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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
that doesn't solve the problem that I (and I assume others) habitually press the back button when I'm done perusing comments in order to get to the main page. At this point when I press the back button it goes to a slightly older version of the comments page- and various other oddities.
I run into this problem all the time--not good for diminishing by reload-addiction! It would be nice if pages included some js to rewrite history[1] via dom, so that we could always see the freshest versions of pages.
[1] It pains me to advocate breaking the "show me exactly what I was just seeing" semantics of the back button, but I think in this case the user clearly conceives the back button as "show me the abstract resource I was just seeing."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks. I'm working on that but News.Yc is designed in a way that your votes on comments are anonymous. Your votes on submissions are also anonymous to other users but you have to be logged in to see them.
The way I envision it happening is you would have to go thru clickpass on ycfeed.com.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :-)
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.
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
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
'... 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?
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?
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!
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?
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.
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.
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. DiggÂ’s 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 arenÂ’t 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. ItÂ’s 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 IÂ’m 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, IÂ’m 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; thatÂ’s why I think a news site needs to be a republic.
I donÂ’t 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.
SlashdotÂ’s 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 IÂ’ve had for a while.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
wouldn't it be simpler to just decide that it's ok to submit your own posts? some people have done that already and it seems fine to me: they're among the best links here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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. DiggÂ’s 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 arenÂ’t 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. ItÂ’s 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 IÂ’m 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, IÂ’m 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; thatÂ’s why I think a news site needs to be a republic.
I donÂ’t 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.
SlashdotÂ’s 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 IÂ’ve had for a while.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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(); })();
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.
This problem is firefox specific. For whatever reason, IE does The Right Thing. Actually, the whole site just looks better in IE, so maybe this should be a request for better Firefox support :)
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.
Prepopulation is what I wanted too. If someone could update the submit page so that it accepts something like ?url=site.com&title=foobar in the url it would be great.
At least now its easy to drag and drop from the page the url and title. Any one know a way to get prepopulation to work?
As I said before, I don't think it can work (in Firefox) without a change in the code. Firefox's default security settings won't let you modify the content of html from another domain (I don't think...)
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."
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
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I just noticed that the edit link on comments expires after a while. An alternative that helps with notification: disallow editing when a comment gets a response. That way I can scan recent comments on my user page to check for responses.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
"""
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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)
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.
