4 points by dpapathanasiou 7 days ago | link 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).
35 points by jwecker 127 days ago | link 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.
3 points by Goladus 67 days ago | link I'm just going to point out that this really makes me only vote on topics I really care about. It doesn't really bother me.
1 point by eli 123 days ago | link 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.
6 points by culix 80 days ago | link I would like to second, third, or fourth this. Having the page jump around when I vote on something really makes me not want to use the site.
Normally I hate "me too" posts, but I feel this feature is important enough that I wouldn't want you to think other people didn't agree. Thanks.
1 point by jwecker 119 days ago | link 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.
1 point by notabel 111 days ago | link 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."
3 points by BrandonM 80 days ago | link 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.
29 points by pg 127 days ago | link 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.
16 points by sharpshoot 126 days ago | link 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.
6 points by davidw 126 days ago | link Yes! That's something I don't like about reddit - I spend my time giving them free content, and I don't even get a link back to my own web site:-/
2 points by jwecker 123 days ago | link 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.
1 point by notabel 111 days ago | link 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.)
14 points by pg 127 days ago | link Not logging users out when we restart the server. (If you
find yourself suddenly logged out, that's why. Sorry, will fix.)
3 points by akkartik 127 days ago | link 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.
3 points by wbornor 126 days ago | link 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?
1 point by bootload 127 days ago | link '... 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?
2 points by mogston 124 days ago | link 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!
10 points by joshwa 107 days ago | link Please, when visiting already-submitted-stories via the bookmarklet, DON'T consider that an upvote. I'm just using it to find the comment thread.
4 points by joshwa 103 days ago | link I should note that this is the way the reddit bookmarklet works... they're the ones who have set my expectations/habits.
You could also make a like/dislike bookmarklet the way reddit does...
2 points by pg 103 days ago | link If other people agree with this, please upvote joshwa's suggestion. If you want to keep things the way they are, upvote this reply.
12 points by akkartik 127 days ago | link 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.
7 points by wicked 127 days ago | link 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.
1 point by danielha 103 days ago | link That works well. A listing of the most active is better than a listing of recently commented on. What's the threshold for most active?
5 points by rmack005 127 days ago | link 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.
11 points by altay 125 days ago | link ideas.yc.com.
we've all got more ideas than time, and it's a shame to let them languish in our individual imaginations. so how about creating a public clearinghouse for ideas where they're a) subject to reddit-esque competition, and b) "open source" -- available for anyone to pursue.
1 point by Alex3917 125 days ago | link I support this suggestion. I have a bunch of problems I'd like people to solve that might potentially make a great startup for someone.
4 points by acheung 76 days ago | link search! Sometimes I want to ask a question but I feel like it's one of those things that's already been posted, but it's kind of hard to find it.
5 points by aston 84 days ago | link 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."
4 points by ralph 73 days ago | link Documentation on the mark-up allowed, e.g. italic, some way to post normal ASCII characters for code snippets, which in turn require line breaks.
4 points by far33d 78 days ago | link 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.
3 points by ralph 59 days ago | link 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.
2 points by willarson 12 days ago | link 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.
1 point by akkartik 114 days ago | link 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.
1 point by akkartik 112 days ago | link 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.
1 point by eli 121 days ago | link 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.
2 points by danw 125 days ago | link 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(); })();
3 points by eli 124 days ago | link 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.
3 points by bluemoo 123 days ago | link 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 :)
1 point by brett 125 days ago | link 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.
2 points by eli 124 days ago | link Then I would suggest that a new feature be the ability to pass url parameters to the submit form that prepopulate the url and/or title fields.
As it stands, there's no real way to do it in a bookmarklet. Firefox's XSS security policies won't allow it.
1 point by danw 120 days ago | link 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?
1 point by eli 119 days ago | link 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...)
5 points by leoc 127 days ago | link 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.
1 point by euccastro 43 days ago | link 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.
1 point by euccastro 43 days ago | link 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
3 points by BrandonM 80 days ago | link 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.
3 points by inklesspen 89 days ago | link 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.
1 point by Sam_Odio 54 days ago | link Regarding links to the comments in the RSS feed, it would also be nice to preview the comments in the rss reader as well.
4 points by harb 126 days ago | link Could we add a domain name that each post refers to. That way we could tell blog posts, from PG essays, from e-zine articles.
4 points by wastedbrains 127 days ago | link 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.
4 points by Elfan 127 days ago | link - 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.
1 point by bluemoo 122 days ago | link 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.
4 points by dpapathanasiou 127 days ago | link 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.
2 points by dpapathanasiou 127 days ago | link 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.
3 points by phil 127 days ago | link 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.
1 point by hayeah 123 days ago | link I would second this.
In my mind, however, what would be more useful for us budding founders is a place where we can share our ideas and projects in their early embarrassing states. It would be nice the be able to get feedback right at the beginning when I have only the the vaguest idea, and then to be guided by feedback as the project develops and matures. I would not be comfortable to share my pre-pre alpha project on reddit. And people would not be interested.
I believe that the search-space is too great that we should ever worry about other people stealing our precious idea. Starting from one point, different people would diverge and develop in different ways.
I don't know. But I would really welcome more openness. I think when an idea is interesting, and new, people would rather cooperate, and help along. Competition only happens (I hope) when people are chasing after the roughly same fad.
2 points by byrneseyeview 54 days ago | link On the 'submit' page, adding a note about the feature request thread would save us lots of "Upvote this if you'd like news.yc to..." posts.
3 points by danielha 122 days ago | link 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.
1 point by ralph 41 days ago | link 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.
1 point by ralph 28 days ago | link 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.
3 points by Chingy 123 days ago | link You should be able to vote down bad stories. I thought this wouldn't be needed but we're starting to get off-topic submissions, so we need to be able to bury them.
2 points by eli 123 days ago | link Maybe the rules could even be tweaked to keep good stories with a minority viewpoint from being buried. At the very least, maybe have down votes count as only 1/2 a vote. (So there would have to be greater than 2:1 of people against a story to bring it down below 0 points)
3 points by gustaf 124 days ago | link I'm having issues with cookies, I have to keep logging everytime I visit, this does not happen on reddit, anyone have an idea or experience similar behaviour?
3 points by mogston 124 days ago | link I'd like to see profiles display the owners' url/blog. It would give a great insight into the mind of the poster.
3 points by danw 125 days ago | link 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.
3 points by danielha 125 days ago | link 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.
3 points by omarish 126 days ago | link We'd like to see a geographic search so that founders can meet other founders based on where they live.
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=445
3 points by mynameishere 127 days ago | link 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."
1 point by ch 124 days ago | link It would be more interesting if news.ycombinator.com also checked if a URL was directly linked from a previously submitted URL; the URL was from the same site as the previously submitted URL.
Before you could commit a new submission news.ycombinator.com would present a list of matches (in descending order by date) so that you could compare what you are about to submit versus what is already submitted.
2 points by jey 73 days ago | link Feature request: a way to escape an asterisk. Sometimes you do want to write a literal asterisk. (E.g. to say "a times b")
2 points by gibsonf1 78 days ago | link Add Classifications:
With the speed that articles drop from the system, and the probable increase in discussions that may have already happened, it sure would be nice if articles could be classified (i.e.: Funding, Infrastructure, Programming, Startups, etc etc), so that users could hit on the class their interested in to see what was discussed in the past. The startup bar could get an added heading like "categories" that would then let the user select. You could allow user based classification at the article and comment level to feed the categories. Maybe you could let the leaders add new categories (preferably a hierarchical structure)
2 points by BrandonM 80 days ago | link 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.
2 points by dougo 92 days ago | link RSS is nice, but spammy. There should be a way to subscribe to an "N-point feed" that only includes stories above a certain threshold.
2 points by BrandonM 92 days ago | link 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?
2 points by juwo 117 days ago | link 1) no way to tell which are new posts - I cant believe it didnt occur to you to color old or unread posts differently! Idea - change the color of every post title as it ages, from Yellow to black. (or light gray to black).
2) poorly organized. I had to reply individually because I wasnt sure they would see it. See here
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1890
3) what is showdead?
4) there seems to be a clamor of links to articles.
2 points by jwecker 118 days ago | link 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.
2 points by danw 119 days ago | link Can we get the ability to see what we've liked and where we've commented from our profiles please? I keep forgetting where I've commented and what that awsome article I liked was.
Also bug report. When I enter some characters in comments such as and it goes a bit funny.
2 points by create_account 120 days ago | link Make urls in comments clickable, ie. automatically wrap markup around them, or let us type the markup ourselves.
2 points by vegashacker 120 days ago | link Something like a "code" tag that you can put around sections of your comment, and within these tags, the formatting will be left alone. This is supposed to be a technical news site after all, so I think this should be pretty high-priority. Thanks!
2 points by imp 121 days ago | link I would like to have the option of changing my vote on articles and comments. There are times (on reddit) when I vote an article up and then read the comments and find that the blogger was actually full of crap.
1 point by ed 115 days ago | link Second the thread archive. I heard there was a secret YC video posted in an old thread but can't find it anywhere! :(
2 points by reitzensteinm 122 days ago | link 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.
2 points by eli 123 days ago | link After you edit a comment, it's very difficult to figure out how to get back to the discussion. This is a problem with posting a comment or performing other actions too, but it's particularly annoying when you edit a comment.
1 point by danielha 115 days ago | link The parent addition is helpful, but to find the origin of discussion, one would have to keep following parent links. Having a link to the main discussion would be nice.
2 points by danielha 123 days ago | link I did a search and didn't see this mentioned.
In any case, a very useful feature would be a way to track your comments in the different submissions and the stories that you voted up.
There are a lot of really great stories on here and sometimes I don't have the time to finish reading some. I'd like to be able to find the stories again quickly in my recent history.
2 points by herdrick 123 days ago | link 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.
2 points by epall 124 days ago | link 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.
2 points by Alex3917 125 days ago | link 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.
2 points by danw 126 days ago | link 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!
1 point by danw 126 days ago | link Aye, sounds like chapter five from Getting Real possibly, "Start with No":http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Start_With_No.php
1 point by BrentCastle 124 days ago | link 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).
2 points by brett 126 days ago | link 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.
2 points by rmack005 127 days ago | link I know this is an early version and things are still a bit rough, but just for the record:
1) The number beside my user name (top of the page) is a bit confusing. At first I thought maybe it meant I had some sort of message waiting to be read, or perhaps that I'd made one comment, which didn't make sense because I'd just created the account. Perhaps a label before the number would clear things up: (karma: 1).
2) I didn't realize at first that the arrows were used for voting. The main page (http://news.ycombinator.com/) had only "up" arrows. I figured they were used to collapse/expand additional content, so I ended up inadvertently trying to vote for several arbitrary items (I hadn't created an account yet, so the votes didn't count - I don't think). Once I saw the "up" and "down" arrows together I got their purpose. Perhaps, instead of removing one (or both) of the arrows you could simply display a ghosted one? Or perhaps replace the arrows with thumb up/down icons?
3) "7 points by pg 1 hour ago | 7 comments" reads like you (pg) added 7 points an hour ago. Is this meant instead: "7 points | by pg | 1 hour ago | 7 comments"?
New feature: Why not combine the scoring with Flickr like tags. Instead of just being limited to increasing/decreasing an items karma, give me the
6 points by rmack005 127 days ago | link 4) Tell me there's a character limit, and what that limit is :)
New feature: Why not combine the scoring with Flickr like tags. Instead of just being limited to increasing/decreasing an items karma, give me the option of increasing/decreasing tags, and the ability to add a new tags of my own which others could then vote on. This would probably be a good feature for Reddit as well. They could do away with the handful of subreddits they have and use this tagging scheme instead.
2 points by jwecker 127 days ago | link I think this is a great idea. It would let things like slashdot's "funny" and "insightful" happen organically. I've been toying with doing something similar for a political blog for a while.
3 points by jwecker 127 days ago | link Here's one: get newlines working. Either allow <br /> elements or translate the newline before applying the comment. It'll make the comments a lot more readable. I know it can be abused, but I don't think that's really a worry in this forum. You can always turn it back off later, right?
1 point by jwecker 122 days ago | link Nitpick. I noticed this is working now when you type two newlines, but when it's just one newline it translates into a space. I'm probably the only one who cares though...
2 points by corentin 127 days ago | link 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.
1 point by litepost 11 days ago | link 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."
2 points by abstractbill 127 days ago | link 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.
3 points by ecuzzillo 127 days ago | link 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.
1 point by joshwa 7 days ago | link 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.
5 points by pg 10 days ago | link One of the features that is (I hope) coming soon is an actual feature request list, rather than a comment thread used for one.
1 point by ralph 25 days ago | link The /threads page doesn't show recent comments. I replied to an old comment of mine on the Feature Requests thread to add more information. That new comment should then have appear at the top of my /threads page, possibly with the other one above it as context. It didn't appear at all, presumably because the parent wasn't displayed. This is wrong. It's a problem that there's no pageing on /threads so I can't view all my posts, but at least the recent ones should be visible.
1 point by mhartl 27 days ago | link 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.
Paul, might you modify the submissions page to have some guidelines?
Point people to the Feature Requests thread as they clearly don't notice the link at the bottom of the page. Remind them that this is Startup News so it would be good if the posting was applicable. Tell them where to find Slashdot if that's what they want. And explain that they are not the only ones with RSS feeds so they don't need to just copy links from there to here.
Personally, I think news quality has degraded since karma came along. Some people are clearly keen to move up the leader board and starting a new thread is one way to do that. How about not rewarding karma for a thread's score? It can still be voted up by others to show it's interesting but karma must be earned by quality comments on the thread. Either that, or let us down vote threads to penalise non-applicable threads.
1 point by kogir 54 days ago | link So, it might be my browser, but whenever someone uses a British pound or a Euro currency symbol in a comment, it shows up as two ascii characters rather than the desired unicode character.
You might wish to:
1) verify your database and code support unicode
2) use the utf-8 charset for your pages instead of ISO-8859-1
1 point by mojuba 56 days ago | link Show the number of responses to my posts/comments next to my name, let's say: mojuba (44/120), where 120 is the total number of messages in all threads I'm involved in. This will give me a chance to know if someone replied in a thread I started by just looking at the number. What I'm doing instead is I'm checking my "comments" page regularly, from top to bottom to see if anyone replied to me.
I saw this feature on other social sites, it works pretty well.
1 point by usablecontent 60 days ago | link Ability to find out if the new article that I am posting has already been posted in the past or not. I wanted to post a few articles from venture blog but before posting I searched on Google using "title of article + news.ycombinator" as a query.
1 point by whacked_new 65 days ago | link My karma shot up mysteriously sometime in the past few days. I thought people were replying to my posts but no, my posts were still lonely.
If this isn't a bug, the request is for a more transparent karma system.
1 point by manuel 127 days ago | link maybe allow people to add a short, one-line description for each submission, so one has more more info to decide whether to check it out or not.
2 points by pg 115 days ago | link I'm considering doing this for questions (i.e. submissions with blank urls). I think it would be a bad idea for stories.
1 point by BrandonM 80 days ago | link This could be possible with a mouseover description, simply throw the description into the "title" property of the <a> element.
title: How to make a demo that people will truly consider
description: Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.
This would result in --
<a href="http://howtowriteagoodemo.com/consider.html" title="Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.">How to make a demo that people will truly consider</a>
1 point by nickb 67 days ago | link Request: More meningful tag text. Paul, could you copy the text from the title of the article and palce it in between title tags?
1 point by ralph 72 days ago | link Using character entities, e.g. & to give an &, works on submitting the comment, but editing the comment populates the form's area with an unescaped ampersand causing corruption on submitting the form. Encoding and decoding needs to be symmetrical.
1 point by ralph 73 days ago | link The page showing the comments of a user should only show each post once. At the moment, if I have a conversation, me1 - you1 - me2 - you2 - me3, then m3 appears first as the most recent, then later me2 downwards, then later still me1 downwards. It's redundant clutter. The only benefit of this arrangement is my most recent posts are first instead of the most recent chain of my posts. I'd prefer the latter.
1 point by ralph 73 days ago | link The HTML header's title should have more page context in it so the browser's Back menu isn't a list of identical titles making selection difficult.
1 point by brett 73 days ago | link a good way to put chunks of code in comments. ideally some wrapper notation around the code that does all or some of the following for its contents:
-uses a monospaced font
-newlines get turned into <br> so that lines show up next to eachother
- < and > get html escaped
- extra spaces and tabs get turned into s to preserve indentation
1 point by BrandonM 80 days ago | link 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).
1 point by jmtame 90 days ago | link A Digg feature that checks if you've already submitted a link twice, or one similar to it (base it off the title of the article, or base it off the description entered by the user).
1 point by jdamato 92 days ago | link Is there a way to change my password? I don't see a form for it anywhere, but maybe I missed it. If it doesn't exist, this would be a great feature to add for sure.
1 point by jadams 98 days ago | link Local subdomains, or groups, a-la craigslist. E.g. toronto.ycombinator.com, or somesuch.
I understand YCombinator's rationale for having founders move to Boston, or the Valley.
That said, it might be great for you guys to get local footholds, where people can meet, organize, find co-founders, etc., before deciding to seek YC funding.
1 point by zaidf 110 days ago | link 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.
1 point by notabel 111 days ago | link 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.
1 point by danielha 115 days ago | link I am very much in favor of having a "top discussions" section. I tend to be more interested in active discussion than just popular submissions.
1 point by papersmith 119 days ago | link Maybe feature requests should be a subreddit of its own? There's so much going on here, I can't tell if the feature on my mind is already mentioned.
1 point by volida 121 days ago | link BUG: If you submit a comment, you are returned to the page you were commenting. But if you refresh that page, the comment is re-submitted.
A "no-cache" and an expire header of the submit request page would avoid this problem.
1 point by dngrmouse 123 days ago | link 1. Have it so you can be automatically logged in. I have to manually log in every time I visit the site (using Safari here).
2. Just like Reddit does, show the domain each link belongs to. Reddit has this in brackets after the headline, which works fine. Since I don't have much free time, there are some sites that have sub-par content which I avoid reading, and it helps to know where I would end up without having to hover over the link.
1 point by iamelgringo 123 days ago | link As far as I can see, there are two tar pits that Digg and now Reddit are stuck in:
1. A lack of focus and quality in the content.
2. No troll guards.
1. Lack of focus and quality
In my experience, users frequent a site because it has quality content and they leave when the quality of the content declines. Digg and more recently Reddit, are experiencing a loss of focus and quality and as a result are losing their initial users. Diggs quality is so bad it is now pointless to read and much to my chagrin, Reddit seems to be following suit.
Reddit seems to be drowning in a rising tide of noobs. Apparently, there arent enough old users around to down-vote the crap posted by the noobal hoard. From a quick read of comments, it seems many long-time users are angry and feel disenfranchised. Its because of this that those users whose content made Digg and Reddit popular in the first place are now leaving those sites and taking their great ideas with them.
2. No troll guards:
Nothing poisons an online community quicker than a few nasty trolls. Another one of the reasons that Im pulling away from Reddit is because it is getting mean. Both the links that are posted and the article forums are being destroyed by trolls stomping around unchecked. I hope Reddit can fix this problem. If not, Im going to stop spending my time there.
The impression that I get, Paul, is that your goal is to make this YC News a start-up news site and a community of potential founders; not simply another social news site. The only way that I can see to maintain quality content and to filter out the trolls is to institute some form of moderation. Straight democracy leads to anarchy; thats why I think a news site needs to be a republic.
I dont think, by any stretch of the imagination, that Slashdot is perfect, but they do have a system where moderators are selected from heavy and moderate users on a rotating basis. The system filters out new and spam accounts and gives preference to high karma users. It seems to keep the trolls in check. It also encourages people to take more ownership and to participate in the community.
Slashdots FAQ explains their moderation system here:
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520
There is also a brief discussion of their anti-troll rules here:
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm2000
Thanks for setting up the site. It scratches an itch that Ive had for a while.
1 point by reitzensteinm 124 days ago | link I think this was mentioned by pg earlier (I'm putting it here so it doesn't get forgotten), but auto generating a link when an URL is posted would be very handy.
1 point by jwecker 124 days ago | link Bug or undeveloped feature? Go to edit a comment- above the text box there is a "comment" and "edit" link. The edit one just refreshes the page. The comment link, though, shows... ??? It looks like I can comment on my comment- had a nice "nil" sitting there. I didn't have any replies to the comment I was editing, though, so maybe I would have seen something more?
1 point by danw 125 days ago | link 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.
1 point by vikram 126 days ago | link Though restricting the site to invitation only isn't a good idea.
Letting people invite friends that they know would be interested
from inside the site would be convenient.
1 point by corentin 127 days ago | link 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 :)
1 point by iamelgringo 123 days ago | link As far as I can see, there are two tar pits that Digg and now Reddit are stuck in:
1. Lack of focus and quality:
In my experience, users frequent a site because it has quality content and they leave when the quality of the content declines. Digg and more recently Reddit, are experiencing a loss of focus and quality and as a result are losing their initial users. Diggs quality is so bad it is now pointless to read and much to my chagrin, Reddit seems to be following suit.
Reddit seems to be drowning in a rising tide of noobs. Apparently, there arent enough old users around to down-vote the crap posted by the noobal hoard. From a quick read of comments, it seems many long-time users are angry and feel disenfranchised. Its because of this that those users whose content made Digg and Reddit popular in the first place are now leaving those sites and taking their great ideas with them.
2. No troll guards:
Nothing poisons an online community quicker than a few nasty trolls. Another one of the reasons that Im pulling away from Reddit is because it is getting mean. Both the links that are posted and the article forums are being destroyed by trolls stomping around unchecked. I hope Reddit can fix this problem. If not, Im going to stop spending my time there.
The impression that I get, Paul, is that your goal is to make this YC News a start-up news site and a community of potential founders; not simply another social news site. The only way that I can see to maintain quality content and to filter out the trolls is to institute some form of moderation. Straight democracy leads to anarchy; thats why I think a news site needs to be a republic.
I dont think, by any stretch of the imagination, that Slashdot is perfect, but they do have a system where moderators are selected from heavy and moderate users on a rotating basis. The system filters out new and spam accounts and gives preference to high karma users. It seems to keep the trolls in check. It also encourages people to take more ownership and to participate in the community.
Slashdots FAQ explains their moderation system here:
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520
There is also a brief discussion of their anti-troll rules here:
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm2000
Thanks for setting up the site. It scratches an itch that Ive had for a while.
Like many others here, I read a lot. Consequently, I find that I have already seen many of the links on this site.
With this in mind, you should consider providing a link next to each article that a user could click if he/she has already read this article elsewhere.
This info could then be used to give an idea of how old the article is, and would also perhaps help prevent overlap with reddit/digg, thereby improving the value of your site.
1 point by jgamman 121 days ago | link i like the 'friends' option. i unfortunately didn't use it enough at Reddit when it was new and now i can't filter for the users that consistently matched my tastes (or challenged them) - the noob tide has risen... i like reddit but a filter that lets everything in isn't filtering anymore. i guess i'm looking for a way that allows me to create my own 'recomendations' type algorithm. i think if it's on and clear at the beginning, it might allow the system to scale if/when it hits a major growth curve and allow that community vibe to remain.
1 point by cbthiess 120 days ago | link I'd just like visited links to be more different from unvisited links. Right now I have to look closely to distinguish between the two.
1 point by akkartik 120 days ago | link How can I find pages that are in the no-mans-land between top and new? I saw a submission for Trevor's article on languages: http://tlb.org/busywork.html but now I have no way of finding the discussion about it. On reddit the submit bookmarklet would find it with its dup-detection.
Dup detection seems brain dead to implement; is there a deliberate reason news.yc doesn't have it?
1 point by akkartik 112 days ago | link Ah, I just realized that it had already been in for a week before parent :}
This was one of those features I was reluctant to experiment on to check on the status of. Perhaps news.yc needs a status page for new features or responses to feature requests here?
I suppose an RSS feed for pg's comments would be one fix.
1 point by corentin 127 days ago | link 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 :)
1 point by papersmith 119 days ago | link I'd be nice to have permalinks of comments in the profile page, and ideally a notification when there's a reply.
1 point by dfranke 118 days ago | link 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.
1 point by jwecker 112 days ago | link These ideas need some refinement, but:
If an article you submit reaches the end of the "new" page with no up votes it decreases your karma by a point. Yah, it would affect me too, but that's irrelevant.
Related, submitting a new article by someone with negative karma not allowed- or maybe the article is assigned that same negative karma that it must overcome...
1 point by domp 110 days ago | link I have no idea if this has already been brought up (considering I just skimmed over the responses in this discussion) but I'd like to see another tab on top that maybe is for questions that people are curious about. I see that people are posting in the news areas not links but a single question that they're looking for people to respond to and create debate. They're not necessarily news worthy contributions but important none the less in fueling conversations.
1 point by abrs 90 days ago | link Can you please add a link to the comments page to the RSS feed with each Article. Then the article's link would go the the site and the content would include a link to the comments. Also, the number of comments should be displayed. This would integrate the RSS more tightly into the site.
1 point by BrandonM 80 days ago | link 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?
1 point by wendyp 50 days ago | link I would really like ycombinator to be supported by the Sociable plugin - I don't think it takes too much to get it added, and the plugin is automatically updated every week on WordPress blogs.
0 points by ralph 36 days ago | link Is the order of comments stable? Sometimes it seems they change without the number of points altering. A stable ordering would be good.
1 point by ralph 28 days ago | link I'm now sure it isn't stable, which makes re-finding your place and making sure you've read everything more awkward than it need be.
1 point by iloveyouocean 6 days ago | link Add a way to contact another user directly, not necessarily Personal Message, maybe something along the lines of sending an email address from one user to another privately.
The current method seems to be posting your email address in the comments with something like, "Hey, email me about that . . ."
