 16 years ago

Is there a way to remove our own comments?

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tfleish• 16 years ago

I'd like to be able to hide links I've already read, so only new links would appear on the homepage.

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chriseidhof• 16 years ago

I would like a mobile stylesheet (also for iPad) that has larger buttons. Especially the upvote button and meta-links.

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prat• 16 years ago

all time best stories please.

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edanm• 16 years ago

There seems to be a small bug. When pasting links, HN removes apostrophes. This is often problematic when copying-pasting links from Wikipedia.

For example, the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem.

It's supposed to have an apostrophe in the word "Else's", that's how it is when it's first written. But HN removes the apostrophe.

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joshfinnie3• 16 years ago

Would it be possible to have some sort of way of highlighting user comments within an item? For example, if I wanted to read all of PG's comments on this page, I could do something like:

    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363&user=pg

This would give you some signification a comment was from pg; either a highlight or a box?

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iworkforthem• 16 years ago

To remove saved stories. Right now, we are able to save stories, but can't unsaved it? Most stories have a timespan and validity to it. This will be useful to keep one focus.

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jonhohle2• 16 years ago

Truncated URLs may be longer than the original URL if they were just left alone.

The URL truncator will append three periods (not a &helip; character) to the end of a URL. In some cases (say for a URL of 62 characters), the last character will be removed and replaced with three periods. This increases the total size of the URL text to 64 characters.

The algorithm appears to be

    def truncate(word, postfix = '...')
      if ((word + postfix).length > 64)
        word = word[0, 64 - postfix.length] + postfix
      end
      word
    end

There doesn't seem to be a need to add the postfix length to the check. This should suffice:
def truncate(word, postfix = '…') if (word.length > 64) word = word[0, 64 - postfix.length] + postfix end word end

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jonhohle2• 16 years ago

Edit: Here is an example:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor#Quartz_Extreme

becomes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor#Quartz_Extrem...

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rtomsmith• 16 years ago

This is a complaint - I am really really* tired of double and triple entries in your Twitter feed for the same stories/articles. It really pollutes my timeline. Please fix this. Thanks.

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niico• 16 years ago

Search and similar posts

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gmichnikov• 16 years ago

A new/ask intersection page.

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apotheon5• 16 years ago

I have a submission link to HN on a Website. I'd really like a way to show two pieces of information in that link:

1. whether or not the page has already been submitted to HN

2. how many comments, if any, have been made in HN discussion about the page

My preference would be for a way to add that information to the page dynamically when the page is first loaded, on the server side, so that no client-side scripting (i.e. JavaScript) is necessary. If for some reason it is decided that it must be done with JavaScript, though -- well, I guess beggars can't be choosers, as they say.

As far as I'm aware, no reasonable way of doing this exists right now (short of something complex like automatically searching HN and screen-scraping). I'd really appreciate an API for this kind of thing being added to HN (and reasonably well-documented) so that I can make use of it on a site written in Ruby (not Rails, mind you).

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10smom• 16 years ago

Categories of topics for hack news for easier discussion and discovery.

  If interested in updating your community features and overall style so more appealing and user friendly, please let me know.  I would like to bid on the project and share my ideas.

Lark

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imsrk• 16 years ago

Follow questions on HN. update notification on any question of interest.

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alanh2• 16 years ago

Syntax support for

- Lists and

- Quotations

would be quite useful.

> Example quotation

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geuis• 16 years ago

Sometimes you downvote by accident. Make it so a downvote can be upvoted once. Cannot downvote after upvoting

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csouth• 16 years ago

Please add the domain name to the RSS feed. Much like the posts on the page it would be Post Title(somedomain.com).

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icey4• 16 years ago

Please ignore case when comparing submissions, as well as trailing slashes.

A dupe made it through today with identical URLs; but a special character was URL encoded using 2 different capitalizations:

  http://steveblank.com/2010/10/13/too-young-to-know-it-can%E2%80%99t-be-done/
  http://steveblank.com/2010/10/13/too-young-to-know-it-can%e2%80%99t-be-done/

  (There is an "E" that was capitalized in the first submission.)

I tested this by submitting the story a third time, and capitalizing a "T" that wasn't capitalized in either submission and it made it through the dupe check.

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TomK32• 16 years ago

HN is case sensitive when linking urls.

http://works.example.com HTTP://does.not.work.example.com

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lachyg• 16 years ago

Would love to see faces / avatars added like in the Facebook Group, that's a killer feature I think.

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metamemetics3• 16 years ago

Flag Reason Field:

When a submission gets flagged, a "reason" string is entered by the flagger. This could be done via javascript event binded to the flag link, or by redirecting to a "flag" page that gets the id of the submission being flagged. The flagger then either types a short string, or selects from a limited set of reason from a dropdown box. The reason string is then displayed at the top of a submissions's comment page when the flag is approved as [dead].

The reason string could be added in the title, appended to the byline, as an autosubmitted comment, or as a new heading... whatever is easiest to implement.

Ex. if submission X is [dead] and a user has "show dead" enabled, when they click on submission X it will now say "spam", "duplicate", "inflammatory", "automatic" etc.

This would prevent issues like: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801727 A post was most likely harmlessly flagged and [dead]ened for being a duplicate of one by a cofounder, but a user who saw it interpreted it as persecution.

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brlewis4• 16 years ago

Subcategories for the feature request page would help me see if my suggestion is already here for me to simply vote up.

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brlewis4• 16 years ago

When I submit a story early in the morning on the east coast, I sometimes kill it. Hours later, long after it has rolled off the news page, California people submit the same story, but it has no chance of hitting the front page because it's "old". East-coast people should not be able to preemtively kill stories this way.

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kakaylor• 16 years ago

Some items are displayed multiple times in the "ask" section. For example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748045

appears 3 times on the front page of the "ask" section (at least at the time this comment was posted).

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riffer2• 16 years ago

Differentiate whether something was killed by flags or mods, instead of saying 'Dead'

It would cut down on the need for comments like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815316

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marze• 16 years ago

On the submit page, have a way to enter the URL and see if it has already been submitted, without having to devise a clever title. Once you are satisfied it is new, you then think about a title.

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amorphid• 16 years ago

A hacker/non-hacker toggle for each submission and a system for letting the community decide what is truly hacker-ish. It is the only way to prevent Hacker News from becoming Reddit with no sub-Reddts.

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charlief3• 16 years ago

I'm upvoting for good intent, but what is and what isn't hacker-ish is decided at least partially through up and down votes already. Hacker/non-hacker are very ambiguous terms and will mean something different from one submitter to another. The submission guidelines are clear whether people choose to follow them or not, and whether people vote and flag in accordance. It isn't about the inadequacy of the current ranking framework. The community is changing, and with that, the ranking of topics. I think you're trying to solve a very difficult problem here that a toggle and an additional ranking scheme may be too simplistic and add too much complexity to the submission process.

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charlief3• 16 years ago

Comments are a really interesting part of news.ycombinator for many, but it is still difficult to find the most interesting threads. The top-level comments page has degraded given that the traffic has grown considerably, so the result is many 1-upvote comments.

I am proposing to change the comments page linked at the top-level menu to a ranking scheme similar to the one that ranks threads in a submission's comments page, but favouring recently posted 1-vote comments less.

Comments are more interesting than submissions in many cases. Such a page would support bottom-up (comment to submission) navigation on the site better. I know there are some features for bottom-up navigation like the on: feature on the comments page, but isn't very useful unless the comments are good. This would allow me to explore articles I would have never found to be interesting looking at the main page but when framed in the right context with an excellent comment would be very interesting.

The usage statistics of the top-level threads and comments links could support or reject a rethinking of the functionality that those pages provide.

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YakiSauce• 16 years ago

Make username on log in not case-sensitive. I just spent a while trying to log in because I didnt realize I needed to capitalize my username. I don't think its possible to create two usernames that differ only in capitalization, so Im not sure why case is considered while logging in.

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kgermino2• 16 years ago

Collapsible Comment threads. (as described in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1864844)

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kristianp2• 16 years ago

This is a bug. When I get to the older posts, around 200 or so, high-ranking posts are displayed twice, one after the other. Here is a saved hacker news page illustrating this bug, with two examples in it:

http://pastie.org/pastes/1270964/download

It has already been reported in: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630931

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nkurz7• 16 years ago

I was wondering if you'd consider adding an opt-in setting that would make users' votes visible to others, both for comments and for submissions. I'm interested in it for a few reasons:

1) I'd like to see what people I respect are voting for, in the hopes of finding things I otherwise would have missed.

2) I'd like to someday make a recommendations system that would work for HN, and starting now to create a corpus of permission-cleared votes would help if I ever get to it.

3) I think it might have a positive effect on social dynamics. While there is in theory greater potential for retaliatory downvotes, I hope that instead people would act more considerately if they felt that others could review their behaviour. I don't see any way to test this other than by trying it out.

I think this option would best be a simple checkbox on each user's settings page: "Make my votes visible to others". The votes would then be visible from a link on that page for others to view. Ideally, it would also be possible to view these from an item-centric viewpoint, accessible from the 'link' page.

If the idea were to catch on, I'd eventually like to see an 'Open' list, parallel to 'Classic', whereby one could view the entire site as it would appear if ordered only by users with their votes set to be visible.

Thanks!

[Originally here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878591]

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kirubakaran7• 16 years ago

I was working on something like this for a while. May be I'll dust it off and release it :)

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lotharbot3• 16 years ago

A simple request: change the location for the up and down arrows, in order to minimize misclick-voting (especially on mobile devices):

  [up] 3 points [down] by author n hours ago

This way, the up and down are unambiguously tied to the point value on the post, but separated by much more distance than at present.

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joshfinnie3• 16 years ago

Is there a way to make the links in the submissions (like Ask HN) be clickable after a certain threshold of upvotes? I understand why they shouldn't be links immediately, but if the submission is getting vetted by upvotes I don't see why we can't have clickable links.

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JoelSutherland2• 16 years ago

In addition to 'flag' add 'meta' on comments. There is no need for a 1/3 of each thread to be complaints about the title, whether it is HN worthy, etc.

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alanh2• 16 years ago

Please make usernames case-insensitive on login. My iPhone auto cases my username as AlanH upon which event I get a "Bad Login" message. I believe most users expect usernames to be case insensitive.

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ahalam• 16 years ago

HTTPS everywhere!

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ericb2• 16 years ago

> HN should put a little entrepreneur badge next to your name for having shipped a product. That would motivate some people.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1917605

To encourage HN users to ship code, allow them to display an icon next to their user name once they have shipped their project. This would work on the honor system. To make the implementation simple, users can self-manage the icon. Perhaps a "ship" icon could be displayed that linked to the product if applicable.

This will help create a culture of "shipping" through a shame/pride/credibility/game achievement effect, as well as help users keep the HN addiction in check.

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roryokane4• 16 years ago

Note that not everyone on HN is an entrepreneur. As a programmer, I don’t want to feel shamed for not having shipped a product when that isn’t even one of my goals in the first place. If there were such an icon, one of the states would have to be “don’t care” or “unspecified”. I think that should be the default initial state for everybody, but the problem then is whether people will be honest enough to change their icon from “unspecified” to “not shipped” on purpose.

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grinich4• 16 years ago

Users often say "My email is in my profile" since they assume the email field in their profile is visible by others. I would make the labels more specific as to what is public/hidden.

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roryokane4• 16 years ago

Please delay the disappearance of the upvote arrow until the upvote has been received and acknowledged by the HN server. The up-arrow could stay as-is until the upvote has finished sending, or could be dimmed.

Background:

When one upvotes a comment or submission, the up-arrow disappears right away, but there is a bit of network lag before the upvote is actually sent to the server. On some networks, this lag can be significant. Lag on my network has caused me to sometimes upvote an item, close the window immediately, come back later, and then realize that the upvote wasn’t counted. This is more of a problem for submissions, where not only does the submitter not get credit, but the submission also fails to get added to my Saved Links page.

The only way to check whether an upvote has been received is to refresh the page, but that also has the effect of canceling any upvotes-in-progress that have not finished, and requires one to remember which item you upvoted.

My current workaround, after I upvote something, is to leave the tab open, view other pages for a while, and close the tab when I come back to it later. However, this has the disadvantage of me having to remember, when I return to a tab, whether I left it open because there was still something to read on it or simply because I was waiting for an upvote to finish.

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roryokane4• 16 years ago

Show a “saved comments” link in my profile, underneath the “saved stories” link. This would show all comments that I upvoted, similar to “saved stories”.

Sometimes I read a really good comment and would like to save it to read again later, but there is no site function to do that. There is already a Saved Links page, so expecting me to bookmark every page I like can’t be a reason to not include this feature.

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karlzt2• 16 years ago

a neutral button to undo upvotes would be nice.

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xtho• 16 years ago

Allow users to add tags to posts. Make it possible to restrict the posts on the frontpage (when logged in) to a list of tags.

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latch• 16 years ago

I'd like to be able to change my name.

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gsivil• 16 years ago

A list- on the right side of the page- with the 10 most popular words discussed on HN the last day.

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J3L2404• 16 years ago

It would be great on long comment threads if I could tell which comments are new, possibly by changing the alpha slightly for newer comments (relative to the age of the post). If the change in alpha was very subtle it wouldn't be distracting and I could easily scan for new comments.

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tptacek3• 16 years ago

When you upvote a comment, if you have authored any parent comment in the the thread, your nick should be listed in the comment metadata ("Upvoted by commenters: tqbf, RiderOfGiraffes").

Upvotes/downvotes send conversational signals that incite responses, whether those responses have intrinsic value or not. So do critiques. Seeing the name of someone who just critiqued your comment in a list of your upvoters might neutralize some pointless flame wars.

To an extent, we already have this feature informally, because "I upvoted you, but..." has become an idiom on HN. I think it'd work better if it was automatic though, and it might incentivize "feel-good" upvotes.

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Udo2• 16 years ago

My avg score hasn't changed in about 2 months, it's exactly at 2.17 and has always been. I'm curious, because I read how this score is calculated and it's supposedly the average of the person's last comments - only in my case it can't be. Other people don't seem to have this "problem", does that mean my account is flagged somehow? Or is it in truth the average of only the first comments when an account is fresh and then stays the same forever?

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Udo2• 16 years ago

Update: by virtue of what is probably a time correlation-causation fallacy, I can now report that posting here helped and the issue seems to have gone away.

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yatsyk• 16 years ago

With new Christmas theme background title of site is unreadable. Would you please use code like this http://closure-library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/closure/goog... for correct text color selection?

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akv• 16 years ago

A way to export the list of articles in 'Saved Stories', either by way of an export function or an RSS feed (public/private) of the page.

After many years of enjoying Hacker News I now have a long list of great articles that I have liked, upvoted and in a sense 'bookmarked'. Right now, even though we can view these articles on the website, we can't download the list in any useful fashion or format.

Actually, adding RSS feeds to other pages like "best", "new" and the new function "over?points=" would be very useful as well...

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ajsharp• 16 years ago

I would love a "Save to Instapaper" link next to each story link, without having to click into it.

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roadnottaken• 16 years ago

In the case of duplicate submissions (or submissions of multiple stories reporting the same news), it would be good if high-karma users had the ability to re-direct the post to the previous HN thread. This would be better than the current situation where they get a few comments and then someone posts a link to the previous HN thread.

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gus_massa2• 16 years ago

Show the subdomains of stackexchange.com . The site is getting bigger and the different subdomains have very different topics.

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Sohum• 16 years ago

All links open in a new tab.

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chegra• 16 years ago

A HN Rising Star list

A list of HN members with average karma scores over 6{arbitrarily selected} sorted by dates they joined with the earlier you join being the high up on the list you will be.

Also, a minimum time of a 100 days{arbitrarily selected} on HN before you can appear on the list.

Hopefully, it will motivate new members to contribute quality content given the possibility of early recognition.

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suyash• 16 years ago

Location: It would be nice to divide posts based on locations. We have lot of posts from SF Bay area, NYC, other metros, UK, Germany, India etc...and it's all jumbled up.

Specially for jobs or networking purpose it would be really helpful to search posts by location.

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tintin• 16 years ago

I'm not sure if you could call this a feature. But I see a lot of 'famous' people getting upvoted because people think they are important and should be upvoted. I think it would be interesting to have a feature that can turn of usernames above comments.

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weakish• 16 years ago

Better support for w3m

Currently hacker news answers w3m's post request with this error message:

  Post request without Content-Length.

This prevents w3m users to login into Hacker News.
This issue has also been reported on the arc forum: http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=4419

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eof• 15 years ago

Name of post-killing moderator. Instead of just [dead] have [killed by flags] if post is auto-killed due to users flagging. or [killed by _username_] if killed by a user.

Fine if this is even just for high-karma users; but there has been some complaints about moderators going too far, and this would add some accountability.

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samcollins• 15 years ago

One media query and one stylesheet for mobile browsing/commenting. I'm happy to do it in an evening for you. Relevant post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152372

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solipsist• 15 years ago

Allow clickable links in Ask HN posts.

Some of the top comments on these posts are simply giving the clickable link, which contributes nothing to the conversation. Why not allow links to be clickable in the text field and consequently get rid of all this "spam"?

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charlief3• 15 years ago

A best comments for a particular user page. Say I am looking at the profile of a retired user. I open the old great user's profile, I click on comments and I only see a list sorted by newest-first. I am looking at some of the old greats, but I have no effective way to look at the comments that made them great. Please allow sorting by karma or an alternative page for best-of comments for that user.

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hoschi• 15 years ago

Give us an API which has also the points for a headline included (the RSS feed does not :( ), so I can build a more customizable feed.

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treyxturner• 15 years ago

The ability to search by URL. This would make it easier to ensure that the link you're about to submit hasn't already been posted and cut down on the number of duplicate links on HN.

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kirubakaran7• 15 years ago

Upvotes given to a story on front page should have lesser weight than ones given elsewhere (new page, post's comments page etc)

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Datasta1• 15 years ago

I'd like to see a password recovery option. I have been randomly locked out of my account and can't get back in.

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forther• 15 years ago

iphone client

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michael_nielsen2• 15 years ago

The ability for each user to create their own personalized domain blacklist.

E.g., if someone doesn't like techcrunch.com, they can add it to their blacklist, and they will no longer see techcrunch.com stories.

There's maybe a dozen sites (TC isn't one of them) which regularly appear on HN, and which I'd be happy not to see. But I know others don't feel this way about those sites. This seems like a relatively easy way of improving everyone's experience.

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bitsai• 15 years ago

The duplicate submission detector appears to be malfunctioning. For example, please see the following:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772650 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218455

Sorry, I realize this is not a feature request, per se, but I didn't know where/how to submit bug reports.

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larelli• 15 years ago

A login box on the frontpage. When submitting a login-protected request like an upvote, I get redirected. If there was a (potentially hidden) login box somewhere on the page (connected via AJAX), then I could just hit the SecureLogin extension's button on my firefox and be logged in.

(See: I typed this, clicked "add" and was redirected to the login page. :))

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frevd• 15 years ago

Concerning better objectivity in voting, I'd like to see two separate counters for up and down votes, rather than the aggregated sum which conceals the actual number of votes and is sort of nontransparent since not all members are allowed to down-vote.

I'm not asking for a personalized vote list though, everything should still be anonymous.

Further, what about an integrated keyword search and a simple duplicate check before a submission is posted? That would greatly improve things, at least those news-related.

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davidhollander• 15 years ago

Proposed Feature

Limit the number of links submitted per account per day to 1.

Why

Prevents spammers and karmafarmers from submitting the entire TechCrunch\Wired back-catalog at a rate of 25+ a day.

Further Analysis

Increasing the scarcity of a resource (link submission ability) will increase the value of items it is traded for (links). HNers value independent news related to code or unique analysis. HN already gets the independent submissions people want. They just die an early death on the new page due to overcrowding by links from webzines\newspapers with a profit incentive for maximum linkbaitery. This feature reduces the rate of dropoff for independent news.

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cliffano• 15 years ago

Please embed Hacker News RSS feed to the page HTML using link tag, this will make feed discovery easier using tools like Firefox.

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mduerksen• 15 years ago

Downvoted comments are greyed out, but possibly contained links stay black. This gives them (unwanted) attention, so they should be greyed out, too.

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whackedspinach• 15 years ago

A lot of the time I will go to hacker news and quickly scan article titles for something interesting. While I know the mods try to change titles to be more descriptive, some things are just ambiguous. Right now there is an article called "A Rare Disagreement" on the front page. Now that could be about anything, and I don't know if I really want to spend my time on it. Can we add a little box on the submit form for an excerpt/summary that would appear on hover? Or maybe a little down arrow that you could click to expand the summary? Limit it to 150-300 characters and it could be a great improvement to the front page.

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mcritz• 15 years ago

3. It’s tougher to monetize on Android

5. Android’s OS is tougher to build on.

8. Building a “smooth” app on Android is harder.

THESE are the reasons I should build on Android? Am I being Punked!?

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pixelphantom• 15 years ago

Mobile site with readable font size!

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mhb• 15 years ago

Profile karma average doesn't seem to work as I'd expect. Despite numerous recent posts and comments with points well above my previous average, the average has gone down.

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lwhi2• 15 years ago

I'd like to be able to grab a list of all the articles I've upvoted.

I think upvoting an article is similar to 'starring' it - and I often find myself wanting to return to interesting articles I've found via HN.

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michael_nielsen2• 15 years ago

Try: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=lwhi Note that it seems you can't see others' upvoted articles this way, but you can see your own.

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lwhi2• 15 years ago

Thanks, but I think these are all the articles that I've commented on .. not the articles that I've upvoted.

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kovar• 15 years ago

I'd like to see downvotes require a comment. Think of it as constructive criticism. I get that someone didn't like what I said, but not why they didn't like it, and thus it is hard to improve or change my style, content, tone, etc.

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intellectronica• 15 years ago

Warn and suggest to strip in page anchors from URLs.

Every so often, people post good links with an anchor in the URL, just because they didn't notice it. It is almost never the case that it's done intentionally, so it would be nice if HN spotted the anchor and warned the user, suggesting to strip it from the URL.

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veyron3• 15 years ago

Lynx compatibility!

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xd3• 15 years ago

Would be nice to see a users up/down voting preference on their profile page. Maybe something as simple as a ratio?

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molecule• 15 years ago

RSS Feed for Classic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

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xd3• 15 years ago

It seems I just became worthy of judging bad karma .. any chance I can turn it off in my settings? Mainly because I don't want to accidentally down vote someone (this optical mouse has a habit of skipping a few pixels now and then), also I really can't see myself ever using the feature .. an eye for an eye and all that jazz.

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xd3• 15 years ago

Also, I've noticed I have stopped up voting, on my HTC desire, as it is way to easy to down vote by mistake.

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Sloven• 15 years ago

Instead of open an original page with article I want to open the page prepared by YC with a button for fast return to HN. It’s handy to walk around the site and then turn back to HN. The BACK button doesn’t helps when you go deeper the site. Or it could be the button that opens comments.

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davykestens• 15 years ago

Please make the upvote-button a tad bigger

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skrish• 15 years ago

Suggesting an idea already implemented in StackOverflow - Moderation by users with certain number of karmas.

Of late, we see lots of HNers complaining about kind of subjects being submitted and the high Noise to Signal ratio. Would it make sense to provide moderation ability to HNers with 10k+ karma and discourage such topics here?

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ivankirigin10• 15 years ago

to fight the lowering quality of comments, maybe you could make a meta-comment feature to describe what is wrong with the way they commented (as opposed to the content itself)

maybe making it public would stop people from making repeatedly bad comments.

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bobstobener• 15 years ago

I'm addicted to HN. One little gripe ... can you have the links from the news list open into new tabs or windows? Makes it easy to return to the HN menu. Thanks!!!

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AbyCodes• 15 years ago

A RSS feed for each of the Hacker News list:

http://news.ycombinator.com/best

http://news.ycombinator.com/active

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

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JoshTriplett2• 15 years ago

Please change page titles from "Hacker News | $TITLE" to "$TITLE | Hacker News". Right now, my tab bar shows a pile of orange [Y] icons that all say "Hacker Ne...", which makes them impossible to distinguish. The [Y] icon already tells me the tab points to Hacker News, so an excerpt of the title would help more than the site name.

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grillermo• 15 years ago

+vote for this idea, same problem here

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shawnjanas• 15 years ago

+1 this idea as well

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PeteBrighton• 15 years ago

It would be great if the links I've already read either changed colour or moved/were hidden - synchronized by my user account. I currently read HN on my work machine, home machine and phone - so it's hard to know what's new at a glance.

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kmfrk4• 15 years ago

I would love a Hide feature that adds a "(-)" in the same place the name and comment links are.

Sometimes, I read a comment that is either stupid, irrelevant or annoying in some fashion, and while they don't warrant a downvote, I want to rid my future reading experience on the thread from it. A Hide feature that remembers the decision like a flag or vote would fix that.

The Hide count for a comment could also be used as an extra variable to tweak HN's algorithms - such as where comments are displayed in a thread.

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Sym3tri• 15 years ago

Would like to optionally not show stories I have already read.

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nkurz7• 15 years ago

It's embarrassing to make the claim, but I think I have a solution worth trying regarding the display of scores.

1) Revert to showing scores for top level comments. This will allow people to know whether the top-of-page responses are well-liked by the community, and how fast this approval drops off as one scans down the page. It will also privilege top level comments, subtly discouraging people from pinning their answer to the current top-of-page comment when it's not really a reply.

2) Keep hiding scores for replies (as it is now). This seems to be increasing civility, and discouraging quick quips. It might even make sense to discount the points internally, giving yet more emphasis to the top level. This emphasis is important because the top level dictates the overall position on the page (things move as blocks). Hiding the response points will also encourage people to vote up threads as a whole, which helps with the case of useful questions which lead to good answers.

3) Now that top-level is emphasized, add a 'fold' to the page. But instead of basing it on number of comments, cut off at a negative point level. As they currently do, downvoted items will migrate toward the bottom, becoming fainter as they go negative. But rather than eventually displaying a fixed negative number (-4), just put it below the fold and only visible with a 'show all' link. This will discourage trolling and piling on, as once a comment is below the fold it's unlikely to attract many additional viewers. And it will encourage others to 'clean up the page' if they feel their vote will have a clear consequence. Starting to fade at 0 and folding at -4 seems like a good start, but one could also fold earlier or even bring new unvoted comments in mid-fade.

I think this hybridized approach would be easy to try and has advantages over both individual systems. Thanks!

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gaoshan• 15 years ago

Re-enable displaying upvotes. It's a great way to see what others think of a certain comment. Without it, considering topics I don't know much about, it's more difficult to know if I'm looking at brilliant insight or FUD.

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colinjack• 15 years ago

RSS feeds would benefit from the inclusion of the number of points for each article, even better if you also included the names of the commenters (making it easy to look out for comments by particular individuals).

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akarambir• 15 years ago

I saw some questions some days old and even answered well are still in top list(front page). Please add a feature of "Yes, I got the answer." in hacker news questions. if the asker get what he wanted to know, he would click on it and the question will no longer be available for up-votes from other members. This will allow other questions to eventually come on front page and get noticed(and hence get answered).

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ianl• 15 years ago

Add a note, or a link to which formatting syntax you use for posts. For example, is it markdown or similar.

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Nimeshpatel• 15 years ago

Computer enginear

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slyrus• 15 years ago

https!

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entangld2• 15 years ago

I'd like a recommended book reading list.

It would also be good to separate advice from news. Lots of popular submissions are industry gossip, but others are useful tips.

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tokenadult9• 15 years ago

I'd like a recommended book reading list.

Would you like that as an addition to the book section already found in the Library page

http://ycombinator.com/lib.html

that is linked to from the bottom of the main page, or somewhere else?

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entangld2• 15 years ago

That was a very tiny link at the bottom of the page ->"Lib". Thanks for the link. I wonder what their UX person says about those links.

I'd really like a rolling reader submitted list on the main page, but this is also good.

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veyron3• 15 years ago

Allow articles/conversations to be grouped. case in point: there were many articles essentially reporting that osama bin laden was dead. There are many articles focusing on different angles, such as the social media influence on the event, and i agree that they probably should be separate discussions. However, people post different articles reporting the same exact news from NY Times, BBC, and fox news, amongst other news outlets.

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th0ma5• 15 years ago

i dunno why but the duplicate check seems to be working less well, see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510757 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2511398

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corin_4• 15 years ago

Same issue it's always had, that most websites are configured to accept more than one unique URL, with minor alterations. Often it's something like "?source=twitter" on the end, or "#top". In the case you linked to, one has a trailing slash and the other doesn't.

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Jd• 15 years ago

Images at the bottom for Green Certified Site, HN Sidebar, and Analytics by Mixpanel take away from the simply lookfeel of the site.

Besides, it looks like all you need to get "Green" certification is to pay the certifiers $10 / month...

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corin_4• 15 years ago

I'd like the option to remove my downvoting abilities, as I find it hard to control my urge to downvote in disagreement rather than for lack of quality in a comment.

Most of my downvotes tend to be in disagreement, whereas if I could disable it in my profile, I'd never be tempted to click that little arrow...

On a side note, I didn't want to do an "Ask PG" thread for such a small request, but this topic seems pretty dead. Last comment from PG in this thread was 1026 days ago. If you're still reading this but just in silence, any chance you'd reply to confirm that posting here isn't a complete waste of time? (Disagreeing with and therefore ignoring feature requests is perfectly fine, but if they're not getting read, this page might as well be deleted.)

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DanI-S• 15 years ago

I'd love to be able to see the names of people who have repeatedly upvoted your comments. It'd be a great way of finding people who share the same kind of mindset, enhancing HN as a 'people discovery tool'.

It would also work for 'if you think this person is clever, you might like to read things posted by these others'.

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naughtysriram• 15 years ago

I accidentally up-voted a post. I was wondering if there is a way to cancel that. I guess it is different from down-voting for which I must have some amount of karma.

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satanIsMyCpilot• 15 years ago

All pages on this site available over HTTPS. I mean, this is a geek website right?

Free SSL certs are available from StartSSL (https://www.startssl.com). If you need help setting it up, contact me. My rate is $45/hr at 30 minutes = $22.50.

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veyron3• 15 years ago

clickable links when people choose to post text. It's annoying to have to read a description of a site, where they put the blah.com, and then have to go and copy-paste the link to see the page. It's common for the "Ask HN" pages to have questions pertaining to a startup. Then, the person is forced to make a comment with a clickable link.

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ctyrider• 15 years ago

Another vote for "best" RSS feed. The unfliltered RSS feed is way too noisy to be useful.

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chmike3• 15 years ago

Hacker news digests

In its current intended use, a reader has to poll the HN site for interesting topics. This is frustrating because it's not very efficient, unless you had advertisements on the site... This is a pull type of access to information.

The feature I would like is an information push option. It would be the possibility to subscribe to a digest with a point threshold I would specify. I would for instance specify a threshold of 100 so that every day I get a mail containing HN titles with urls of posts that passed 100 points.

A more Simple and efficient variant, from HN perspective, would be to provide an alternate display to new, like new50, new100 that is like new but shows only posts with more than 50 points or 100 points in the order it reached that threshold. This would be a way to get the best of HN without the unpleasant feeling I could miss any of them if I don't check the front page frequently enough.

Make it new+ new++ and new+++ with hidden point threshold values that you may adjust to get dayly, weekly or monthly ~40 best ranked posts holding on a page.

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quizotic• 15 years ago

The "more" link at the bottom of each page expires.

I love this site, and I like to read more than the 1st 100 posts. But by the time I get to the 4th page, the "more" link at the bottom has expired. To continue, I have to start from the beginning and quickly click the more link fast enough so that it doesn't expire.

That's just silly.

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dbeardsl• 15 years ago

Add embedded chat rooms to discussion pages: http://wompt.com Or simply a "chat" link next to the "discuss" link in each entry that points to something like http://wompt.com/chat/hackernews/363

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tjpick• 15 years ago

"Unknown or expired link":

I frequently get "unknown or expired link" when clicking the "more" link after browsing to the bottom of the page. It's constantly frustrating.

If another page of links was shown to me, I'd be much happier. Just show the next page instead of an error. Just give me more links.

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Jasitis• 15 years ago

source of hackerstream.com on github open ot be forked and embedded

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Abscissa• 15 years ago

You've set the forground colors for this text entry box and the Submit button to black. That causes the text to be invisible for those of us with light-on-dark systems. Just leave the text color alone for those and it'll work fine for everyone.

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rdl4• 15 years ago

I'd like SSL. Especially since Y Combinator uses the same site for various internal things, it would be nice to be able to protect from passive monitoring at cafes (I use a VPN but a lot of people don't).

Splitting news.yc from the YC app, hours, etc. system might also be nice, so people can blackhole hackernews without losing YC functionality.

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chris_j• 15 years ago

When flagging stories, please could we get asked for confirmation before the story is flagged? Since I started using HN on a touchscreen phone, I have found myself unable to precisely control where I click, meaning that I have accidentally flagged a lot of stories. A simple "are you sure you want to flag?" would save me from having to click unflag so often.

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tomp• 15 years ago

as usual, undo is better

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agentcurry• 15 years ago

Have a "widget" that allows users to display their submissions (or recent number of submissions) on another site.

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summereyes• 15 years ago

on front page, clicking on "more" reports "expired link"

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falava5• 15 years ago

Delete stories button, or maybe downvote button equals this delete behaviour.

Reloading the front page will not show stories that I've deleted.

That way my valuable front page slots will be full of stories that I have upvoted, or forgot to vote, or that simply are new :)

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rajeshvaya• 15 years ago

Is it possible to send emails to the user when there is a reply to one of the users comments?

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mindcrime• 15 years ago

I'd like to see an official "HN Marketplace". Whether that means building a new service (doubtful) or simply having pg endorse an existing site (http://www.hntrade.com, perhaps) is an open question. If pg felt comfortable endorsing, and linking to, an existing site, I think it would be a win for everybody.

Why is this a good idea? Because more than a few of us would probably be good trading partners for various things.. domain names, services, and $DEITY knows what else. But with no official market, people are left to just spam HN with their "domain for sale" and "service trade opportunity" things. And I expect more than a few people have domains, startups, whatever, for sale, but don't post because they don't want to be seen as spamming the site.

Edit: Disclaimer - I have no affiliation with, or commercial interest/stake in, hntrades.com. I just mentioned them because it's the only HN Marketplace site I'm familiar with.

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lhnz2• 15 years ago

I would like the ability to follow users.

I would like the votes, comments, and user submissions of the users I'm following to help curate a personalised version of the front page that is of specific interest to me.

Doing this would mean that, when I found people that I thought were intelligent, the front page and threads I was looking at would not reflect the general user bases opinion, but the opinion of the members of the user base that I hold with highest respect.

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parenthesis3• 15 years ago

Fix srv.arc to recognise "Content-Length:" case-insensitively (in (def parseheader ...)).

Lynx says "Content-length:" in the POST requests it sends, which are thus rejected.

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alexdong• 15 years ago

Make "saved links" page public.

Or at least accessible by crawlers if the user allow it.

Use case: I'd like to see all the links I have upvoted to be indexed by Trunk.ly so that I can find them later if I want.

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brigadier• 15 years ago

please create "Report Spam" button.

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macrael• 15 years ago

Reiterating a past request because I can't reply to it.

Please can we get sub domains for google domains displayed. Especially now that we have google plus, I'd like to know what the actual service a link is coming from is. Google code is especially confusing. There are lots of project announcements at I initially assume come from google but are just hosted on google code.

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bradsmith2• 15 years ago

Just requested pretty much the same thing for google-plus (as I didn't see your earlier request) ... so ... +1

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subbu88• 15 years ago

Make all links open in new tab.

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llambda• 15 years ago

It would be great if we could strip URLs of anchors (or rather just see them as the same URL, no need to strip) to prevent people from submitting the same article multiple times, e.g. http://example.com/article would be the same as http://example.com/article#anchor

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AltIvan3• 15 years ago

Hi, i created a Google Chrome extention that does what this person: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430542 was asking (The title is now "$TITLE | Hacker News")

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AltIvan3• 15 years ago

ups, forgot the link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bldhjkmbdomhijjjnm...

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AltIvan3• 15 years ago

The extention now also fix the problem with "Unknown or Expired Link".

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ravintpillai• 15 years ago

I want to be able to delete old posts

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bradsmith2• 15 years ago

When linking to a google plus page, please use something like (plus.google.com) and not (google.com). Perhaps it's just me, but when I see a story by (google.com) I tend to think it's an announcement/ info form google themselves - and not just some guy with an opinion :-)

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ramy_d• 15 years ago

Why does this happen? http://i.imgur.com/d4Occ.png

There's a story in the RSS, it's not in the front page, and I can't search for it.

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dredmorbius7• 15 years ago

Text formatting bug, bold / _italic_ stuff.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2806018

I totally fubared the formatting in that post. The first problem is the asterisk in "fXckwits" (replaced with an 'X' here). I thought the formatting rules were that text surrounded by asterisks would be bolded, _if_ the asterisks were surrounded by whitespace. Parsing bug?

I tried to fix in one edit, apparently my edit timeout window's expired, so the post stands as is slightly borked.

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dredmorbius7• 15 years ago

Oh. Re-read the rules. First star doesn't require whitespace around it.

I guess I can't be f*cked anymore ;-)

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hollerith2• 15 years ago

RSS feeds for individual stories. (The feed would notify me of any new comments on the story.)

Better yet, RSS feeds for every item, story or comment.

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makecheck9• 15 years ago

Implicit upvoting awarded to comments based on the length of "discussion" that they produce.

I've been surprised sometimes how an entire thread will form under a comment of mine, and in the end there will be 2 or 3 sub-comments voted at 20 while mine stays at 1. Shouldn't I, in those cases, receive some votes for starting such a discussion?

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corin_4• 15 years ago

Skipping over the fact that you can only guess at one other people's comments are voted to... no, you shouldn't get votes for that.

If your comment was actually well written, or useful, or whatever people decide deserves upvotes, then you'll get them for it. If it wasn't a good comment but it happened to start a discussion, credit goes to people having an interesting discussion.

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bfe• 15 years ago

One separate Hacker News page for Software Patents News, with every submission that mentions "software patents" automatically diverted to it, and that allows the remaining ten percent of articles to appear on the original Hacker News page.

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lethal• 15 years ago

Sort by points

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tinman• 15 years ago

Can you open source the code for news.ycombinator? Then all of us can supply changes and you can approve as you wish.

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paulnelligan• 15 years ago

As already requested in the following thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2868110

I would love to see a tab for people submitting their products, i.e. a show HN tab ...

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pmarin4• 15 years ago

Add a new list: The top 10 recent articles voted by the top 10 leaders.

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tzs• 15 years ago

Please, if it wouldn't be much work, change the mechanism for coloring down voted comments to be via the stylesheet instead of via font tags with color attributes?

Also, there is an oddity in the way comments are organized. They go like this:

   font tag that sets the comment color
     "first paragraph text NOT in a p tag"
     p tag
        "second paragraph text"
     p tag
        "third paragraph text"
    ...
     p tag
       font tag that sets the comment color
         "final paragraph text"

(Not using actual tags to avoid any quoting problems, and closing tags omitted). This leads to amusing results--for instance if you use a user stylesheet to try to set comment colors, by coloring all the paragraphs under the comment span, it only actually colors the middle paragraphs. The first and last paragraph of each comment are not affected.
If there is no specific reason for this odd layout, fixing it would make the site a little more friendly for those who want to tweak it with user stylesheets. (I'm tweaking the font size, to make it easier to read on my aging eyes).

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pmarin4• 15 years ago

Limit the number of articles that can be in the frontpage at the same time for sites like Techcrunch.com.

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pmarin4• 15 years ago

Cache the list pages. They are vey slow lately compared with the rest of HN (5 seconds for the leaders list).

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T_S_• 15 years ago

Ability to filter out Groupon stories.

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oshai• 15 years ago

rss to the 'best' page links. since the regular rss has too many items for mee, I would like an rss with only high rated links.

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rednum• 15 years ago

Is it possible to stop new accounts from submitting new stories, maybe at least until they are 24h old? It seems that amount of spam on new is increasing and each of spammers is a newly created account.

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morgandev• 15 years ago

I like to scan HN during dead time. By the time I get to the bottom of the page and click the 'More' link I run into the 'Unknown or expired link' error.

Can you just put the page number in the URL? Or redirect to the front page after 5 seconds?

thanks!

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kunjaan• 15 years ago

Delete Accounts Easily

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ikarous• 15 years ago

This has been suggested previously, but I would like to add my vote as well. HN could enhance its readability by introducing a method of visually identifying new comments in a thread. It is often very difficult to spot new comments in an ongoing discussion even with comment re-ordering.

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bleakgadfly• 15 years ago

Hacker News swag.

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petenixey• 15 years ago

HN has an incredibly high number of good commenters but with the exception of people I know in real life or a couple of high profile cross-referenced commenters like patio11 I don't feel like I build up a mental profile of anyone else.

I'd like to read people's comments in the context of their previous comments. Other readers may be much better at this than me but I find it hard to index what people are saying against just a handle.

It would be great to see some more clues to people's identities appearing next to their names - not necessarily a photo but perhaps a snippet of who who they are / what they do (their about section perhaps). It doesn't have to be there all the time, onmouseover would be great but it would be nice to easily get that reference.

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freakwit• 15 years ago

List of comments I have upvoted - Similar to saved stories.

I may upvote comments which are valuable, but not the story itself, making it hard to come back to those valuable comments later.

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elangoc• 15 years ago

I just had an idea: is it possible to move the voting arrow(s) down to the end of the post, e.g. next to the "reply" link? From a user UI flow standpoint, it would be nice to be able to read a long post and then think, "After reading through such an insightful post, that deserves an up-vote" and not have to break the-flow-of-scrolling-down to do so.

Now, the current position of the voting arrow is nice demarcation of the beginning of a post, and it also serves to indicate the nesting depth of a comment. Something serving that purpose is still useful. But maybe this more conveniently-located voting option can be implemented with an onhover so that it's visible at the end of only the post that the mouse is hovering on (a few other sites have comment boards like this).

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TomGullen• 15 years ago

There's a bug, if you write a title too long (please put a character limit on the text field!) and then enter text in the message body too long, <p> tags appear. When you fix the title length these are inserted as text.

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temporary_user• 15 years ago

fix the forgot password emailer, doesn't work.

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sravfeyn• 15 years ago

HNSearch currently searches only for comments and link titles.Please add the ability to search through the content, carried by the articles(may be by duplicating the content in the links to search-base?).

As Hacker News holds a superior quality content on many topics that I(..anyone curious to learn) am interested in, it would be great if I can search through these articles than spending hours altogether on Google, where everything gets dumped at.

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yeahyeahs• 15 years ago

an IRC server. I think it'd be awesome.

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falava5• 15 years ago

I use my saved stories profile page (upvotes) as a great link archive and read later tool.

Could also comment upvotes be saved and showed in the same way?

And as a less important sugestion, but cool reverse way of thinking, could stories and comment downvotes banish that items from my view of the HN site. Thanks!

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jwdunne• 15 years ago

I don't know about anyone else but when following an outbound link on HN, I always open in a new tab. I was just wondering if it would be a good idea to make this the default for all outbound links?

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jeffool• 15 years ago

I believe that the consensus had always been "clicking on a link, goes to that link. If I wanted a new window, I'd open it myself."

(Just explaining what I've seen.)

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zach2• 15 years ago

Bug report:

I somehow created a post which does not appear on my threads page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053559

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amhnews• 15 years ago

this good for me and for all netizen, i recomended for this site and will invite all my friend's!

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waldo• 15 years ago

Bug report: This is actually in the 2012 winter application form* - http://news.ycombinator.com/w2012form

Using a < silently truncates the remainder your text from the input field.

* But I couldn't find a better place to report this error.

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vemv• 15 years ago

RSS feed of /best please.

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whotemp• 15 years ago

smallrss: 10x less

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tewks2• 15 years ago

shorten plus.google.com/x to plus.google.com rather than google.com, as is the status quo

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pengsu• 15 years ago

Can I have the RSS version of http://www.hackerne.ws/over?points=100

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DanBC6• 15 years ago

Please can I filter some people from /news and /newest? Or could I set a minimum score for any of their submitted articles to appear for me? (Thus, they submit twenty articles. One of them gets 6 upvotes, which is my limit, and thus I only see that one submission.)

I guess this is a user-side configurable hellban / killfile.

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WiseWeasel2• 15 years ago

I often find it difficult to tell which posts are new when I load the main HN front page, and I end up spending significant time and mental effort re-parsing the same headlines. This problem is compounded by the fact that my session often expires before I finish reading page 2 or 3 and try to go to the next page, making me reload the front page again and work my way back, by which point I have to scan all the headlines again so I don't miss any stories.

It would be nice if either story headlines I haven't been shown yet could be highlighted, or ones that have recently moved onto that results page could be highlighted, so I can tell at a glance which stories I might not have seen yet.

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marcamillion• 15 years ago

Can you change the color of the text for the Job posts plz?

I hate going down the line of stories on the main page and get confused by a job posting for a YC company. It kinda feels a bit deceptive to not have it stand out - given that it is completely different.

If not a MAJOR color change to the entire title, have something subtle (that is a different color) that acts as a visual cue to tell us it is not a 'regular' HN story.

Thanks.

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shn• 15 years ago

There should not be down voting for the comments. But number of votes should be shown and moved up so that others can see which ones liked by community and others "left behind". Removing down voting is essential if number of likes are going to be shown to eliminate any emotional response and action (=downvoting).

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giulivo• 15 years ago

I would like to get an RSS feed for the user's upvoted/submitted links (questions).

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lotharbot3• 15 years ago

Request: please make the black memorial bar clickable (linked either to the memorial thread on HN, or to the official source of the announcement.)

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mastensg• 15 years ago

Make sans-serif a fallback for Verdana in CSS.

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najicalove• 15 years ago

Is there anyway to separate stories based on technical competency? I love Hacker News, but can't stand having to skim over 50+% of the stories because they are beyond my comprehension- to get to the 40% of stories that I can actually learn from/understand.

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ivankirigin10• 15 years ago

Interesting experiment to improve comments: only show a comment field or reply button on threads if the user clicked the story.

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soundsop2• 15 years ago

Please use https links to story pages in the https version of the rss feed.

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irrationalfab• 15 years ago

Official API or mobile interface

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ebabchick• 15 years ago

highlight the link i just came from briefly and fade the highlight out over a few seconds when i return to the page via back button (or use some approximating heuristic ) ... i like to scan the page multiple times a day and i cant rely on the native highlighting to see the comment link on what i just read because the top stories are re-ordered throughout the day. so i have to scan the page visually for the title of the story. I'm going to make this a browser plugin for myself if you don't do it, but I'd rather everyone have this feature natively....

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3ds• 15 years ago

I would like to be able to read HN on mobile devices more easily. I commited some code on github that achieves that:

https://github.com/nex3/arc/commit/0efaa1b189c4ed54c4f91a7ec...

It only adds a viewport meta tag and some styling which applies to small screens only by using a media query.

Please use it! Afterwards the site will look like this on the iphone: http://minus.com/lGBmQmM4CrdHE

Sidenote: Why can I commit directly to the github repository? I thought that by clicking edit, I would create a fork and work on that and create a pull request later. Strange. Or is this some kind of open-to-all repository?

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ivankirigin10• 15 years ago

list the subdomain for posts on plus.google.com

Currently confusing with just google.com

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xtrimsky_• 15 years ago

Please put a date in your rss feeds. At least a "last_updated" field!

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zabazup• 15 years ago

Please change your RSS feed http -> header -> content-type from 'text/html' to 'text/xml'.

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nkurz7• 15 years ago

Suggestion: Keep scoring duplicate submissions as +1 votes, but also add them to the user's publicly visible "submissions" list.

I'd love it if submitted links always appeared on the my "submission" list. Currently, they only appear if the link is a new submission, with submissions of existing links being treated as an upvote and added to "saved stories".

This is a reasonable default for the scoring purposes, but caught me today when I was looking back for a story I was sure I'd submitted some time ago. Because I went through the process of submitting it, I thought I would be able to find it by scanning my "submissions". No such luck.

In the absence of a personalized recommendation system, I also find it useful to look at what else my favorite posters have submitted. Since "saved stories" are not visible to others, whereas "submissions" are, this is lost information.

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lisper2• 15 years ago

Email notifications when someone posts a response to one of your comments. Having to poll and scan the threads link is annoying.

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egor832• 15 years ago

http://hnnotify.com/

Didn't get any responses to test it yet, but they promise exactly that.

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lisper2• 15 years ago

Cool! Thanks!

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g3orge• 15 years ago

I'd like to see keyboard shortcuts to upvote, follow or flag a link.

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heelhook• 15 years ago

It has been pointed out several times that new items submitted to HN have increasingly less chance of being picked up because of how fast the new items page scrolls items out of sight. This problem will be growing as HN gets more users. Maybe the approach of showing the list of new items in the "new" page is not necessarily the best one [anymore]?

An alternative approach would be to display a random subset of new articles from the past n minutes on each display of the new items page. This is particularly true for times when several articles are submitted per minute, which will only become increasingly common.

That way each submission would get more time (from a smaller audience) to be picked up and more quality items would be upvoted.

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dopp• 15 years ago

Mobile compatible site.

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jsteel• 15 years ago

I subscribe via RSS and it would be helpful if each topic had a brief description (just a few lines from the first paragraph at least). If I want to read the whole article I will then visit the specific website.

If the whole article was the description that would also be OK; so I could read everything from my RSS reader.

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corysama• 15 years ago

I just spent two hours writing a comment, only to get "unknown or expired link" when I hit reply. Grrrrrrr.....

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llz• 15 years ago

Editing or deleting old posts

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colanderman• 15 years ago

[deleted] comments currently follow childless siblings without an intervening line break, making for very confusing threads (it seems as if the [deleted]'s children are children of the preceding childless sibling).

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Kilimanjaro• 15 years ago

Show only the first and second level comments for faster browsing, like:

    - this is cool
      - seconded
        + view 120 more uninteresting comments
    - not so cool
    - my point of view gets lost

This way we don't have to scroll a hundred subcomments to get to the next comment in line.

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docgnome• 15 years ago

It would be nice to know how the RSS works, and maybe have a way to select articles over a certain threshold via RSS. I use Calibre to fetch HN articles but when i see them through out the day, I can't be sure if I'll get that one later or not.

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_wp3r• 15 years ago

When you submit a link it would nice to have the similar link check list the last 10 most recent post from the root domain. This would allow for slightly different urls being submitted for the same articles or story.

A list of 10 similar titles would be nice also, as the submitter may not have the time so do an indepth search for a similar article or may be limited by platform.

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mrpollo• 15 years ago

Google Cache link besides the (flag | comments) links for all articles

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philjackson• 15 years ago

Please give us a syntax which allows for quoting a parent comment. I would vote for a '>' at the beginning of a line.

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pg51• 15 years ago

Please give us a syntax which allows for quoting a parent comment.

Italic seems to work fine for that.

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chacham15• 15 years ago

This is going to sound very twitterish of me, but I'd like to be able to follow certain people.

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dbrock• 15 years ago

Please fix the bug where trying to connect my account to a Google account just leads me to a completely blank page http://news.ycombinator.com/openid_merge with the word "Unknown." (Sorry, didn't understand where to report bugs.)

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gumbo72• 15 years ago

A way to "save" threads, so that I don't have to comment on them to keep them.

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maeon3• 15 years ago

When adding comments via Android to the textbox, it is a nightmare, I have to resort to writing my post in a NotePad and copy pasting. An Android app. I can write one up for you if you need to. Im alost ready to write one myself and ad it up.

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sahilshah91• 15 years ago

I bookmark a lot of links that I read on HN. Can there be a button next to links with which I can bookmark them on the HN server on my account itself and later revisit them chronologically or categorically. Maybe also specifically 'search' these personally bookmarked links while coming back to read them.

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malandrew6• 15 years ago

Tags + filtering would be sooooo useful

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MarkTraceur• 15 years ago

When I click an 'up' arrow, it disappears and doesn't seem to do anything. Why?

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ivankirigin10• 15 years ago

Strip spaces from the username on login, especially at the end. Signing in from iPhone, I got a few login errors before I realized that it wasn't a fat fingered password but a login username of "ivankirigin "

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nandemo• 15 years ago

Please allow users to change their votes (as reddit does). "I downvoted you by mistake" is a very common comment.

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vinorathna• 15 years ago

Option to search recent posts with points (200 to 300/ 300 to 400)..

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lelele3• 15 years ago

HN discarded my comment to a submission I made. It seems commenting your submissions it's not possible anymore. Why? And then why the submission form makes you write a comment just to discard it?

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lelele3• 15 years ago

Actually, if you look at the submission from HN, its caption looks discarded: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3455054

However, if you look at it from HNSearch instead, its caption is there: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=doit

What's going on?

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micheljansen• 15 years ago

I guess this is more of a bug report than a feature request, but it's related to several feature requests involving subdomains, so I figured I might as well post it here:

I noticed that the Kenyan TLD uses a similar approach to that of the UK where there is a controlled secondary domain (.co.ke) under which all commercial sites are kept. This is not visible on the front page. I noticed this on this item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033

Expected outcome: show one level more for the Kenyan .*.ke domain space.

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lelele3• 15 years ago

Besides replying, it would be nice to be able to send you a thank you note to users who accept them. Acknowledgements do not add to discussions, but humans are social, you know.

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sidcool3• 15 years ago

Expand collapse comments.

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lhnz2• 15 years ago

I'd like to be able to hide techpolitics. I don't care about piracy. I don't care about the latest torrentfreak.com gossip piece. I cared about SOPA, but not the gossip.

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bfrs• 15 years ago

Ability to fold comment threads.

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yason• 14 years ago

Please extend the submission form timeout. Would it crash the server if it was at least a few hours? Half a day, 12 hours?

I often leave HN tabs open, then start writing a sketch of a comment, then continue later, and notice the link has of course expired. This means going back, reloading the page, and re-pasting the comment. Irritating but bearable.

However, this doesn't work if my noprocrast period gets switched on while I'm reading other articles. I know noprocrast allows submissions, but it needs me to submit with the old link. And the link never gets too old.

I bump into "Unknown or expired link" almost every day.

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djacobs• 14 years ago

It would be awesome if HN kept track of new comments on a post. While I can tell which articles I've read on HN because of the a:visited color, I can't tell which comments I've read.

As a solution, I'm imagining updating a timestamp each time I view an article I voted up (to limit the scope of this feature). Then, when I re-visit the comments for that article, any comments with timestamps more recent than my recorded one are emphasized in some way.

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SonicSoul• 14 years ago

The way i always browse HN, is by clicking comments, and than the article, so that after finishing reading the article i can go back and view the comments.

it would be great if there was a link that would go to comments, and comments had a little script that would forward automatically to the story based on originating url, and some query string param.. it would just need to differentiate the page loads that happen after browser back button was hit (possibly originating url would be different)

it would also be great to turn this thing on for all links in settings page, but a separate link next to each story wold also work..

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matin• 14 years ago

Adding infinite scroll would be a nice touch.

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xenithorb• 14 years ago

I would like it if clicking a link opened a new tab.

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Arpad• 14 years ago

hacker news

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mmackh• 14 years ago

Could you possibly include Points/Number of Comments in your bigrss feed?

(maybe even time of submission?)

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JoshTriplett2• 14 years ago

If I access the RSS feed as https://news.ycombinator.com/rss , the "Comments" links in the RSS feed should point to the stories on https://news.ycombinator.com/ , not http://news.ycombinator.com .

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aquinn• 14 years ago

Please add a submit button to the search box at the bottom of the site. I can't use the search function on Android (Opera) and less importantly, w3m.

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acerimmer• 14 years ago

When users downvote a comment, they should be required to give a reason. When someone downvotes me, I wonder why that is: Am I too arrogant? Do they just disagree? Is it because what I posted is obvious? This would also motivate people to think about downvoting more and reduce the problem with interesting comments being downvoted because people disagree with them.

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andrewhillman• 14 years ago

It would be nice to have "Tell" and "Show" next to "Ask" at the top of HN.

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polemic• 14 years ago

Could HN have an opt-in to save your outbound link click history?

I've lost count of the number of times when I've unexpectedly wanted to revisit an article from days/weeks/months ago and have utterly failed to find the site by search/browser history (I visit from mulitple machines), etc. I really don't want to have yet another service to sign in to for saving interesting links - and even if I did - they're not always things that I think I wanted to save at the time.

What I'd like to see is:

- opt in to have links pass through a intermediate step so the outbound step is saved in my profile on HN - include the URL and the HN piece (comments, etc)

Seems very simple to do, and would make it so much easier to refer friends back to what I've read without having to rely on my poor memory or rigorous bookmarking.

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jcr7• 14 years ago

The feature you want already exists. If you look in your profile, you'll see at the bottom a link called "Saved Stories". It's a list of every submission you have up-voted.

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Coronado• 14 years ago

I am needing to Update my domiAn

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sbt• 14 years ago

Is there a way to filter out certain links, e.g. based on domain name?

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lucb1e6• 14 years ago

Since I don't see a "feedback" button, I guess this is the place. It might have been submitted before, though.

The domain-parser has a little glitch; in an item like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033 it says "co.ke", which I guess is just the sort-of TLD Kenyan websites use. Instead, I think "mocality.co.ke" is the desired result here.

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pja• 14 years ago

Is there some reason why the text of a job ad in HN is greyed out? It makes them hard to read.

Feature request: the text of a job ad should have the same contrast as a standard HN post or comment.

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jay-pinkman• 14 years ago

RSS: please add to each <item> a reference to the user that posted it.

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woodall• 14 years ago

It would be nice to have some buttons. One to report a comment if it does not meet a certain level of discourse- lol I don't know why they down voted you- and the other to collapse threads.

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alpb2• 14 years ago

Please fix tabindex of that comment box, it focuses to Search box instead of "add comment" button.

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untangle• 14 years ago

The ability to collapse the nested replies.

This would aid in keeping page formatting within bounds, and also in scanning the scope of the threads.

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jebblue• 14 years ago

I'd like to have filters so I can ignore people I choose.

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vincyjoseph• 14 years ago

The post are not easy to read. It would be better if they are highlighted

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rabidsnail2• 14 years ago

BUG: Periods get sliced off the end of links. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_Network,_LP_v._CSC_Hold....

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naveen99• 14 years ago

downloadable archives of user comments

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jcla1• 14 years ago

How about an api for all the posts including archives? The ihackernews.com API is always down and buggy

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yathern• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if this will even be visible, but I'd love to have the site with css/divs instead of tables/html styling. This is because I use plugings to manually edit the css to make it look prettier, but I can only go so far when all table are just <table> with no id or class.

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lucb1e6• 14 years ago

Perhaps show vertical indentation lines? (Best would be in two or three different styles). In the more popular threads with a lot of comments-on-comments, it gets rather hard to see what that comment down there was actually referring to.

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ryanbales• 14 years ago

Please change the vote icon.. it looks just like the expand/collapse icon in OSX.. The indented replies make it even more confusing. Either that or get Apple to change theirs :p

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notatoad• 14 years ago

can it be made more difficult to accidentally flag or downvote? i find myself fat-fingering those buttons a lot on the ipad and it doesn't seem very fair to the submitters.

an optional zoom level would probably solve my problems, on the desktop my browser remembers to always keep HN zoomed in a few steps, but on the iPad it's tiny.

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anthonyb2• 14 years ago

The other option would be to allow an undo of your vote/downvote, perhaps only within 5 minutes or so, to prevent abuse.

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amoshaviv• 14 years ago

A read it later feature.

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kmfrk4• 14 years ago

Can we split the ^ button into an upvote and save button? The stories I want to save and upvote are not necessarily the same, and if I want to use ^ to save stories, there's a disincentive to upvote them.

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liliseby• 14 years ago

just a half ...

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michaelkariv• 14 years ago

Request: RSS feed to return "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" HTTP header set to * to enable all sources, for both GET and OPTIONS requests.

Details: To read HN more conveniently both on desktops and on iPad I would like to have fewer headings per page, have them in larger font etc, I am writing my own, magazine like (or Flipboard like) HTML viewer. I don't want the data from HN to travel via my server, fetching it directly from the browser.

However fetching RSS from the client side, at least on Chrome, and going forward on any modern browser, would require obtaining permission from the Cross Domain site. Currently RSS returns none. Chrome reports error, will not allow JavaScript code to process. For the development purposes I fake it via proxy (Fiddler2) but once coded it would either require RSS returning the right header, or me channeling this request via my server (Google App Engine)

Since the point of having RSS is to publish it to other services, I presume you would not object to such use of your data. If you do, please let me know and I'll stop.

I plant to make HTML/JS/CSS open sourced once it is done.

Contact: Michael Kariv michael_kariv@yahoo.com

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jmcgough• 14 years ago

Can we have some proper HTML and CSS rather than tables in tables in tables indented by GIFs?

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Fando• 14 years ago

Nothing, it's perfect!

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anthonyb2• 14 years ago

How about not permanently hellbanning new users? Or at least allowing us to upvote their [dead] posts to get them back over whatever threshold bans them?

Latest one that I've seen is this guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dailyllama , but I see lots of cases all the time, such as this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3755037 (who wasn't very happy about being hellbanned).

None of these people are trolls -- one of their posts must have been downvoted early on, and they've tripped some sort of automatic mechanism. Perhaps you shouldn't hellban people like this unless one (or more?) of their posts has been explicitly flagged (rather than just downvoted)?

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rantav• 14 years ago

Improve layout and font sizes for mobile experience. Currently it's pretty rough, barely usable from iPhone or android phone. Or tell me how to send a pull request... Thanks :)

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Cyapow• 14 years ago

working upvote's. never work for me when logged in (firefox 11 if that helps, and firebug shows no ajax request)

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jerrya• 14 years ago

I'd like to see an RSS feed that points first to the ycombinator comments, and second to the original targeted link.

From a comment thread, it is of course simple to get to the original link, but not the other way around.

With an inverse RSS feed, it will be much easier in Google Reader to share both the comment thread and the original link with Google+, or any of the services that support Google Reader Send To.

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wfgfg2• 14 years ago

Wfgfg

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wfgfg2• 14 years ago

Wfgfg 238 points by bg 1877

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ironlotus• 14 years ago

Archived posts? Just as there is a news.ycombinator.com/newest, couldn't there be a /oldest? or something along those lines. This website is just a goldmine of information, it seems like it all kinda disappears into black whole

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271828183• 14 years ago

Please add a meta description. The snippets on Google and Bing aren't very good

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ebrink• 14 years ago

Increase the number of saved stories one can save. For some reason I can only save 75 stories on this account, all of the ones I have saved for the last month or so never got recognized on my account.

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sidcool3• 14 years ago

Allow collapsing/expanding of comments (like reddit)

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organisedminds• 14 years ago

A bear hug-button for everyone. Getting hugged is sometimes very important.

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ancymon• 14 years ago

It would be nice to be able to login using openid without being asked to give away "contacts". I just tried to login using Google account and it seems to be immposible without letting them see my contacts. Anyway, why would HN need such data?

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falava5• 14 years ago

Saved comments like saved stories in the profile?

Some comments are so good that I want them for later reference.

When I upvote a story I know that it will be there in my saved stories for later enjoyment. Same for upvoted comments? Thanks.

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fsniper• 14 years ago

please use some kind of user distinction feature like auto generated distinct picture boxes for every user. I'm a person who does not give much attention to the posters' identity while reading over net. And with small in-distinctive user names used over HN makes me think every post or comment is anonymous. This makes my HN experience less valued.

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punjsingh• 14 years ago

Please look at the authentication system password recovery when all I can remember about an account is the email address. Thank you. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3963671

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v0cab• 14 years ago

Ability to edit or delete comments more than a day old. At least let us 'delete' our username on a comment.

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elteto• 14 years ago

Please remove the requirement to obtain access to my email contacts when using OpenID to sign in.

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DavidAbrams2• 14 years ago

A "forgot password" or password-reset function. It's not letting me log in, and I'm mystified because I know what password I used. I had to use an alternate ID to post this.

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pygy_• 14 years ago

In order to give an incentive for fruitful conversations, it would be nice if the numbers of answers to a post, and their scores, were added to the karma of its author. Something along these lines could work:

    (sum (map (fn (score) 
                 (if (< score 1) ; don't penalize users if answers are domnmedded
                     0
                     (+ 1 (floor (log (score))))))
              children-scores))

This would only be granted to comments with a positive karma.
It could of course be computed offline after the thread has settled.
It would for reward people who ask questions that elicit either lots of answers or an highly upvoted one.
By using a logarithm, people would not be able to cheat by upvoting every answer to their posts (someting I automatically do out of courtesy, BTW, but many people don't).
----
Another thing: When the comments scores were visibles, people would rarely get more than two or three downmods unless they were obnoxious. There was a rule either tacit or explicit, I don't remember, not to downmod people lower than that, and if they were, it was corrected by other members of the community.
I have the impression that the score go much lower now, and are sometimes fatal to new users, who end up hell-banned and don't get a second chance. It may be nice to display the scores when they are below one.

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Jemm• 14 years ago

Hi. I was just looking at my profile and noticed you have a notifo: field. Curious, I google notifo and it would seem they are no longer extant.

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cweiske• 14 years ago

RSS/Atom feed for http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100

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samcreate• 14 years ago

nodb.js is the fastest scalable, high-performance, open source NoSQL database. nodb.js features: auto-sharding and data integrity anaylsis

http://nodbjs.com/

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DavidAbrams2• 14 years ago

How about fixing the log-in system? It claims "bad login" for valid credentials, doesn't say what's bad about it, and doesn't provide any way to reset supposedly bad passwords.

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dewiz• 14 years ago

please make comments and upvote links easier to click on ipad.

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mdnajim8592• 14 years ago

hi friend....

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mdnajim8592• 14 years ago

hiiii/.....

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ZanderEarth32• 14 years ago

Given the support and reaction of this post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053427) possibly a 'Show HN' tab at the top of the page might be a useful feature.

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bartonfink• 14 years ago

In addition to the header coloring preference, it would be nice to either have a preference to color the text ("new", "threads", "submit" etc) or, failing that, to change the text from black to white for darker header colors.

Currently, with dark colors it's occasionally difficult to read the text.

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marbletiles2• 14 years ago

You need a meta outlet. Deleting threads about moderation won't wash: a site won't allow itself to be secretly moderated, especially in ways it doesn't agree with. Every single online community learns this; every one benefits from the meta outlet they create.

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akkartik13• 14 years ago

Yeah. Just add a 'meta' list to the lists page (http://news.ycombinator.com/lists). It won't be hard, and it won't take up much space. I'll even help build the feature.

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mad_with_power• 14 years ago

It would be nice if child comments were foldable.

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coldpie• 14 years ago

Please fix URL autodetection not to include the Greater Than character. For an example and reference, see <http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.ht....

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dredmorbius7• 14 years ago

Can we please have a blockquote markup? And improve the code block markup so that the line width is wider and doesn't require horizontal scrolling?

  This is a code markup example.  The problem I'm seeing is that, lacking a clear blockquote text citing markup, it's also used for citing text.  Which, in the case of long lines, leads to the example I'm trying to replicate here:  a single line of long, horizontally scrolling text.
  Just sayin'.

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newobj• 14 years ago

Almost every time when I go to post an "Ask HN" story, I submit and get "deadlink". If there's some kind of CSRF token that's expiring, maybe you can increase the timeout a bit? Or maybe I need to type faster in my "Ask HN" posts...

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akkartik13• 14 years ago

Please create a variant of 'dead' that indicates to the submitter that the story has been killed. Killing stories without informing the submitter is for spammers and trolls, not people who have demonstrated some value in the past. It seems excessive to treat meta posts just like spammers. It is inhuman to deny feedback to loyal regular users. To kill a story without feedback is to suggest the submitter is beyond help, not worth engaging with.

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sparknlaunch• 14 years ago

1- When logged in comments and submissions (by logged in user) should be highlighted in a distinctive colour.

2- Comment karma should be shown publicly rather than privately. ie each comment should show value.

3- Comments within a thread should be able to be sorted by comment score.

4- Submitted links for same news stories should share karma points. Several times you submit the same story only to see someone else collect karma hours later.

5- Increase transparency on how comments ranking works.

6- Increase transparency on max submissions and comments allowable per day.

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nopassword• 14 years ago

Would really like to see a feature for forgot password! If there is one, please let me know as I have misplaced my password to my only/favorite news site.

Best Regards,

Sergio Stephano

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huhtenberg6• 14 years ago

Please add an option for showing original submission titles.

When titles are changed by mods, it frequently neuters them. From "Today my company came out of stealth mode" becomes "Ex-Facebooker closes $1.4M financing round." Clearly not a change for the better. Please keep a copy of the original title and add an account-wide toggle to switch between moderated and original versions.

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dakimov• 14 years ago

Annotations for submissions. Just a couple sentences telling what the submission is about. Titles are often obscure, so you cannot determine whether a submission is even worth your attention without opening and reading it. Given the rate of submissions on HN this may be really time wasting.

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nopassrecover• 14 years ago

1) Automatically resurface popular old articles after x days (or some other metric). This will hopefully stop reposts and tie in previous discussion.

2) Order the comments feed by "most recent active" (so Max(childDatePosted) DESC THEN BY Max(posted) DESC".

Happy to dig into the Arc if you'd like a hand.

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Olacoded2• 14 years ago

entertainment!

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Olacoded2• 14 years ago

nigeria news and many more news!

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zach2• 14 years ago

I just saw another rehash on the front page (which I don't mind much at current) which drew the inevitable responses:

Old member: This has been on here n times!

New member: But hey, as a new member, I appreciate it!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4189220

A way for new members in particular to see the "Catching Up With Hacker News" classic content they appreciate (on their front page, by default) seems like it could help mainstream them into the community.

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nkurz7• 14 years ago

Down-voting is awkward. Some feel it should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances, others that it's essential for every day curation of the site. Frequently, the person being downvoted does not know what they did wrong. But if all downvoters were to explain their reasons, far too much attention and page space would be spent on poor comments.

Proposal: The downvote arrow takes you to a "confirm" page with a "reason" text box. If you want to downvote you are encouraged (required?) to enter a reason before confirming your vote. This page also shows otherwise hidden comments by other people explaining their downvote.

Advantage: Allows downvoters to explain to the commenter why their comment is being downvoted without cluttering up the main discussion page. Ideally produces a better and more functional community.

Credit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4208938

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nyliferocks• 14 years ago

A TOP Ten Page of Submissions

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andrethegiant• 14 years ago

Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲ to make the upvote triangle look crisp on high-resolution displays.

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drp2• 14 years ago

Some comment threads are getting very long. Collapse children would help keep these from hiding other worthy top level comments.

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boristhespider• 14 years ago

I find myself flapping between news.ycombinator.org and news.ycombinator.com (also .net), and cookies are not shared. Picking one and redirecting the others to it would be appreciated.

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johnobrien1232• 14 years ago

I often open a new tab to read an article off the homepage. After I've read all the articles, then I'll click on "More", and receive a "Unknown or expired link." message.

It would be helpful if instead the More link simply gave me the next 31-60 ranked articles, even if they were duplicative with what I'd seen before.

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possibilistic• 14 years ago

Hey pg et al., could you embed the post date and time as a timestamp in the HTML source? (Perhaps using data attributes?) It would be great for HN parsers/readers. Personally, I'd like to scrape a few comments and cache them in a feed. As of right now I have to use the cheap heuristic of parsing "X days ago", and I assume this could be +/- 23 hours in error.

Thanks!

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awakeasleep• 14 years ago

I'd like a modification to the "get back to work" message.

I would enjoy if it rotated a bit through different creative reminders.

Examples:

"have you exercised 150 minutes this week?" (low activity has been purported to kill as many people as smoking, and a bet a lot of we computer users are in that demographic.

"Any hobbies interesting you at the moment? Why not work on them for a bit?"

"Get back to work!"

"Go get out of your comfort zone"

And maybe some inspirational quotes.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/paul_valery.html

Thanks for thinking about it!

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gbelote• 14 years ago

It'd be nice to have an explicit "save" link for stories and comments. I know that every story I upvote gets saved (and can be retrieved via my profile), but I'd like to be able to save things I find interesting w/o giving it an upvote/endorsement (and for users who aren't aware of upvotes getting saved in this way).

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PeterWhittaker• 14 years ago

Tags/Categories, and filter-by-tag/category

tl;dr: Let any user add any tag/category to any article, allow each user to up/down vote each tag once (to increase categorization quality), and allow all users to filter HN articles by tag - and tag properties.

Result: When we have only a short time, we see only the types of article that most interest us. When we have more time, we can browse through new or untagged or little tagged articles and apply/vote tags.

Why? Because HN and the HN community are good at curating articles of interest, and I cannot find a better community for suggesting the types of article I'm interested in, but that type is, broadly, off topic.

Longer version, more rationale, details....

I wandered into HN when I was a hackerpreneur - but I'm not anymore.

I stay because of the high quality of articles and comments - but the articles I'm mostly interested in are not about hacking code or hardware or startups, they're about cognition, hacking the mind, pedagogy, etc. Ya know, the off topic stuff.

But the real off topic gems tend to drown in a sea of on topic stuff.

So I spend a fair amount of time filtering through the first four or five pages of stories every day, looking for those non-coding&&non-startup gems that spark my interest. I'd like technology and crowd-sourcing to make this easier for me....

Let anyone add a tag/category to a story, e.g., hardhack, softhack, hardknocks, cognition, mindhack, etc. - AND let everyone vote up/down the tag/category: Voting tags would make them fluid and make the most sensible ones apply to any story.

(The most popular tags, or the most commonly used ones, would populate a dynamic list - this would allow the tag system to grow organically.)

Next, let me filter HN by tag/category, using as many/few as I want. Or none.

I'll start viewing with filters turned on and find recent stories of interest. When there are none (or not enough for this period of distraction), I'll look through recent untagged (or little tagged) stories, and apply tags, or up/down vote tags.

In other words, when I have little time, and need a distraction, I'll find one on topic for me; when I have more time, I'll help manage tagging so that you find one for you, next time you need one.

(Why am I not a hackerpreneur anymore? Well, that's off topic, but tl;dr? My values and interests have changed as I near the big 5-0, I'm not completely enamored of my current gig - IT security consulting - and I've come to realize I don't really want to start or run a business. So I'm irrationally edging back into undergrad studies in a very different field from my original studies... ...but I'm still here because of the very high signal/noise ratio.)

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kruk• 14 years ago

Memorizing clicked links independent of browser's history.

I often read HN at work. The page interface is very simple but the bright color of visited links makes it easy to navigate and spot new top stories.

The problem occurs when I go back home and check if any interesting news were added. I have to navigate through a long list of links and the only way of knowing if anything new popped up is to read all the titles again.

It would be helpful if HN could memorize visited articles and change the link color accordingly regardless of the browser history.

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TTRex• 14 years ago

Just one, small, simple thing... why don't you consider changing the highlight color of the texts/words in yor website to orange? The regular blue its just regular (one thing that YCombinator isnt) and the orange would really add to your website structure (everything is delimited in the textbox size) and its and the company's logo color.

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trailcable• 14 years ago

Add subdomain mews.ycombinator.com(also possibly meows) to redirects to news.ycombinator.com.

Lighting sucks at times and muscle memory might be a key off.

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LockedOutOfHN• 14 years ago

Bring back OpenID/Google auth for a little? Just so I can get access back to my account please? :(

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sbuk• 14 years ago

Delete account button please.

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Tycho2• 14 years ago

To help people manage the time they spend on HN (given its slightly addictive nature), what about a rolling series of front-page view counts beside your username. Like it would show you how many times you'd clicked on the front page today, and to the left it would have the counts for the prior days (going back 5 days say). Users can strive to keep that down to a reasonable level.

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vhf• 14 years ago

I suggest changing the way the karma works (I know : "no way") by making up/downvotes ponderated by voter's karma (I know : "ELO blabla, no way").

This way, newcomers impact on what is HN vs what was HN (regarding comments habits and what should make it to the frontpage / what should not) could be less dramatic.

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rabid-coder• 14 years ago

In the news feed, there are topics for 'Ask HN' and 'Show HN', but one thing I really enjoy are the books or other sorts of list-based suggestions people provide. It would be really nice to have a more explicit way to pick these out, like a 'List HN' type of comment as opposed to sorting through all the 'Ask HN' links for a good booklist.

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smackfu• 14 years ago

Use the same text color for comment links as comment text, so that a spam post heavily downvoted doesn't have the spam links still in black and even more visible.

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earnubs• 14 years ago

Can I suggest changing the CSS units for fonts from points to pixels? That way HN will look the same on both Chrome and Firefox for me :)

On Chrome 10pt HN type is 12px on Firefox it's 13.3333px (Mac OS X).

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Shank• 14 years ago

Pushover support. Notifo is basically the same thing, but Pushover supports all platforms while Notifo has been "in development" with their other platforms for the last several months.

https://pushover.net/

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jcr7• 14 years ago

It seems you don't know, but Notifio shut down close to a year ago, almost to the day September 8, 2011.

http://blog.notifo.com/notifo

There are other alternatives listed in their farewell message. Since they're no longer in service the 'notifo' field in profiles on HN and the arclanguage.org form can (should?) be removed.

Personally, I hate notifications, but of course, tastes vary, and some people really do love getting an endless stream of notifications. The trouble, or course, is which service to integrate, and how triggering should be done. It's not as simple as it might seem at first glance. Worse yet, HN (actually news.arc) runs as a single thread on a single system, so the performance impact of adding notifications might make them infeasible.

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lotharbot3• 14 years ago

pg once lamented "comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

There have always been mean/dumb comments on HN, but in the past they were routinely downvoted to -4 and then ignored. The problem is that now, people have begun upvoting them, and there are more upvoters than downvoters. Thus, the reason this is a problem is a change in voting patterns, due to a shift in community makeup and expectations.

Partial solution: when a mean/dumb comment is killed by flags or moderators, send an automated warning to anyone who upvoted it and apply a token karma penalty. Increase in severity for repeat offenders -- from a larger karma penalty to no longer counting their votes to a hellban. This educates those who simply don't understand that mean/dumb comments don't belong here, and removes those who continue to intentionally violate guidelines.

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jcr7• 14 years ago

When a submission is new and has no comments, the link to the discussion page reads "discuss".

When a submission is active and has comments, the link to the discussion page reads "# comments" where the "#" is the number of comments.

After some period of time (yes, I know it's more complicated than just time), the comments on a submission are disabled. Of course, this is good, and it stops the stupid bot that always posts "This is why we can't have nice things."

The trouble is when comments are disabled, the various submission listing pages reads "comments" without the leading number. Since we're trained to expect seeing a leading number from active threads, the expectation when seeing just "comments" is that there are no comments at all. It would be better if closed submissions are marked "# closed" or better "# comments (closed)".

Although it seems you have a special exception for this "Feature Request" thread to allow submissions even though it's ancient, it still reads just "comments" without the leading number, and hence, we've got no clue how much reading we might have to do.

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jcr7• 14 years ago

When all commenting is closed on a submission, all of the 'reply' links are replaced with '----'.

It would be better to use '(closed)'.

When your anti-flamewar code kicks in to slow down posting by preventing replies, the 'reply' link is also replaced with '----'.

It would be better to use '(paused)' or '(wait)' or best of all, something more informative to describe what is going on. Simply not being able to reply to a post and the 'reply' link showing as '----' fails to instruct the user of the reason, so you're wasting a valuable opportunity to teach them something.

You could even replace the 'reply' link with a link to something else (instructions, guidelines, faq, ...) as well has have more descriptive text for the temporary anchor.

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samofny• 14 years ago

New visitor. Login page has no option to register for an account. Doesn't say anything about how to signup.

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beagle3• 14 years ago

Whenever an article has a title text that ends with a question mark, automatically add a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines following it.

(Someone posts this on every such article anyway)

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intellegacy• 14 years ago

After reading an interesting discussion's comments, I'll often close the window, do something else, and return to the discussion to read the new comments.

However, it is annoying to re-read the same comments I've already read. Sometimes I'll refresh a discussion 5+ times to see the new comments, and it's harder and harder to find where the new comments are located. I suggest that comments posted < 30 minutes before be marked somehow as "new", either through CSS or some visible indicator.

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_jmar777• 14 years ago

Make http://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin redirect to https://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin. Not to be overly facetious, but there's some irony to having an unsecured login form on a site called "Hacker News". :p

On a related note... any chance we can get confirmation on passwords being hashed/salted?

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FredBrach2• 14 years ago

1) For fairness and effectiveness concerns, on the top news pages, please display a number of news according to energy thresholds, energy being the same variable used to determine the position of a news.

2) Please put a mark on the last clicked news so we can vote or discuss it (often a dozen minutes after) without having to look through plenty of tiny moving gray links.

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FredBrach2• 14 years ago

EDIT 1): the right term must not be energy but odds. Please display on a page a news amount according to an odds threshold (and maybe a minimum of 30 news, it's not a problem in this way for us, maybe it is for you). Anyway, thx.

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StartupBuilder• 14 years ago

Forgot password/username support. This is my 50th account, no joke.

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rabidsnail2• 14 years ago

The culture of HN seems to be drifting slowly away from technical subjects and towards more "5 easy ways to make your shit smell like roses" Business-Insider-type posts. This has been going on for a long time. It's one of the biggest sources of friction in the HN community in my opinion.

I'm not saying that these posts are bad per se, but I would bet that most HN users like either one type of post or the other and not both. I would also bet that the Techcrunch-types outnumber the LtU-types, so trying to move the discussion towards more technical topics is a losing battle in the long run.

So here's what I'm suggesting:

1. Let submitters add tags to their posts along with their titles.

2. Let people whitelist the tags that show up on their homepage.

3. Using data from 2, it should be possible to cluster tags together, and make ad-hoc subreddits. I'm not entirely confident that subreddits are a good idea, but having the tag co-occurrance matrix would indicate whether it is or not.

Adding tags this way is much less drastic than diving straight in to subreddits, and it has a path to end up at subreddits in the end if that ends up making sense. And if subreddits don't make sense, it should at least make search work better.

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gegidoni• 14 years ago

Apple, yahoo, microsoft, google, thats "hacker news" ???? WTF!!

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rolux• 14 years ago

Low-hanging fruit:

The byline of this thread currently reads "2041 days ago", and it's really hard to make sense of that, since dividing by 365 usually takes more than a split-second.

Thus for submissions and comments older than X days, change the byline from "X days ago" to "Month DD, YYYY".

Both 100 and 365 would be okay values for X.

EDIT: Alternatively, extend the current pattern of "minutes ago", "hours ago", "days ago" to "months ago" and "years ago".

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antidoh• 14 years ago

Mouse-over titles to show the original when the mods have edited the title.

Inspired by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580767

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lixon2• 14 years ago

redesign and update the <table> layout :)

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Zenst• 14 years ago

Relocation of down vote icon per post

-------------------------------------

Currently the downvote icon is directly below the upvote icon. This gives a small margin for error and I have noticed a few times were people have accidently downvoted an artcle due to this. Instead of the layout we have now ( A= Upvote icon and V= downvote icon):

A Name n minutes/hours ago | link

I propose that a layout such as this:

A Name n minutes/hours ago | link V

At least to me it would make more sence from a usibility regard to avoiding misclicking and more useful for those upon smaller screen sizes as well.

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jcr7• 14 years ago

If a text based submission gets above some threshold (points, user history, replies, ...), parse the links in the submission. If the submission gets any flags, then stop parsing the links.

Also, rendering text normally (black) rather than grayed-out when a text based submission gets above some threshold would be beneficial.

Sure, parsing links on text based submissions will allow manipulative people to put their comment in a privileged position, but the current implementation detracts from discussion. For example, it's typical to see a follow-up reply for the sole purpose of having clickable links, but due to reply ranking, one usually finds the reply too late. Another issue is mobile devices where a copy-and-paste of a plain text URL is painful.

Obviously, I don't know the stats necessary to grasp whether or not you're fighting with flag-bots or even users who flag too aggressively, but I know you have code running to deal with these two issues (you publicly mentioned how the weighting works eons ago). Since you have the capacity to roughly determine good flagging from bad, a single good flag should be enough to reverse the decision to parse links. This should be enough stop the "privileged positioning" problem.

As for combating the "link harvesting/spamming" side of problem, I think the most you could do is mark the parsed links as "nofollow" in the text based submissions (as usual). It's not a perfect solution, but it's still better than nothing, and it's equivalent to how you handle link based submissions.

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daveog3• 14 years ago

Could a tick box be implemented beside each title on the main page as I don't alway have time to read the full article linked at a particular time, and if its a couple of days before I get a chance to do so it is difficult to find the article again. Then put an option for the user when they come back to the page to have it display the articles they previously ticked.

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ricardo• 14 years ago

I'd love an iOS home screen icon.

Since iOS allowed saving web pages as icons on the home screen, I've had a link to Hacker News on the first page of apps on my iPhone. iOS looks for an image in a specific location and will use that as the icon for the bookmark. If it can't find one, it'll take a screenshot of the home page.

Since updating to iOS 6, my home screen bookmark icon for Hacker News has started changing to the icons for websites that HN links to. For example, my icon currently is a purple 'Slate' logo after reading a story at Slate.com. The only way to change this is to recreate the bookmark until this happens again.

It'd be great if we could get a HN icon that iOS would use instead of failing to the default and now changing often.

Implementing this is as easy as placing specifically named and sized images in the root directory of the domain.

Specific naming and sizes can be found here: http://gigaom.com/apple/how-to-create-ios-device-home-screen...

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hmpurwar• 14 years ago

is Google current version of Hacker-News is down,

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rvijapurapu• 14 years ago

Having the same issue.

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psawaya• 14 years ago

Implement login via Mozilla Persona. It's really easy to implement (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/persona) and e-mail based, so it should integrate into HN very easily.

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andrewhavens• 14 years ago

At least use HTTPS so that our passwords aren't passed in plain text across the internet. Or, like you said, implement some sort of OAuth2 login so we can log in with Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, Persona, etc.

(correction) looks like you can use HTTPS, but it is optional. It should be required on login page at least.

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kgill• 14 years ago

It would be great if the links on HN automatically open in new tabs. This would clearly imply that the clicked link is on a different domain. In addition, the user won't need to remember to go back to HN page, because it would be always open in the first tab. (Similar to Google News)

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jcr7• 14 years ago

At present, the only way to access all of my "saved stories" is to send in a scraper to keep walking the 'more' link until it no longer exists. With the "unknown or expired link" timer, one would have to repeatedly hit the site quickly to get all of the saved stories. Similar is true for a user's comments and submissions. Needless to say, HN already has enough trouble with bots/scrapers, so it would be rather unfriendly to add to the load.

Is it possible to provide a 'download all' link for a user to get their own comments, submissions, and saved stories?

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nilclass• 14 years ago

It would be awesome, if the RSS feed would return CORS[1] headers. That way pure client-side JavaScript apps can retrieve it without the need of a proxy. All that is needed for this is a single static response header: "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *"

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/

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hornytoad• 14 years ago

Trying to login with emacs-w3m, I get the error message: "Post request without Content-Length."

Sniffing the POST request that emacs/w3m sends:

Content-length: 38

I get the feeling news.ycombinator expects the more common form "Content-Length" (capitalized l), but according to the HTTP 1.1 spec: "Field names are case-insensitive." (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-4.2)

So my request is to fix that to adhere to the HTTP spec, thus allowing us poor emacs-w3m users to login as well.

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Nogwater• 14 years ago

Add a points filter to the new stories page. This would allow people to find potentially interesting stories (say, with 5 points) that haven't made it to the front page yet.

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binaryorganic• 14 years ago

Responsive Web Design?

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KalobT• 14 years ago

As far as design goes: HN has a very simple design and I find it a lot less distracting than more responsive designs.

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Hexstream9• 14 years ago

tl;dr: I'd very much like a "noprocrast front-page only" or "comment threads ignore noprocrast" checkbox.

I have a huge noprocrast.

Having to /logout just to check out a story or its comments that I got linked from somewhere else (and that I know I really want to check, specifically) is really annoying.

To me, this is a completely different use-case than browsing stories on the front-page. Browsing of the front-page is a significant threat to my productivity, hence the huge noprocrast. Browsing of stories I have a direct link to is not a significant threat to my productivity.

Hence, the suggestion above.

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robarago• 14 years ago

It's a little anoying not to be able to read HN offline. I mean, I use my Smartphone to download several RSS feeds. All of them includes a short summary of the news so I can read them quickly. Unfortunatelly, HW DOES NOT include such summary so I have to go online to and, even then, what I see is not the new, but the comments.

Please, please, please, include summary in RSS.

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Hupo• 14 years ago

It would be very nice if you could wrap the post time in a <time> element. I've been toying with the idea of writing a userscript for HN, and it'd be much nicer if I didn't have to parse the post times by hand. Not to mention that right now it's impossible to know the exact time of older comments when they might all say "300 days ago". You could also add a feature to the site itself that would show the exact time and date of a post when you hover over the post time.

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alpb2• 14 years ago

Collapse comments which has more than 2 comments or so. I don't care about a particular comment and 50 people who replied that comment, my screen fills up. If there would be a JavaScript collapse option, that would be cool.

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replayzero2• 14 years ago

It would be great if yo could move the search bar from the bottom of the page to the op of the page ;)

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replayzero2• 14 years ago

commented upvotes? give people the chance to say why they upvoted something?

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aaron-entropy• 14 years ago

I noticed about a week or two ago, the HN RSS feed at http://news.ycombinator.com/rss suddenly started responding with a 301 redirect to http://news.ycombinator.com/ when the HTTP "Host" header in the request is not capitalized. Node.js sends all request headers in lower case, so this situation makes it impossible to access the HN RSS feed for those of us using Node as part of an RSS client (without very kooky workarounds).

RFC 2616 states that HTTP headers are case-insensitive; yet HN's RSS service responds happily to "Host:" and badly to "host:". Would be very grateful if this this problem could be corrected in the HN RSS service.

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btbuilder• 14 years ago

Force SSL for the login page. Yes sessions could still be stolen but at least passwords would not be revealed.

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boksiora• 14 years ago

Non expiring paging

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pavansrinivas• 14 years ago

password recovery option...

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serf• 14 years ago

Please add an 'after-dark' feature that allows those concerned with battery usage , and those with already burned retinas from years of computer to view Hacker News in a darkened theme. Please keep fonts on the new theme as high contrast as the black on white.

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teach• 14 years ago

What happened to the "More" link on saved stories? I can only see the first page.

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kmfrk4• 14 years ago

Please make SSL/HTTPS the only way to browse HN.

I see that SSL is now supported on the site, so please make this the default.

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naquad• 14 years ago

Informational noise reduction.

HN covers lots of subjects (IT, scientific news, business news, social and lots of other stuff) while not providing any tools to sort out what one doesn't need/interested in.

During 2 days I've received ~1k news. For me there were 12 useful. I've skimmed through a 20-screen long list to find those 12 and didn't even try to look through all others because there is just too much of informational noise. So please add some categories or tags to news.

Thank you.

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nosklo• 14 years ago

Automated reset password option please? One that automatically sends an email to my registered email address, with the new password?

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downrightmike• 14 years ago

Access to older stories? Past page 3 the url params usually expire before I can get to p4. It sucks trying to find something from a bit ago.

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williamaadams• 14 years ago

The service seems to expect a "Host" header, and if 'host' is used, it will return a 301 redirect. Please accept 'host' (lowercase) or be case insensitive as per http spec.

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jyunderwood• 14 years ago

I would like to see the subdomain for entries. For example, github.com is used for official blog posts (blog.github.com), blogs from random users (username.github.com), project websites, and project repos (github.com). Having the subdomain displayed would make the distinction easier to make.

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SiVal• 14 years ago

I sure wish I could get a front page with 300 articles instead of 30. Yes, I can use bigrss if I want the awkward interface and restricted data about each article that RSS readers provide. And, yes, I can just click the "more" button...wait...again...wait...oh the heck with it. Even if I go through all that and actually read an article on page 3, the more button will die while I'm reading and return its "too bad for you" timeout message if I try to get to page 4.

What I want is a very long front page that I can use to explore the past few days' articles without the annoying not worth the trouble to read beyond the front page current interface.

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mak2• 14 years ago

External links must be open in new window

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gimlids• 14 years ago

Mobile version!

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lucb1e6• 14 years ago

Allow the //uri scheme. Right now you can use https://example.com and http://example.com, but //example.com is not allowed.

Edit: To clarify: I mean for the URL field at the submissions screen. It's probably not a good idea to implement this in comments because in many languages the double-slash indicates a comment.

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ScottWhigham2• 14 years ago

Please implement a "collapse" button on all 1st-level comments. In big conversations I want to skip to the next comment when I am not interested. I don't want to scroll slowly down the page to find it.

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982388

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rauar• 14 years ago

More spacing or different location for the flag link (as far away as possible from commonly used links like submission title or comments).

Every now and then I hit the flag link by accident when I click on the comments. As I'm mostly reading on my phone click means actually touch on the tiny links...

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ScottWhigham2• 14 years ago

It would be nice if links you flagged would be removed from your view. It's sort of strange to have flagged something, come back the next day, and see an upvote arrow with the "Unflag" verb next to it.

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awayand• 14 years ago

can I filter out all articles with aaron schwartz in them please?

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Angostura• 14 years ago

Allow a 2 sentence summary to be displayed below the headline. With cryptic headlines it easy to click on headlines without really knowing whether the story might interest you.

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KedarMhaswade3• 13 years ago

Please open the links in separate browser tab by default. To retain current behavior (compatibility ;-)), provide a configuration option in user profile.

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jimsc• 13 years ago

for the love of all things.

Forgot. Password.

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readme• 13 years ago

Show scores next to comments again...

There is some evidence here that hiding it to avoid egotism isn't worth the loss of function: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430542

See, respondents to the comment had to manually create a child comment "+ 1 for this idea!" to get their message out. That's not efficient, organized, or quantifiable.

I also wonder how much having no comment scores even contributes to eliminating egotism and hive-mind behavior.

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KedarMhaswade3• 13 years ago

Add a simple title attribute to the upvote up-arrow. That way mouse-hover tells you what clicking it would result in.

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KedarMhaswade3• 13 years ago

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jrs2352• 13 years ago

Create and track separately "saved stories" and "upvoted stories" and also allow unsaving and de-upvoting (sometimes we make mistakes).

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dylangs10302• 13 years ago

pg, is there any chance you could implement a basic tagging system for Hacker News comments? Right now there is no way to know if someone has replied to a comment without manually checking.

For example, yesterday the user dweekly submitted a post about his new idea and after my initial comment, told me he would welcome further feedback. A tagging system would, in this example, notify a user like dweekly that someone had made a follow-up comment or reply.

Just a thought.

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zalzane• 13 years ago

remove the karma count in the upper right corner of the landing page.

every single time I go to the site I unconsciously eyeball that karma count to see if it went up or down. it can be very distressing and distracts me from the content of the articles. would prefer some other kind of notification method that someone may have replied to my posts.

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LarryMade2• 13 years ago

Some method to recover or change your password would be helpful.

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ochekurishvili• 13 years ago

RSS Feed for the Best submissions would be a nice addon.

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aashaykumar92• 13 years ago

Add a "hyperlink" option so that when people are discussing on a thread, they can point to other sites more easily. Will make for a cleaner and more efficient way of communicating thoughts.

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alexanderRohde• 13 years ago

So my user doesn't exist according to http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alexcr

However, I also get That username is taken. Please choose another when I try to register the same username. Have I been banned? If so, would you like to start indicating that in the interface somewhere?

For example: "You cannot login because this account was banned" or "The user account you tried to lookup no longer exists because it was banned" ?

Account: alexcr

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aviraldg• 13 years ago

Please add an option to switch the "comments" link and the title link.

(Many people read the commentary on HN before actually reading the linked article)

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jewel• 13 years ago

Highly related, can you make the "visited" link be a different color for the comments link on the main page? I often peruse the comments without clicking on the link, and that isn't reflected in the comments color.

What would be especially nice is if the "visited" state of the links followed my account around from computer to computer. Once that's in place, a little "x" next to each article that I can click to hide it would be magical.

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lucb1e6• 13 years ago

Instead of:

    upvote.onclick=func(){ hideButton(); doRequest(); }

Please do:
upvote.onclick=func(){ doRequest().onsuccess(func(){ hideButton(); } }
Upvotes, or downvotes for that matter, don't always go through, but this is in no way made visible. Especially when pressing the back button, the browser might load a cache with expired links. Or when using a mobile connection, the connection often drops and you never know when it's safe to navigate away from the page.

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nonrecursive• 13 years ago

Can we add maxlength="80" to the "title" field for new submissions? It's annoying to have to guess at how much I need to edit my title to make it fit

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p6v53as• 13 years ago

Change the functionality so that "Unknown or expired link." would not appear any more.

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afshinmeh• 13 years ago

Accept Markdown in comments. I think it's really necessary to have a style in comments.

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huhtenberg6• 13 years ago

Add a link/flag to help bringing erroneously hell-banned users back. At the very least, if automatically hell-banning people, kill their comments, but allow replying to them.

Case in point - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=slmt - nothing from what he said justifies a hellban.

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simias• 13 years ago

Allowing people to delete their comments when there are replies is annoying since it removes the context.

I think instead of deleting the post it should just remove the username and make upvotes/downvotes not impact the poster's karma. Or maybe just make the post sink to the bottom of the page and not allow voting on it.

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BHSPitMonkey• 13 years ago

Please make discussion post text easier to read. Whenever I view one of these posts, the submission's body text is in a light grey font that's annoyingly difficult to read compared to comment text (which is black). It's almost as difficult to read as comments which have been severely downvoted, which signals that the submission itself is not worth reading.

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k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

Please allow account deletion. All activity could remain on the site with username changed to 'deleted' or 'anon'. Alternatively allow users to change their username.

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Dall0oo• 13 years ago

Can we have a rss feed from search ? Something like https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=hacker&... . If this feature exist, I can't find it.

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stephen_g• 13 years ago

Hacker News should be available over IPv6 - it's pretty easy to set up (but looking at Softlayer's blog it looks like you may have to pay a couple of dollars a month for a subnet allocation, which is usually free. That information could be outdated though).

It's a small price to pay to be future proof though.

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logn• 13 years ago

People create throwaway accounts all the time. Allow people a limited number of posts per day to anonymize their screen name. I think you'll get much more candor on some topics. And with this you can better sort comments and stories since HN will still have access to karma and other signals. And perhaps on an anon post, we could see an anonymized version of their karma (what range their karma is in, say 0-49, 50-399, 400-999, 1000+). This might allow us to take someone's anon comment more seriously.

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ISL• 13 years ago

A parallel view of HN, using the same source, but with a much longer time constant.

HN1: 1-day timeconstant

HN7: 7-day timeconstant

HN30: 30-day timeconstant

HN365: 1 year timeconstant

HN is interesting on multiple scales, and things of intellectual value, especially things that take more than 20 minutes to ponder, are getting lost to the cruelty of exponential suppression.

Thanks for HN. It's useful, fun, and addictive.

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tolas• 13 years ago

this would be really interesting

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citizenkeys• 13 years ago

Allow a url AND descriptive text on new submissions. Otherwise, the submitter must also write a comment immediately after posting a url simply to elaborate on the url and/or why the url was posted.

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rdl4• 13 years ago

Add a "/superclassic" which is like /classic but 24mo instead of 6mo. Or maybe several levels of /classic all the way back to ancient times.

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greenvaio• 13 years ago

My submission not showing in new section after submit :( Anyone can tell me why it is so?

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chm• 13 years ago

I would like to be notified when someone replies to my comments.

A first-level reply notification is what I have in mind, i.e. don't notify me if someone replies to someone who replied to me...

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rdl4• 13 years ago

I wish there were an easy way to see things I'm not supposed to see:

1) I'd like to be able to actually see the URLs of "dead" submissions; sometimes they're awesome and have been autokilled due to sites being blacklisted, which I don't support

2) I'd prefer if "showdead" weren't so hard to read. It's just the wrong color on Chrome to be readable when deselected AND even worse when selected. I'm fine with it being hard to read when deselected, though.

3) Maybe allow people with karma > certain amount to turn off the low contrast color, too. I realize I can do this in the browser but it's a pain on mobile browsers. I like high-contrast.

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rsync• 13 years ago

Just spent 15 minutes writing up a detailed submission. Hit submit, dead link.

Back button, copy selection, retry ... but oops, entire selection was not copied, so now the half page of text is gone for good.

Thanks for wasting my time with a years old bug. There is no reason that new story submission page needs to expire. I should be able to start typing in that textarea, walk away from my computer for a week, and then come back, finish, and submit. No state is necessary.

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bestest• 13 years ago

More cats please. Everyone knows the internet is for cats.

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vy8vWJlco• 13 years ago

How about some visual indicator (a line - ex, white/the same color as the background; or pumpkin) on the left (under the arrow), so the eye can see the nesting/tree structure more easily in really long conversations. Might be a CSS-only tweak.

( For a visual example, see: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2010/09/msg01682.html )

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moses175• 13 years ago

Hi. I'm a student of UNN and here's the school's website(www.unn.edu.ng).Please, I'll like to know more about your website and how I could actually contribute. Thanks.

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saraid216• 13 years ago

Could we please get username.github.io subdomain support on HN? Unlike the old github.com, these are all user content so it makes sense to distinguish them just like for wordpress.com.

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669707

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dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

Mobile / Desktop UI / markup enhancements.

The biggest problem is the voting arrows, which are far too easy to hit accidentally, and up/down votes cannot be changed.

Allowing changing of votes for a brief time (1-5 minutes) would be useful.

Improving display contrast -- setting a darker border and lighter main body area, would be vastly appreciated. Contrast isn't too bad, but can suffer under adverse lighting conditions.

A mobile-specific presentation would avoid resizing / sideways scrolling.

> Please provide a quoting markup. Existing workarounds of either prefixing with a greater-than sign

    Or indenting text to present a

Are awkward.
* Bullets would also be useful # As would numbers. And proper line breaking.
A collapsed view of comments (available through a Chrome plug-in) is another nice-to-have.

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staunch8• 13 years ago

A "launch" tab at the top, where we can publicly launch projects without having them compete with popular articles.

The same way the "ask" tab works. It would help make sure the community easily sees every new project.

I see interesting projects fall off new really quickly pretty often. Launching projects is such an integral part of the community, it makes sense to make the site work better for it.

Base it on "HN Launch" in title or something?

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stefantalpalaru• 13 years ago

Please implement proper pagination. The "Unknown or expired link." message when clicking "More" after being on the page for a few minutes is frustrating.

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southxpress• 13 years ago

I'm getting error: https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=AeXXkBwwjeuQUyWi8p6iWU

Unknown or expired link.

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ruliov• 13 years ago

Add:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Hacker News" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/rss ">

(warning: one space after url)

To the main page for RSS autodetecting by browser plugins/etc.

Thanks.

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epfleckl• 13 years ago

Two words: mobile-friendly. Seriously, ten lines of CSS would make a world of difference.

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DanBC6• 13 years ago

Some people love to provide grammar / spelling / etc fixes.

These comments are usually useful and helpful, but not interesting.

HN has "Showdead". Could HN have "ShowMinor", with a user selectable "this is a minor post" checkbox?

"I enjoyed this post! Here's a few things I spotted: you use your instead of you're, and you use it's instead of its" [X]MINOR

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imonkey• 13 years ago

I want to see iPhone version of Hacker News. It's not hard to create, and most of links that shares here already iPhone-friendly.

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pinakipillai• 13 years ago

Keep it simple

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ValentineC• 13 years ago

Could we please have a link to go straight to the parent topic? It's annoying to have to keep clicking "parent" when the page is at a child reply.

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cdvonstinkpot• 13 years ago

I think it would be interesting to have a page that detailed a list of which websites were supplying the stories that have been currently submitted to HN. Like a top 100 base URLs of stories that made it to HN.

So I can keep track of the most popular news sources for the demographic of HN readers. & Keep up on these same sources myself.

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HugoMelo• 13 years ago

WHY THE HELL DIDNT I FIND THIS THREAD SOONER? THESE PEOPLE KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I WANT

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sdrdis• 13 years ago

I noticed that some blogs create a post, submit the link on HN, then add a link at the end of the post toward their submission on HN for comments.

Something great (and simple) would be to create an API for that. The first useful feature would be to get a listing of comments for a given post. The second one (a little more complex) would be to allow HN user to comment via the API. A simple listing for the moment would be great.

This way there could be a similar plugin to Disqus for instance but for HN. It could help some post get interesting comments.

Thanks,

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cinquemb• 13 years ago

Sounds pretty cool. I wish there was a general API for HN to see so we can plot interesting data it collects in relation to topics/time/users.

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basdevries• 13 years ago

Please add a html attribute to the submitted links so the articles displayed in HN open an actual new tab instead of going back and forth between just one page!

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rpgmaker• 13 years ago

Mobile site could be a heck of a lot better. So far it's the same desktop site to me.

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therobotking• 13 years ago

I am having a problem where a story has hundreds of comments. I click 'more' once to go to the second page but by the time I've reached the bottom the 'more' link takes me to an expired page and the only way to reach the page I wanted is to go back to the first page, reload it and then click 'more' on each page quickly until I get to the comment page I wanted to be on.

Is this fixable?

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lucb1e6• 13 years ago

Bug: The title of pages gets double html-encoded when viewing a single comment. Does not occur when viewing a thread like this one.

Example: single quote (') displays as ' in the title bar, or &#x27 in the HTML data.

Example case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838757

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marquis• 13 years ago

Bug: Posting a trailing slash on an URL gives /.

Remove the trailing slash and the link works.

Not sure when this started happening.

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dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

I'm getting frequent Nginix errors posting or deleting comments at the moment, though actions appear to complete. A comment posted twice showed as "dead". I deleted the dupe and got the error again.

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dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

Including the parent comment on the "Request Features" story. Quite likely this reply as well.

The error:

An error occurred.

Sorry, the page you are looking for is currently unavailable. Please try again later.

If you are the system administrator of this resource then you should check the error log for details.

Faithfully yours, nginx.

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yaantc2• 13 years ago

Hi, it's not so much a feature request than a bug report (sorry if it's not the right place). Since a few days ago the comments link in the RSS feed is wrong, it contains extra spaces. Example:

https:/%20%20%20%20/%20%20%20%20news.ycombinator.com/%20%20%20%20item?id=5859307

As a result clicking in a link in a RSS reader will fail to open the page in a web browser.

The story link is fine thought.

This is while using the feed: http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

I can't pin down the exact date when it started, less than a week ago for sure, possibly this WE?

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yaantc2• 13 years ago

Sorry for the spam, it seems client specific (RSSOwl). I tried another client and it was fine, then looked at the RSS flux and it also looks fine.

I've been fooled by the fact that I only had the issue with HN but none of my many other feeds. My best guess is that you're using the HTML entity "/" instead of the straight character "/" for URLs. Somehow RSSOwl handles this fine in <link> elements, but not in <comments>.

I'll submit the issue to RSSOwl.

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reledi• 13 years ago

Inline replies and comment folding.

I know there are several browser extensions for these features, but as native functionality it would increase the UX for everyone, not just those that know of the extensions and are fortunate enough to have them enabled all the time.

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dylangs10302• 13 years ago

pg, I humbly submit that it's time to make a "subreddit" of sorts for politico-technical discussions, and moderate what is submitted to it. I know this might sound distasteful, and I'm not suggesting we go down the slippery slope of becoming like reddit, but I think the events of the past week have shown that it's necessary for change.

I'm not a particularly old member here by any means, but it's become very obvious that this community is too large for the current constraints on it. Minor changes, like implementing a separate area for political discussions would act as a sort of "release valve" without sucking up precious real estate on the front page.

My reasoning is as follows: there's no stopping wave stories like the NSA scandal from being submitted to Hacker News, people are too invested in hearing about it. Besides, there's some justification for it, being that it has a technical basis despite being political.

Moreover, it would lessen the impact to the front page for polito-technical debate to have its own "arena" of sorts. I would also motion for these to have separate karma/upvote/"staying power" treatment, similar to Ask HN: threads.

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superasn• 13 years ago

There should definitely be an algorithm to group stories by tags.. so NSA(7) stories, Steve jobs(8).. kind of like how facebook groups stories ("aka 3 more friends posted about this").

This way, the top stories or homepage will have more diversity and content.

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satishkota• 13 years ago

Can't a link click open in a new tab??? since there are lots of external URLs, whenever i click the link, it takes me out of HN... and i am still trying to select the ones i want to read... so everytime i select one, i have to do right click and open in new tab...

P.S: May be i am a new guy here...and there are other methods there which i dont know

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wise_young_man• 13 years ago

Can we get the ability to change our usernames?

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zimpenfish• 13 years ago

It would be handy if medium.com URLs could include the author somewhere - otherwise it's a bit of a crapshoot as to the quality of what you're about to read.

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de_Mundo• 13 years ago

I know my HN experience is very, very short, but I have a proposition.

It's true you can write anything you want in your profile's "About" section, but is there a possibility to have a little pop-up window that appears when you hover over someone's username? It only shows you their workplace and education because, as far as I've seen, HN isn't attractive to hackers only, there all sorts of people who use this platform and it would be nice to know what is their background, for example, when commenting. It could bring more quality and dynamics to discussions because then you'll know what you can ask others and what are their expertise. I don't want it to become similar to a facebook profile, but the two previously mentioned information lines are far more important than others such as age, location, etc.

There is a chance that this will turn our screen into a popcorn bowl but I think it can be managed by having a little delay or something else.

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mooism22• 13 years ago

When someone important to the community dies, a thin black bar is added to the top of HN as a mark of respect. (As I type this (4th July 2013) it is present as a mark of respect to Doug Engelbart.)

This invariably confuses new users.

I suggest the thin black bar be the height of a line of text, and it contain the text “R.I.P. Doug Engelbart”. This text could link to an official announcement of the death, or to a HN page discussing such a link. The text should probably be a light shade of grey.

Alternatively, without expanding the thin black bar, the text could appear in the orange header bar, and be coloured black. In this case it should probably be centred between the “submit” link on the left and the username / “login” link on the right.

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dogzilla• 13 years ago

I am moving all my feeds from RSS to Twitter. Is there a Twitter feed with links to all the new stories that are posted to the RSS feed? I don't see a Twitter link on the web page.

Thx

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namlem• 13 years ago

Add the ability to collapse comments without needing to install the threadify greasemonkey script. It makes comments far easier to read and browse.

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vinchuco2• 13 years ago

I was wondering if something like this would be likeable by users. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005252 <<<< A wiki/resource list.

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blogytalky• 13 years ago

It would be much easier to create services publishing news from ycombinator feed if there was a way to easily get current news scores.

The only way to do it now is to get the front page and to xpath your way down to the score html element. For that I would have to know stories identifiers. Sadly, RSS stopped publishing those recently - it now contains them as a part of href attributes for links leading to comments. Not to say I had to rely on HTML page layout.

Things would be much easier if RSS contained a score for each news item.

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DabData• 13 years ago

Thanks CIA from heart Europe DC

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celwell• 13 years ago

ability to sort by Top this Day/Week/Month

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devsda0• 13 years ago

Hi, First off - really like your website. I check it out every day, several times a day! Love it. One enhancement request - would it be possible for you to have the links open in another window ... what i mean is ...target="_blank"? Many thanks Gerard L devsda0@gmail.com

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staunch8• 13 years ago

Ban RT.com. They're a trashy linkbait tabloid like the dailymail.

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brimstedt• 13 years ago

could we please get the css adapting to screen size (i.e. make HN readable on mobile without zooming and scrolling)?

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dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

I prefer higher-contrast sites. I've restyled HN swapping the border and body background colors, and with slightly larger fonts. CSS and screenshot on stylebot.me:

http://stylebot.me/styles/2945

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Jerrysmartchris• 13 years ago

Paris

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frederickf• 13 years ago

Move the search box to the top of the home page. Maybe in the header or just below. Alternatively, add a "search" link to the header that takes visitors to https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=

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tehsirsakdepok• 13 years ago

I do not know why I joined the contest seo, when I was a novice who do not understand SEO it is really about being a contest I follow and this was the theme. and these are some urls that are following the SEO contest "cari uang lewat ekiosku.com" http://tehsirsakdepok.blogspot.com/2013/06/cari-uang-lewat-e... http://tehsirsakdepok.blogspot.com/2013/07/citra-indah-dan-c... beg explanation of the seniors about good SEO and true http://masihakudisini.blogspot.com/2013/06/cari-uang-lewat-e... http://masihakudisini.blogspot.com/2013/07/perumahan-citra-i... beg explanation of the seniors about good SEO and true

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cgs1019• 13 years ago

keyboard shortcut: '/' to focus search textbox

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Zaheer• 13 years ago

Comment Notifications. Many times I'll forget to check my past comments and only a few days later will see people have replied to it. By the time I reply to it I'm afraid the value is significantly diminished.

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kmfrk4• 13 years ago

Use http://hnnotify.com/. It works pretty well, except when you submit a popular link and get fifty e-mails.

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m_ram• 13 years ago

Please add a title tag to the https://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin page. Password managers like KeePassX and KeePass use window titles to select user names and passwords for the auto-fill feature.

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sararob• 13 years ago

Real-time updates so you can see articles moving up and down the home page without refreshing, and automatically update the vote count when you vote on an article

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hrasyid• 13 years ago

Daily emails of top threads

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mikecupcake• 13 years ago

Please add an option for the RSS feed's links to point to the HN comments page.

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galawa• 13 years ago

i am new to the feature about y combinator but i think you should correct something. what is that? when you log out and you click the arrow on the left side point left you log in again. that shows if you log out you have not yet log out completely. At gmail when you log out no matter what arrow you use you will not log in till you decide to follow log in process such as your username and password.

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Moto7451• 13 years ago

Could a profile option be added to toggle on/off the availability of the downvote button? I browse HN on my phone a lot and am always a little paranoid that I'll hit the downvote arrow rather than the up-vote arrow due to the inaccuracy of touches v.s. a mouse pointer.

I've been zooming in a ton before upvoting (which works fine) but it would be nice to avoid that.

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juncode• 13 years ago

Please add an RSS feed for the "new" section as well Turns out there's a lot of interesting stuff that doesn't get upvoted and so doesn't get to my feed..

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Sukotto• 13 years ago

For polls, please auto-include "Number of respondents" at the bottom of the poll.

This is not perfect, since users have the option to pick multiple poll choices, but it helps to know how large the sample pool is in a measurement.

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nether• 13 years ago

I can't reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689212 so I'm posting this as a separate comment. A real quote tag implementation would make entire subdiscussions on quoting syntax moot, like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6483366.

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IvyMike• 13 years ago

When HN generates a "Unknown or expired link" it would be nice to have a "Click here to return to homepage" link.

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makecheck9• 13 years ago

Actually, my feature request is "don't show that incredibly aggravating page at all" or "increase by 60 minutes the time it takes for things to expire".

I see no particularly good reason for the site to give up on me just because I took awhile to read articles before clicking "More" at the bottom of a page. From my perspective the page was still open in a browser window so it should have remained functional.

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nikatwork• 13 years ago

Leave the upvote and downvote arrows accessible when a vote has been cast. Nothing more frustrating than checking HN on mobile, then executing the opposite of your intended vote action by accident.

Also good for those mea culpa moments when one realises a comment has been misunderstood.

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codezero3• 13 years ago

People often complain about mods changing the titles of stories.

The changes are as far as I can tell, always good.

It might alleviate some complaints if comments added before a title change, have the original title when the comment was made attached to the comment in some way.

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blueblob2• 13 years ago

I would like the FAQ and search moved to the top navigation bar. I did not know that there was a search and FAQ for a while and only found the FAQ through google before finding the bottom navigation. The top navigation makes you think that there is only that navigation.

Also, the document formatting is a little inaccessible. The submit page should have either a link to the document formatting, or just verbatim contain the document formatting page content. This probably won't help people who have been on HN for a while, but it would definitely be useful to me.

The top navigation is also a little confusing at first; I would expect that "comments" would show only my comments. I did not have an expectation of what "threads" would show.

EDIT: Forgot to put that an explanation of some of the more strange behaviors in FAQ would be nice. For instance sometimes there is a reply button to comments and sometimes there isn't.

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dncrane• 13 years ago

I frequently see users who don't realize that the email field on their profile page is not visible (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6593160) and that they have to put it in the "about" section. There should be a text warning next to the email field saying that it will not be visible to other users (or a checkbox to make it visible).

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tashmahalic• 13 years ago

There's a "more" link at the bottom of each page. It stops working after the page sits for a few minutes.

If this is fixed, I will sigh one less time each day.

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bobx11• 13 years ago

I consider this a feature, not a bug. If you've gone that far into the pages it is time to get off hackernews and get back to work.

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ck22• 13 years ago

I'd like to see all pages default to a list of 100 items.

I mean it is pure text page that is gzip'ed and should barely add 1k more to make it 100 instead of 30.

If not 100, then 50 as a compromise?

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codezero3• 13 years ago

If you detect an antagonistic or uncivil comment or commenter (an exercise to the reader), add an interstitial that displays the "In Comments" section of the guidelines with the editable comment before they are finally allowed to submit the comment.

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fenollp• 13 years ago

Add "tabindex=1" to the title-link found in every /item pages. Now pressing tab on the comments page selects the link at the top, press enter to follow it.

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DonGateley2• 13 years ago

I would so like to have all comment threads and sub-threads be collapsible with controls on each entry to control the collapse and expansion of what derives from it.

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DonGateley2• 13 years ago

When I reply to a comment, please leave my browser at the point where I replied (like everything else does) rather than moving me to the top of the comments.

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crdunwel• 13 years ago

I use the keyboard almost exclusively and it's annoying to have to tab through everything just to get through the article list. It would be nice if I could push the arrow keys to navigate the article list (similar to google search). Thanks

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rotub2• 13 years ago

Please make the UPVOTE (and downvote?) button/s more obvious and usable. I feel like people don't up-vote things simply because they forget that they can!

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rotub2• 13 years ago

Sometimes I go to "collapse" a comment or a post when actually i am up-voting it! The arrow looks like a collapse link rather than an up-vote link.

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lucb1e6• 13 years ago

Bug:

    <font color=”red”>green text</font>

Is not allowed as title and will show up as "green text", which is a completely different title, without warning. Is there a reason for not allowing this?

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neuroscr• 13 years ago

Sometimes the article isn't that great but the comment threads are amazing. I don't want to up vote the article but I do want people to read the threads. It would be nice to be able to up vote just the comments of a link.

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stbullard• 13 years ago

Please adopt contrasting colors for header anchors when using custom topcolors. (See problems with #000 and #fff, below)

https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/456556/1653002/49d37416-5b...

https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/456556/1653003/49d42960-5b...

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asah• 13 years ago

Please allow us to comment on (Cheer for!) YC companies posting job ads.

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justplay• 13 years ago

mobile app.

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elwell2• 13 years ago

When on list view on articles, press tab to focus on first item, then up/down to traverse, and enter to go to link (similar to Google search results)

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elwell2• 13 years ago

"Read Later" button for every article

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vinchuco2• 13 years ago

I noticed two types of HN posts:

1.- A Hacker News for _______ (finance[1], bitcoin[2], architecture[3], etc)

2.- Filter Hacker News (exclude ___[4], by tags[5], etc)

Food for thought.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844565

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867232

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860611

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6866403

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563739 (expired link)

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jmcguckin3• 13 years ago

Get rid of timeouts! This is an immense PITA.

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ondiekijunior• 13 years ago

private message/ping

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adamzerner5• 13 years ago

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/bc340a52f6a4

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tss93• 13 years ago

Make so that the end of news auto-loads next page.

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mandeepj• 13 years ago

It would be nice if HN had follow feature similar to twitter where you can see what your favorite author\commentator just posted. With notification feature, HN would lets us know when someone replies to one of our comments then HN would be so user friendly.

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htoniv_1712• 13 years ago

Please make the upvote button in some bit large size and change the color too.

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dded• 13 years ago

Please relocate "delete" in new submission.

I just submitted a question. Under the entry in new is this text:

  	1 point by dded 0 minutes ago | discuss | edit | delete

This puts "delete" where "discuss" usually is. I intended to click on "discuss" to see what my entry looked like, but clicked "delete" instead. Luckily there was a confirmation dialog. Could the text be made to look like this:
1 point by dded 0 minutes ago | delete | edit | discuss

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BASANT45• 13 years ago

now i will know this news,it is vary famous in world and populer,i like this news,and all pupile in this like.

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bluecalm• 13 years ago

Upvote/downvote arrows are too close togheter to comfortably use on phones, especially that the actions are not possible to reverse. Some UI idea is needed here imo. I like what Reddit is Fun app does: you need to touch the post and then upvote/downvote appear below it next to each other. Unfortunately that wouldn't be natural for desktop/mouse users. As it is now, downvote rights which just appeared on my account make it that I can no longer upvote anything on mobile, risk of accidently hitting the wrong arrow is just too big.

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pessimism• 13 years ago

Please ban comments empty-linking to Wikipedia articles.

At the very least demand they contain, say, ten characters of contextual wording to discourage this lazy kind of argument.

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malandrew6• 13 years ago

double post prevention.

Today I ended up with something getting double posted and this struck me as odd since it was always such a basic feature on many other community services such as forums. In the past I also recall being shadow-banned temporarily for a double post.

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throwawaycoder• 13 years ago

Less punishment for controversial comments in controversial topics.

Difficult to explain. In short, I actually have a six years old account with karma in the top 100, but today I wouldn't be allowed into HN anymore. I temporarily disabled my main account for productivity reasons a couple of months ago, and since then I created 3 new accounts when I was drawn into controversial discussions. After a good start, two of them were hellbanned, both times rather to my surprise (that's why I am on the 3rd now). I don't expect this one to last very long either.

I felt a bit guilty for taking part in controversial topics, but at least I figured the controversy stayed in those threads. I am not a troll, merely somebody who wants to understand things as objectively as possible and therefore is not always aligned with the mainstream opinion.

I was going to suggest to ban controversial topics rather than controversial users, but since that would sadly involve all topics involving female coders that is probably not workable. So perhaps an idea would be to punish controversial comments less if they appear within controversial topics? I assume I was hellbanned because I received too many downvotes, or maybe the majority of mods just don't like me.

I'm sure I won't be missed, and perhaps all is working as you want it to be. I don't think we really can escape our own filter bubble. But HN is pretty much my only news source, so naturally it saddens me that today I apparently am not welcome anymore - and probably lots of other people feel the same.

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kwhitefoot• 12 years ago

Increased contrast. light grey text on a grey background is tiring and irritating to read.

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sidcool3• 12 years ago

When a reply is given to my post, something tells me so.

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golem_de• 12 years ago

"Unknown or expired link."

This is somewhat annoying. If you have a page with 5 or more interesting links and then after some minutes want to continue, it breaks the xp on ycombinator entirely. I usually leave the page. Why in any hell don't you even just link to the start (or include the header bar)?

I bet it's because of caching the query, to avoid post sliding over page indexes after time, or whatever you thought with that non-session and non-user token. But. It. Is. Somewhat annoying, to cut the ?x=whatever just to return to news.ycombinator.com.

Use a timestamp to refresh the query or go back to use old school bad page indexes, but please fix something, at least the error message. Please!

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jrs2352• 12 years ago

It appears "people" are submitting the same link but with a different value after a hash (#) at the end of the url and the system doesn't recognize it's already been submitted. I've seen half a dozen "How I lost my $50,000 twitter username" submissions to thenextweb.com in the last 12 hours.

Can we improve how this functions to prevent so many duplicates?

Perhaps a ban on links to thenextweb.com??? I see before all these submissions one (that gained traction with HN comments) was to medium.com https://medium.com/p/24eb09e026dd

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...

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blueblob2• 12 years ago

I would like a "favorites" or "saved links" page. The front page changes rapidly enough that if you don't bookmark pages that you want, a few hours later they can be hard to find if you don't remember the exact title to use with search.

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lixon2• 12 years ago

http://codepen.io/lixonic/full/LwnKH

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yoha• 12 years ago

Sorting poll results would increase readability. It should be done after vote (or by clicking on some button) to avoid biasing the results.

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highCs• 12 years ago

I would like the links to open on a blank tab by default.

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plntxt• 12 years ago

Responsive design.

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adamzerner5• 12 years ago

Unread replies to your comments. Like how the message thing on reddit is red when you have unread comments. It's too annoying to click "threads" on the navbar, and look through old threads to see if there were any new comments.

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adamzerner5• 12 years ago

An answer wiki.

http://www.quora.com/Quora-Answer-Wikis-Feature/What-is-an-A...

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adamzerner5• 12 years ago

I think that a feature that would allow for more rational discussion would be good.

Like, you declare claims, say how they depend on each other, and participants could say which claims they agree with, and which they don't. Within each claim, there'd be a thread where you discuss it.

I think that this would seriously improve the quality of discussion.

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/bc340a52f6a4

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gus_massa2• 12 years ago

I have an idea to discourage deletion and resubmission. Apply a -1 penalty to the deletion of a story. It's small enough to not penalize too much honest mistakes, and it's a signal that deletions are bad. (If the user still continues to delete and resubmit, use the current method.)

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simon_vetter• 12 years ago

ipv6 support (it's been mentioned multiple times in comments, thought I had to share it here)

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nerdynapster• 12 years ago

Include a button showing "Trends"

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onuryavuz• 12 years ago

Please let article links to be opened in a new tab.

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bru• 12 years ago

Just Ctrl+click or Middle click...

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GabGoldenberg2• 12 years ago

Categories so that I can find the specific topics that I'm interested in.

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GabGoldenberg2• 12 years ago

Also, perhaps some site-initiated intros to other members would help with the feeling of 'small community' that a lot of people seek.

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richardc12345• 12 years ago

I'd like to be able to reset my password. The only option available appears to be to create a new account, or email Paul Graham.

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cbzink• 12 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/changepw

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johndavid• 12 years ago

I need php related topics like php, mysql..

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networked• 12 years ago

Suggestion: this thread should have the comments sorted differently than normal with a heavy biased towards newer comments (e.g., everything posted in the last year is sorted separately and placed ahead of everything else or comments are simply sorted by their date). The thread is a bit of a mess right now; the proposed change would make it easier to navigate and provide exposure to newer feature suggestions, which I assume are more relevant because the suggestions older than X that aren't implemented have either been reviewed and rejected or placed on a shortlist somewhere.

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Jtsummers• 12 years ago

A thought on "pending comments". Use this mechanism as a way to community-moderate [dead] posts. This may reduce or eliminate the need for a permanent hellban on individuals. For instance, someone who posted something that got them banned a year back, but has consistently posted good quality posts since, could have their posts un-deaded by individuals with sufficiently high karma, bringing them back into the conversation. If a sufficient number of their posts are resuscitated, then remove the auto-dead from their future posts (or queue them for review by moderators).

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adamzerner5• 12 years ago

There should be an app or something where we list 1) problems, and 2) startup ideas. We also vote on them. * There's value in discovering good startup ideas via the wisdom of the crowd.

* There's value in just seeing a list of ideas to help with brainstorming.

I think that this will lead to more startups being started, which is a good thing. It'll help people who don't start one because they don't have an idea. And it'll lead to some pretty good ones being started because the wisdom of the crowd will produce some good ideas.

Whether or not this succeeds depends on the community of users. HN has the perfect community for this. Thus, I propose that an "ideas section" be added to HN where you could add and vote on problems and startup ideas.

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malandrew6• 12 years ago

It would be very useful if 500+ karma users could reply privately to comments. The use case here would be to be able to tell a user why their comment is not appropriate or lowers the quality of discourse.

This feature could also come with the ability for 500+ karma to make such private comments visible (to make sure this privilege isn't being abused).

For example, in the following thread I would love to tell users why their comment does not constructively contribute to the discussion, but I also know that my comments on their comments don't contribute to the OP. There are many comments on there where a downvote is sufficient, but there are also borderline comments that merit an explanation as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115

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fnordfnordfnord• 12 years ago

When someone posts a tweet, it shows "(twitter.com)". It would be more informative to show the twitter "(@username)" or "(twitter.com @twitterusername)".

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darksim905• 12 years ago

Sort by oldest!

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stonemetal2• 12 years ago

If someone has been hell banned could users with showdead on upvote them back to life. It would cut down on the silly Hey so and so you are dead go make a new account posts.

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grinich4• 12 years ago

Make the comment "link" text just be the date of comment submission. (e.g. "15 days ago")

This is now common practice on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The pipe+"link" is unnecessary clutter. It's also more clear, since "link" is the ambiguous verb/noun.

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nilved• 12 years ago

Set a background color on textareas and inputs. You set a dark text color but not a background and it makes the site unusable for people with dark-coloured themes: your dark text is rendered atop my black background.

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gojomo6• 12 years ago

A 'headline needs attention' flag-like button. It shouldn't imply a penalty, like a normal 'flag', just an indication the headline may need tuning. (Some headlines bury the lede, as with <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7562859>.)

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Snail_Commando• 12 years ago

Another social news aggregator (the one frequented by crustaceans and disenfranchised Hacker News users) implemented a "story merge" feature yesterday. It is a really nice feature.

https://github.com/jcs/lobsters/commit/73b8df5eb7d9cc0de3189...

This feature would significantly reduce noise around major events, and likely prevent second order noise as people try to piggy back on with tangential analysis, derivative stories, or redundant commentary.

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gojomo6• 12 years ago

Re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593249 (software to formalize user better-URL recommendations)

An idea along those lines: every item (submission/comment) should have a separate set of children that are 'meta/correction/derailing'. (That is, there's 'reply' and 'reply-meta'.)

Users would have to choose (or earn?) 'showmeta'. (So, no clutter for those who don't want to see that level. But perhaps even people without 'showmeta' see the meta subthreads on their own authored items, and a count of unseen metas-in-reply-to-them.)

Minor editorial nits like typos/headline-improvements/URL-improvements ought to be raised in 'meta' replies... and normal replies can be moved to 'meta' if appropriate, even beyond the normal edit-grace-period - especially if their point become obsolete by parent/admin editorial action.

Perhaps meta-items even have a one-tick way for the parent/admin to acknowledge they've been seen, mark as agreed, or mark as addressed.

All in the spririt of subtle-behind-the-scenes work to keep the "foreground" that most see on-point and high-quality.

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dang4• 12 years ago

I agree with your ideas in spirit but the implementation would be complicated. Could you think about how to distill this down to the simplest, least invasive thing we could possibly try first?

(Better to continue this conversation at hn@ycombinator.com.)

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ravensley14• 12 years ago

a way to follow post that you like,so you can go back on them to post or follow the discussion under the post.

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coffeecodecouch4• 12 years ago

Display new posts on the front page of users with high karma.

Put random new posts that don't have any votes on the front page of those who meet a high karma threshold. Currently a single vote in the new queue is a gigantic step towards hitting the front page and being noticed. When that one vote matters so much and there's so much luck involved in getting it before even newer posts come in, it's no wonder people are creating voting rings. I think this could hugely reduce the luck factor in quality posts getting noticed.

Here's a preview of what I'm imagining: https://i.imgur.com/ZNQTn7q.png

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coffeecodecouch4• 12 years ago

Too late to edit, but I should probably make it clear that I personally don't approve of or use voting rings.

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dang4• 12 years ago

We're working on revising the new queue to reduce the amount of randomness in what gets noticed. It's definitely a problem.

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coffeecodecouch4• 12 years ago

That's great news, any info on this queue update or is it a secret? :)

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sillysaurus3• 12 years ago

Are resubmissions allowed (or even encouraged) yet? For example, Mt. Gox posted an update 3 days ago, but it only got one upvote (mine was the second, and came three days late). It contained, among other things, news that the company had been turned over to someone else (a Provisional Administrator): https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140416_002_announce_en.pdf

I would say that's newsworthy and worth resubmitting once, but by the current rules I'd risk being banned.

One problem with allowing people to resubmit is that they'll probably resubmit too much. It will also push non-resubmitted stories out of the new queue faster. The first might be able to be solved by encouraging the community to be responsible; the second by increasing the number of items displayed on the /newest page from 30 to 120.

There is another way to solve new queue randomness: create a page where submissions come entirely from HN members that each user may select. For example, I'd be interested in tptacek's submissions, along with tokenadult, cperciva, yours, etc, so submissions from those members are what my page would show. Each user would be able to select their own list of users that they're interested in. But this might be a bad idea because it will make voting ring detection a lot harder.

Another idea is to create a page showing submissions from members that you yourself select. I'd be happy with that, but that's a bad idea because it would divide the community. Pg's short experiment with highlighting users with high average karma proved that this is a horrible situation.

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DanBC6• 12 years ago

Have some marking on the text box on the submission page to give a clue about where the 80 character limit is.

Or just chop titles at 80 chars.

I would find it easier to trim down characters and make replacements if I had a guide. Without the guide it is tempting to remove whole words and sometimes that becomes misleading or link baity.

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lordgilman• 12 years ago

Google searches qualified with site:news.ycombinator.com often turn up the permalink pages for individual comments rather than the original post itself. Could you set rel="canonical" on comment permalink pages to point back to the original post?

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TRManderson• 12 years ago

Change/Add the/an RSS so that there is a feed with new items first, perhaps with an optional parameter for a minimum point count before it appears on the feed?

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danford• 12 years ago

Instead of a blanket filter for political (and other) terms, why not create a way to check if certain terms already exist on the front page and only apply penalties to posts that include these terms if the topic is already being discussed on the front page. This way when big political news happens you can still talk about it without it taking over the front page.

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nkurz7• 12 years ago

It would be nice if there was a 'log' or 'about' page for each submission to show editorial changes and other administrative data. Often it would be easier to make sense of earlier comments if the full history of moderator changes was accessible.

If desired, this page could also be used as an out-of-channel means for the moderator to tell the submitter why the changes were made, or why the submission was killed. It could also serve as a page linking to discussion of earlier (or substantially similar) submissions.

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nhebb• 12 years ago

[dead] is currently used for both comments and new submissions. I often see [dead] comments that are perfectly worthwhile, but new submissions that are [dead] are completely useless. The link is removed, and they clutter up the new page.

If there were two different categories of [dead] - comments and submissions - we could show dead on one but not the other.

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ColdHawaiian4• 12 years ago

It would facilitate more convenient discussion if you had the option of getting notifications that someone has replied to your submission or comment. Along those lines, it would be cool to be able to "subscribe" to a thread and receive notifications whenever someone posts a reply to anyone.

The notifications can be on the site itself, like a little box in the corner that shows the number of unread notifications, Facebook/StackOverflow/Google+ style. And/or set up notifications as emails (though personally, I already get tons of spam in my inbox, I'd rather just have on-site notifications).

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mrcdima• 12 years ago

I built a small chrome extension that provides this functionality. Next to your name, the extension adds a mail icon that lights up whenever someone replies to one of your messages. It then takes you to a 'cleaned up' threads page that only shows new messages. Doesn't work for submissions though. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notifications-for-...

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ColdHawaiian4• 12 years ago

I would like it if HN could be divided into separate sub-topics, or have each submission tagged with a few topical tags, like "web development", "javascript", "compilers", "linux", "graphics", etc. For bonus points, allow HN to be customized for each user so that they can subscribe to their favorite topics, which then populate the front-page and /best page.

I find that keeping up with news on HN is essential to me learning new things and becoming more skilled in my field. However, HN caters to a wide variety of interests, and it is time-consuming to have to sift through a bunch of posts on topics that I'm not really interested in.

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sagmartindia• 12 years ago

Its Presentation very clear. easy to used.

Thanks

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ColdHawaiian4• 12 years ago

Please provide more tools to help users moderate their own comments. In particular, I think the following features are sorely needed:

1. The ability to delete your own comments indefinitely, instead of having a window of only a few hours within which to delete your own comments.

2. The ability to flag your own comments for moderation.

I suppose one possible reason for not allowing comment deletion after a certain amount of time is that it forces people to really only make high-quality comments, otherwise they'll be downvoted and they won't be able to do anything about it after a few hours.

But if you're trying to improve the quality of Hacker News threads with high-quality comments, then I argue that it's counter-productive to force low-quality comments to remain by not allowing users to self-delete them after `X` hours.

Both Reddit and Stack Overflow allow users to delete their own comments indefinitely. Heck, Stack Overflow even encourages you to delete your own comments, if they don't contribute useful information to a post.

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malandrew6• 12 years ago

I think a nice comprimise would be to allow each user a certain number of deletions relative to the karma they've earned. i.e. for every 100 upvotes, you're allowed to delete any post of yours indefinitely/permanently.

The reason for the ratio of votes to how many you can delete, is because its likely that HN karma per user correlates with the quantity of posts per user. With that in mind, someone who has made many more posts may have a need to delete more posts in the future.

This would balance the needs of the community to not have holes in its conversations, but also allow individuals to strike a particular comment from the record.

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ColdHawaiian4• 12 years ago

Open source Hacker News. I think the community can get together and talk about new features (maybe on GitHub pull-requests and/or on HN itself, or maybe a Discourse forum instance), and get those features implemented quickly.

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coffeecodecouch4• 12 years ago

I can't remember if this is in effect or not, but stories starting with "show hn" (case insensitive) should get a ranking boost. That would help more user created content get on the front page, which is a good thing IMO.

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malandrew6• 12 years ago

Leaderboard that also breaks down karma from posts and karma from comments.

Specifically, I'd love to see whose comments are the most upvoted, without having their total karma and average karma skewed by getting to the front page.

It's not uncommon for a front page article to get 100+ points, but it's rare for a comment to get 100+ points.

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malandrew6• 12 years ago

It should be possible to comment on posts in this thread indefinitely. I can currently only comment on some of the posts in this thread, but I could contribute to others.

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arithewiz• 12 years ago

This is not so a much of a feature request, I would simply like it if the background color could be white, or a shade of white. I have been reading a lot of news here over the past few days and I get the feeling my eyes have been hurting due to the text and background color combination. Could be just me.

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h4ck3rr• 12 years ago

H...k...R

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DanBC6• 12 years ago

FLAGGING:

I do not know what I should flag. Should I flag things that have terrible titles?

"10 articles every programmer should read" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743952

Or should I flag the obvious (but rare) off topic spam that makes it through the filters?

I believe HN users want to reduce mod-work, and that they would be happy with slightly increased friction on flagging.

[flag - should not be on HN]

[flag - HN Worthy but terrible title]

[flag - train wreck comments]

I believe this would increase flagging. I suspect it would make modding easier but I don't know and maybe I'm talking nonsense.

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andywood2• 12 years ago

The 'unknown or expired link' embarrassment (that's different from both bug and feature) continues to eat my carefully thought out posts, even to this day. This of course, makes me furious at you, personally.

Whatever the timeout is these days, it is simply not enough. Not for editing posts on a phone on a bus, which should be a core use case in 2014.

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andywood2• 12 years ago

Whatever logic it is that makes stories enter free-fall from the #1 slot, to page 10, in the course of 15 minutes...

I seem to see this frequently. It is jarring 100% if the time. I can see a rational for it maybe 10% of the time.

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maggit2• 12 years ago

Use `min-resolution: 2ddpx` media query for high-resolution graphics rather than/in addition to `-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2`, to allow non-webkit browsers to display high-resolution graphics.

I have tested this fiddle and found it to work in both Chrome and Firefox: http://jsfiddle.net/LRaJj/

----

Alternatively, and perhaps even better, use unicode ▲ as up arrow instead of gif, as suggested earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238956

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maggit2• 12 years ago

Another alternative, which doesn't need media queries, svg: http://jsfiddle.net/pJt4N/1/

SVG for the arrow:

    <svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewbox='0 0 10 10' width='10' height='10'><path d='M0.5,10L5,1,9.5,10' fill='#999'></svg>

As a data-URI:
data:image/svg+xml;utf8,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg'%20viewbox%3D'0%200%2010%2010'%20width%3D'10'%20height%3D'10'%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D'M0.5%2C10L5%2C1%2C9.5%2C10'%20fill%3D'%23999'%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E

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DanBC6• 12 years ago

Please could you put a linebreak in that very long string, or put four spaces in front of it?

Thank you!

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NaNaN• 12 years ago

We may turn some HN submits into article-friendly places, and only thoughtful articles are welcome from the replies. We can have a small homepage on HN to attach our small articles about interesting news. Maybe the submitter can choose which mode to use. It is like SubReddit but still has difference.

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gedrap• 12 years ago

I'd suggest hiding upvotes count in /newest page.

After submitting a bunch of links, some of them making a front page, I noticed that there is a fairly strong effect of social proof.

People check /newest, see that some post already has 1 or 2 upvotes, check it instead of some without any upvotes (someone upvoted, might be good!). The upvoted one gets even more upvotes (because more people are reading it), and it's on the homepage.

A bunch of my submissions made the homepage and from what I've noticed, the threshold is about 7-10 upvotes in the first hour. So can we fairly say that a dozen of people decide what's on the homepage? Maybe.

While the sample size is really really small, 8 of 9 links I submitted and got more than 4 upvotes, made the front page. But I guess with a greater sample size, the general assumption would still hold true.

The obvious disadvantage of hiding score is that it's harder to tell what is worth attention (especially during peak hours when there is a new submission every minute), but maybe it would help to bring more good content to the front page (as opposed to content that a dozen of people thought is good).

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stranger26• 12 years ago

I would personally like news to come to my mail box. That would ease my process to read the news as I'm checking my mail. A little like what techi.com did.

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gurgus• 12 years ago

It's probably been suggested a million times but a ctrl+f couldn't find it so I'll it.

Infinite scrolling on the main page. I'm not sure much more needs to be said.

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DanBC6• 12 years ago

Please automatically convert very long unbroken strings into code markdown, thus putting them in a scrolable box.

See this for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7837247

View it on mobile (chrome on iOS) to see how unusable that thread is now.

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brudgers• 12 years ago

Make this thread strictly ordered by most recent top-level comment.

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rrrhys• 12 years ago

Bold OP's name in comment thread.

When reading comments, I often find myself scrolling back up to check OP's name to see if the comments I'm reading are first hand.

It's a simple one that would drastically improve readability IMO.

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buro9• 12 years ago

On the login form could you use just one HTML form on the page rather than two.

Presently LastPass and other password managaers will submit the last form found on the page (the create account one).

Which means users with password managers are constantly hitting the account creation page and then have to go back and attempt to click the login button before the second form is submitted (again).

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tronium• 12 years ago

A separate "Show HN" area/link at the top. As it turns out many people would love this separate area, allowing more organization with "Show HN" posts no longer showing up in the "Ask HN" section.

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pastullo• 12 years ago

target="_blank" in all website links

I always have to cmd+click the open them in a new tab :(

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sunilkumarc• 12 years ago

If i can see all the people who are online and discuss with them( basically chatting ) about my ideas, my opinions about a particular post would be a great feature.

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vjandrea3• 12 years ago

Hello, i see that the Instapaper action disappeared. That's a pity, i used it a lot, i hope you'll bring it back soon. Thanks!

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vjandrea3• 12 years ago

I see today that the action is back :-) Thanks!

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jcr7• 12 years ago

Add a profile option to allow people to make their "saved stories" list public.

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tempodox• 12 years ago

Give users the ability to filter out posts by their source. Case in point: informationsecuritybuzz.com

We need a spam filter for crap like that.

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gtirloni• 12 years ago

Notifications when there is an update to a thread you replied to.

Tried to use Algolia's API and IFTTT without much success.

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nkurz7• 12 years ago

There should be a cap on the maximum number of points that can be earned per submission. Karma scoring will never be perfect, but the current reward for being the first to submit a popular story is excessive. Being the first to click submit on an obviously popular story can earn more points in a day than a patient user who spends years writing thoughtful expert answers in low-traffic threads.

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nkurz7• 12 years ago

Comments from people asking for or offering mirrors of inaccessible articles are very frequent. Old articles disappear from the web, leaving discussions that lack context. HN should offer a link to a cached version in the header of the item page.

While it would be easiest to use an external service and just add the link, I think HN should consider creating its own archive of all submitted articles. The articles, links, commentary, and voting data could one day be a great corpus for future scholars (and current-day CS researchers).

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edwintorok• 12 years ago

Merge duplicate submissions and their votes for URL that are "the same", and display only one submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903800

Blogspot is a common problem for example, trailing slash, etc.

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peterlada• 12 years ago

I'd love to follow the news in my RSS feed reader. But the 30+ per hour makes it impossible. I'd love a Top News RSS feed with 30-40 items per day. Filtering can be vote count, throttling, etc.

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vjandrea3• 11 years ago

The instapaper action disappeared again. Will it be added again eventually?

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codezero3• 11 years ago

Is this still looked at?

It would be cool if resubmitted stories had links to the previous versions – it's always nice to see the old comments, as well.

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bijon• 9 years ago

Oldies - Music Time Radio (http://www.musictimeradio.com/oldies/) refers to the music from the 1950’s to early 1970’s.It’s a mixed music genre consisting of R&B, pop and rock music. It also refers to the radio format that specifically broadcast this particular genre.

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lostmsu• 7 years ago

"Unknown or expired link." is still a problem for new submissions (not comments).

I've spent under 5 minutes editing text only to get it upon clicking on "Submit"

Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator

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