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.
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
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'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 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'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 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 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)
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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'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.
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.
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 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'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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"""
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.
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'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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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)
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 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.
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:
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.
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...)
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
lets be real, this site is all about the quality of the submitted links and the quality of the comment system.
I think you should focus on COMMENT system 100% and the quality of the links will improve as a result. For instance, i continue to be downmodded basically because i offer an opposing view to the whatever the current topic is. I try to not insult, and I try to back-up everything i write with facts, or state them as opinion if it is only such. If I was posting off-topic spam, I expect to get downmodded, or if I am shock-jocking just to get noticed (I don't see the point of that one) I would expect to get downmodded, but your 'Point' system is seriously broke.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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>
Can you please increase the size of the 'Comments' links under each posting? I often click on the comments first to determine if I want to proceed to the actual article.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
How about adding a rate-limited amount of "bigpoints" to the voting system?
E.g. each user would receive one "bigpoint" per week. The bigpoint could be given out to any story/comment and would count like 5(?) normal votes. Unused bigpoints should not accumulate (or only to a small backlog of maybe 2 or 3).
I imagine this might help to make the extra-ordinary content stand out more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have a background lookup of the URL and/or title, so that before you hit Submit on an item, it can tell you in the submit page whether the item has already been submitted (something with the same URL or same/almost-same title).
Based on an example that appears to have been removed from the front page just now, I'd like to see an easy way to flag a user who is spamming up the site as well as the current way of flagging particular submissions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A quick search didn't find anyone else suggesting this, so:
I'd like a link on the page for a particular discussion thread that takes me immediately to the top of the entire discussion (the initial submission, in other words). That way, I don't have to click "parent" twelve times to get there.
I would like to see a search feature pg, I have seen searchyc, however I would like to see search integrated.
Today for example, I used Google to search (I learned of searchyc while searching for "search" :) in this discussion - after trying Google) and it brought up what I was looking for (discussion of your History of T essay) in the results, however, Google did not provide a link to the discussion, apparently only a link to the main page was indexed. It was only after using searchyc that I found it . . . and a link to the essay as well, as I did not see it under essays on your site. I was looking for both because I saw them yesterday or the day before yet was in a hurry . . .
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)
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.
There is something funny that I really wish to see here... but it's not essential.
I want to see kind of analytical tool for my karma.. and see how I am doing!
Let me explain: Can you program a tool that would draw charts of your karma history... so you can see if your karma is raising or not? And it would be great if you can let the users choose to display their karma in specific dates!
There is something more advanced also... Can you analyze the topics that user is writing about that helped him in increasing his karma?
Also recommend a stories for the user to comment on... that's related to the user's interested topics based on his/her previous comments.
I think this is hard somehow... because it needs so much of analyzing, data mining... and some logical factors to work with!
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.
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 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.
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
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?
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...
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.
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.
RSS for the newest category, not for the front page. this way i can keep an eye on what's new without having to constantly refresh the page. the current RSS feed is pretty useless to me.
"showdead" should allow me to follow links in killed submissions. Right now I can see the title of the dead links, but there is nothing I can click on to actually go to the page which was originally linked.
Inclusion of every new post or exclusion of every post from a particular website at user's discretion. Regexp based? Just to prevent the site from effectively becoming an RSS reader.
Not sure "[deleted]" posts are correctly indented from their parent. Also, the lack of space above them means they don't stand out from their parent. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624964 is an example. It's not immediately obvious from indentation or spacing that swolchok's two posts aren't a reply to himself.
When I click the "More" link and the page is expired, I'd rather have it go to the latest next page than have to backup and refresh the page. Could be a pref.
a way to distinguish seen and new comments - HN is awesome especially because of the informative discussions that are going on so I often end up returning to a particular discussion over and over again.
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.
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.
Allow users to choose to either add a comment or add a sub-link to the primary link. It's amazingly common to have great links burried in the comments. It would be great if there was a way to have them show up near the top, under the primary link.
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.
I get so engrossed in this site and it is turning out to be a major time waster. There are a lot of interesting articles but I really need to more productive and reading HN isn't helping with that.
Perhaps a solution.
I would like to have the option of reading the highest rated article of the day. Just one article on the page. The 'active' page has a lot of articles. I just want one article. Period.
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.
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?
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?
The ability to tell how you are logging in and request lost login information.
For example, I think I used OpenID to log in, but I might have used Google instead. I don't know which. I tried to log in from home, and I got the cryptic "Bad OpenID error". I don't know if this meant OpenID was down at the time, or that I was using the wrong provider. There was no way to request an email with my login credentials, not even to my already entered email address.
Even from my work machine, where it remembers I am logged in, I cannot tell if I have a real account or if I have used one of the many OpenID providers. So I still don't know if I'll be able to log in when I get home.
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.
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.
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...
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?
I would like the ability to save stories in situ. But, most of all I would like for all of our comments to be saved. Unless I missed the next button, I noticed that only relatively recent comments are stored.
Thank you for expanding the volume of posts displayed. Previously, you only displayed about 200, which meant that the user would probably miss some postings unless he or she consulted the site twice a day or so. By displaying many more "historic" posts, the user would have the assurance of not missing posts if he or she did not consult the site for a couple of days. Thanks again.
Thank you for expanding the volume of posts displayed. Previously, you only displayed about 200, which meant that the user would probably miss some postings unless he or she consulted the site twice a day or so. By displaying many more "historic" posts, the user would have the assurance of not missing posts if he or she did not consult the site for a couple of days. Thanks again.
Anything that appears after two newlines and a blank space is treated as code, till there's a line that doesn't begin with a space. This is like the markdown convention, but you don't have to use four spaces; one will do.
Incidentally, the code above tells me the number of nodes in the code tree of a file. Not just leaves, which would be
(len (flat (readall (infile file))))
but interior nodes as well. To me this is the best measure of how long a program is. I used to go by lines of code
(def codelines (file)
(w/infile in file
(summing test
(whilet line (readline in)
(test (aand (find nonwhite line) (isnt it #\;)))))))
but I found this was encouraging me to do the wrong things.
(This kind of test matters because I'm constantly trying to make news.yc shorter as a way of pushing functionality down into Arc.)
Here's trav, btw:
(def trav (f base tree)
(if (atom tree)
(base tree)
(f (trav f base (car tree)) (trav f base (cdr tree)))))
It traverses a tree, doing something at every node. So e.g. CL copy-tree would be
If you're wondering how the second argument to trav in codetree could be 1, it's because a constant when called as a function simply returns itself. This turns out to be quite handy.
I like the abbreviations you're using. "w/" in particular is extremely readable. And who wouldn't love a function call (isnt it #\;) in real code. #\; looks a little bit like Perl walked into the middle of your Arc program though.
I'm no lisp hacker, so that part stood out to me as particularly hard to understand in comparison to the rest of the code which was perfectly clear to me. I had to re-read it a number of times to figure out what it meant; obviously, if I was at all familiar with lisp I would have had no trouble with it.
Is Arc going to support concurrency and/or manycore systems?
The original writing(s) on Arc assumed a free lunch that would continue for decades (justifying a lack of emphasis on scalability and efficiency in implementation, I thought), which already seems kind of naive. You can already buy 8-core systems from Apple, mang. It's the future.
It has threads and a way to say a chunk of code should be executed atomically. No more than that at the moment. Nor is there any explicit notion of a processor. I'm not sure how that will turn out.
I think that's all you need for version 1.0. All the bleeding-edge concurrency abstractions like software transactional memory are only that: abstractions. Henning is right that they're going to become increasingly important in the future, but as long as you have threads and atomicity as building blocks, you should be able to do all the rest in the macro system.
Just make sure that some concurrency package eventually becomes a de facto standard. Getting C libraries that use different threading implementations to interoperate is a nightmare, and I'd hate to see Arc go the same route.
In general, combining multiple packages that each attempt to perform concurrent operations is error prone, especially if they use locking. The STM papers make an interesting argument for why using transactions rather than locks as the typical concurrency primitive leads to concurrent programs that can be more easily composed.
That's why it's really nice to see that Arc has threads and an atomic-execution mechanism. GHC-style Software Transactional Memory would be a natural fit, and it seems to scale very well.
On that note, you might take a glance at the lightweight concurrency paper; it proposes a new concurrency runtime for GHC, basically moving most of the implementation into Haskell, with just a thin layer of primitives in the RTS. Interestingly, those primitives don't include locks, but instead a very minimal transactional memory.
In On Lisp, you mentioned that implementing continuations with closures via transformation to CPS could be accomplished by writing a code walker, but that this would be a "serious undertaking" in Common Lisp.
This struck me at the time and ever since as painful, but understandable. Macros aren't first-class objects in CL, so the code you're walking through could be very complex due to macro-expansion, and I could be wrong, but I don't remember if the resulting code would necessarily contain clues that tell us what macro generated it, etc.
Could one assume (and it is definitely an assumption, or speculation, not a deduction from what you've given us here!) that it would be much simpler in Arc? Say, a page or so of code?
I could make it as easy as I wanted to write a codewalker, by changing the language where necessary. But it's not a priority right now. I haven't been doing anything where I felt I needed a codewalker.
Hmmm. I guess I could also ask "What does readall do?" and go on speculating to myself, but the stuff above is what I really want to know. Once I've defined something (macro, function), what does it look like in Arc? Is its structure, either before or after macroexpansion, available to play cute little tricks with?
I'll stop asking questions now. I feel I'm reaching the limits even of assumption and might start getting silly. (For instance: "Could I write a function that let me select nodes within a loaded function using CSS Selector syntax?", but that's just silly so I won't ask it).
Sorry for asking obtuse questions obtusely. Let me try this way:
How much would codetree need to change to accept a function or macro as input instead of a file, and produce output that is similarly meaningful? (Not at all, a little bit, a lot).
Sorry again for poor question quality, and to harp on what increasingly appears to be an unimportant point.
I assume by taking a fn as input you mean taking a fn whose return values would become the input. That would not be hard, but the clean way to do it would be to modify read so that it could take a fn as an argument.
> constant when called as a function simply returns itself.
I thought a sequence at a procedure position acted like aref, e.g. ("abc" 1) => #\b, right? So the automatic promotion of constant to constant-function occurs only for non-aggregate types?
I love the idea of startups, but I've got the wanderlust. During the part of the year where I have net access, I watch ycombinator closely, and I'm not really hoping to see startup news.
Very Interesting ! - especially the idea of using a count of the parse tree to optimize the language. Can you tell us anything about how well (or if) Arc is converging to a potentially releasable state?
I'm assuming "it" is an implicit variable meaning the result of the last expression. I'm also assuming since you have "isnt" you also have "is" and it's used like this:
(when (and (regex-match "[0-9]" foo) (is it 4))
(print "it is 4"))
Does boundp exist in Arc, or are unset variables null? I've always thought making them null would make code shorter, though it might cause more problems than it's worth.
Since I haven't used a language where unset variables are null or tried to design one, I'll assume you're right. I haven't had to use boundp much in Lisp, but I've had to use its equivalents in other languages quite a bit when working on other people's code for money. I suspect that boundp showing up in code a lot is a sign of badness - most likely in the choice of variable scope. I'm not sure if leaving it out will encourage people to write better code or just write their own workarounds.
Edit: aand binding test results to "it" reminds me of Apple's Hypercard. I will read the entire thread carefully before asking questions next time.
It's even simpler than that. I changed function application so that if the first element of the expression is a simple type (e.g. a number), it just gets returned.
That's cool enough. Though, potential spot for allowing subtle bugs? If I'm tossing around what I believe is a function (but instead happens to be a simple type, maybe even like #f or something), when I apply it I'd prefer to get a runtime error instead of a silent value return.
Having a more dense language inevitably means that more programs turn out to be accidentally meaningful. If the power of a programming language is the inverse of how long programs are (which is the best definition I've found so far), you can't make a language more powerful without the space of meaningful programs becoming denser.
Having a more dense language inevitably means that more programs turn out to be accidentally meaningful. Since Arc is designed to be an LFSP, that trade-off is worth it.
I have some questions about arc if you don't mind :)
Why 'whilet instead of 'while and why 'aand instead of 'and?
I thought one of your aims was to produces a minimal set of "axiomatic" operators (functions, macros, special forms) which gave the maximum utility. So couldn't these be generalized into a single operator?
Also, isn't ")))))))" overkill for such a simple function, Can reader macros be defined within lisp? (like if you wanted to make } close all parenthesis up to the top level for example)
They're different from while and and: whilet is a combination of while and let that binds its first argument to the result of the test. aand binds the result of successive tests to "it" for use in succeeding tests.
))))))) isn't overkill to Lisp hackers. Lisp hackers
read code by indentation and rarely notice the parens, especially terminating ones. There have been dialects (Franz Lisp) that used ] to close off all open parens, but it would be a waste to use up a good char like ] to fix a non-problem.
I expect that ] to close all open parens would lead to code that is even tighter jammed to the left margin. I like that I feel comfortable writing nested code in Lisp, and if I was always looking for somewhere to put a ] I'd be tempted not to write nested code, and hence start leaking private identifiers.
Arc has a bunch of iteration constructs. It's iteration-friendly. Most previous Lisps have been ambivalent about iteration, because their designers didn't like side effects.
The usual Lisp do macro, for example. What a wretched bit of language design. Even now, whenever I encounter one, I have to stop and translate it in my head. Plus it can be very verbose. The reason do is so bad is that whoever designed it wanted to make it as functional (in the no-side effect sense) as possible. But sometimes side effects are just the right model.
BTW, there is a do in Arc. It's the new name for what used to be called progn. (It's surprising how much better that little change makes code look.)
Does Arc have an API for iterating across general types of data structures? The classic example is lists and arrays; in Common Lisp, supporting both can be a hassle and the language itself seems ad hoc when the issue arises. MAP supports both, but MAPCAR doesn't; the LOOP macro has seperate "IN" and "ACROSS" syntax, and no (standard) way to extend this to user-defined data types.
Arc seems to take a very implicit approach to things - rather unlike Python. I haven't written anything non-trivial in Python, but it looks like the problem with the list formatting operator is that it's an infix operator that depends on similar looking characters (paren and square bracket) for its syntax. I think it might be less confusing as a function or method:
Looking at it on the screen, making it a method call looks far less confusing. Arc treating constants and sequences as functions doesn't seem like the same kind of thinking to me.
This will eliminate the confusing difference in the treatment of of tuples and lists when formatting a string. I think it's more clear, although I imagine some people will complain that "format" takes longer to type out than "%".
Perhaps I should've elaborated a little. Here's a follow-up that I posted on reddit:
both of them violate the user model in subtle ways[1]. Most people don't expect numbers to act as functions. If a bug crops up because of it, more than likely they won't check to see if that's the problem. Again, I'm not against brevity. Just don't make functionality implicit in situations when the programmer isn't expecting it. If you use it so much, use a symbol prefix like `--I don't care. Just make it explicit.
In python's case, it's because it treats tuples and lists differently. Tuples and lists are almost always identical in python. The user's assumption is that they will also be identical in this case, when in fact they aren't.
[1] User interface design is surprisingly helpful when designing programming languages. It's fairly obvious why, but most people don't realize it.
Arc is supposed to be a LFSP. Smart people adjust their user model to the tools they have available (right?), so it's at least consistent with Arc's design principles.
It's not the choice I would've made - I tend to agree with you that "explicit is better than implicit". But languages all have to make certain assumptions about who their users are (same with UIs, really), and this design decision is consistent with Arc's previously-stated design philosophy.
As far as you're thinking in procedural mind, probably there seems to be a big difference between constants and procedures (functions).
Once you are converted to functional mind, difference between a constant and a function that returns a constant is very subtle. When you use combinators a lot, you no longer think functions as something "invoked" or "called" in the similar sense as in procedural languages.
A possible pitfall in this case is that Arc is dynamically typed language. I usually program in Scheme, but when I'm passing function-returning-function-returning-...-functions around a lot, sometimes the 'one-function-level-off' error becomes hard to track down. Implicitly promoting a numeric constant into a constant function possibly delays catching this bug (since it masks the function level difference) but I doubt that it makes situation much worse. I think optional type declarations and type inference would be a lot of help.
It's not really a procedural vs. functional distinction - I'm fluent in Haskell and had the same initial reaction as cwarren. Rather, Arc is "weakly typed". The same bit of program data can be interpreted as different types depending upon the context where it's used. (This is distinct from strong-but-dynamic-typing like in Scheme or Python, where you have to explicitly convert between types.) It joins the club of Perl, PHP, and assembly in this regard.
I mentioned elsewhere on this thread that I think this is the right design decision given Arc's design principles, but that those design principles are flawed. In my experience, bugs resulting from implicit coercions are rare, but they're also really difficult to track down. That was a major reason I switched from PHP to Python.
OK, I stand corrected. Statically-typed minds also frown on this. It might be only Lispers that feel differently (after all, they've been conflating an empty list, a boolean false, and a symbol NIL and insisting it's the right thing).
>User interface design is surprisingly helpful when designing programming languages.
I don't know why this is surprising (though I don't dispute that most people find it so). I think both Python and Arc pay a lot of attention to this principle, though their philosophies on the subject are quite different. I agree that allowing constants to be called as functions could be a source of bugs. It also seems like it could be, as PG says "quite handy". I'll have to see for myself when Arc is released.
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!
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.
I really appreciate the procrastination preventer, but would like one change.
It is not enough that the reader does not spend too much time reading and commenting on Hacker News. Because willpower is a depletable resource, it is also necessary that the reader does not expend too much willpower resisting the impulse to spend too much time reading and commenting. When the "get back to work" page comes up, I find that I have to expend real willpower not to click on the override link (anchor) at the bottom of the page. To balance that change, you might simultaneously put a link to the reader's user page, so if he really needs to, he can go to his user page and turn the procrastination preventer off. (A logout link on the "get back to work page'd be nice too.)
PG - i use news.yc on my cell phone from time to time. it seems that something changed in the last few months that makes it quite unreadable at least on my phone - all the text is centered, not left-aligned at all. Perhaps the mobile browser doesn't support whatever CSS you're using to left-align things, and taking the <center> tags literally. I don't know how much of this was my fault either. :-)
The RSS feed must supply at least one day length of Hacker News. I live in middle east and maybe because of the time difference, I can not get the RSS feed of the night before, into my FeedReader and to see those missed news I have to visit http://news.ycombinator.com just to browse those news that I have missed in my FeedReader.
So the coverage of RSS Feed must be longer than currently it is. Preferably it must be at least one day (24 hours) long.
An RSS feed which takes me to the comment page of the submission.
Reason being that I like to use live bookmarks in Firefox, and the RSS feed which goes directly to the submitted link means if I want to read the comments left by HN users, I must go to HN's homepage to look for the article, and then click on comments.
Which is a lot of work compared to clicking on the live bookmark entry, then opening up the submitted webpage (in a new tab) from the submission's comment page.
I'd like to be able to login from my G1. It seems like it works, but the session doesn't want to stay active. When I upvote something it calls for a login, and then upvotes the item, but then I'm no longer logged in.
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.
When I add a comment the edit link expires after a certain amount of time but I can still edit the comment (in a roundabout way). This is more of a bug than a feature. There is a hole that allow people to edit comments even after the link has expired and even thought the edit link no longer appears.
When submitting a form (like editing a post), my reflex is to hit tab and then enter, since this exits the textarea and then immediately submits. However, where the help link is now, this causes me to be sent to the Help page each time. This is a minor thing, but I think Hacker News should model usability and move the help link to after the submit button (or set the tab index on the submit button).
When submitting a form (like editing a post), my reflex is to hit tab and then enter, since this exits the textarea and then immediately submits. However, where the help link is now, this causes me to be sent to the Help page each time. This is a minor thing, but I think Hacker News should model usability and move the help link to after the submit button (or set the tab index on the submit button).
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...
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.
As posted in another thread: Please add a view of only startup / site review threads.
Also please change the way 'threads' view is sorted to bring the most recent thread to the top, meaning my most recent post in a thread of comments rather than my most recent root comment.
Please move the comment form to the bottom of the page.
It frees up space at the top of the page for already posted comments and It would encourage reading or at least skimming through previous comments before adding a new one.
Not sure if this has been asked before, but I'd like to see a feature that alerts us whenever someone either 1) posts a reply to a submission we made (should be optional) and 2) posts a reply to a comment we made on any submission (again, optional). An "alert" can either be an email or a message indicator on the site in the top right corner.
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. 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 :)
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?
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 :)
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
I read Hacker News via the RSS feed in Google Reader.
Looks like the comments link disappeared yesterday.
Not sure if Hacker News changed or Google Reader changed, but I think this can be fixed by putting the comments link inside a <description> element in the HN RSS feed.
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.
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)
To prevent any abuse to the story's title... why don't you make a curl/wget request to the URL that a user is submitting, and get the title of that URL/page automatically?
So... user won't have any control over the title when submitting a link.
In fact I need this feature.. because I am tired of copying the title of the story that I submit! :(
What do you think?
Hey,
This story has more than 660 comments on it, it takes many seconds to load, and it does not load completely!
I can't see the whole comments...the page stops loading!
Why don't you devide the comments to several pages? So you would display something like 100 comments per page.. and you click next to display the next 100, if any!
That would be better... page would load faster... and things would be fine!
Simple item-based (hackers who upvoted this article also upvoted...) and/or user-based (hackers who upvoted similar articles to you, upvoted ... ) recommendations would be cool to see on HN, possibly as a way to access (relatively) older content that one might have missed. this assumes people are actually away from the site long enough to miss something -- unlikely. addicts!
Disable the use of "pre" tags or enforce maximum line lengths for "pre" sections on comment threads. Long "pre" lines widen the entire page width so you have to keep scrolling right and left to read. In addition to accidental problems, you might also run into problems with trolls.
The other post gives a nice example of where the problem actually occurs. Note that contrary to what the other item says, the issue isn't actually "code" tags per se, but "pre" tags.
Bring back down arrows on story submissions, but instead of voting the story down like before, enough down votes would show the community disagrees with that type of submission.
I didn't say the opinion, I said the type of submission. Also, the story and points would continue to appear unaffected.
What's going on with the hostilities on this site for the past two days? You could have easily said, "I have another idea about how this could work" with your link.
Hey, relax, I wasn't being hostile, just pointing out that the feature wasn't useful. The only thing the feature would accomplish is adding bias to a submission. If someone sees that the community disagrees with a submission, they're more likely to think of the submission as "bad" before they read it and not upvote it (and probably they're more likely to downvote it). That will be directly reflected in the comments, causing someone who had nice things to say about the submission to not comment lest his karma take a nosedive.
Unless you're talking about a whole "category" of submissions, in which case I have no idea how to divide submissions into different types.
Oops! I'm sorry for the confusion. I originally wrote that only moderators would see the flagging, but when I edited the post, I lost that part of it. No wonder you hated the idea so much.
As for what I meant by "types of submissions", I had just seen an "ask YCNews" article about republicans and democrats make the front page, that I hoped to silently vote down. I came up with my idea and added this comment (correctly) to the feature request thread, instead of below the parent, but the fact that the idea lost its context escaped me at the time.
Broken Links: There are many older links in the comments in the form of http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=<num>; which returns an error (like the many comments on this page).
Those old links really should be transparently re-mapped to /item?id=<num> instead.
A setting in my profile which specifies the maximum width a line of text can be. Reading the long lines is annoying, but i like to keep my browser maximized for other purposes.
I second the idea that the RSS needs a way to be more filtered to the quality articles.
Also, having something more than just a title and link in the RSS feed would be nice, but I suppose that you don't really have summaries anywhere yet anyway.
Perhaps you could include the points in the title of the RSS feed entry? Google Reader seems to allow RSS feeds to update already sent articles, I dunno if other RSS readers support that well though.
As far as I can see, no one has asked this before. It would be /really/ nice if I could subscribe to an RSS feed of stories that has earned a certain amount of points, for instance 30. That way I most probably wouldn't receive pointless news about how facebook should look like.
Edit: Btw, what about including a point link in the feed, it's not like you're earning money by ads anyway. Thanks for a nice service!
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.
Could you add a media type categorization to the submit page? I'm on a work computer without sound. Would be great if I could pass over the video and podcast links and only go to the blog/news stories. Nothing fancy like a filter - maybe just some radio buttons on the submit page for text|video|sound| that would appear in the listing.
When posting a reply to a comment, have the page center on your new post via an #anchor. This refreshes the other reply links on the page and makes it easier to find your place again on the page.
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.
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?
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.
I'd like a link to any replies people make to my comments. Like the red envelope in reddit. I sometimes make comments asking questions or simply brain-vomiting and would like to know what people's reactions are.
This site seems restful, but the more link doesnt act so. My typical use case on n.yc: rt click-open new tab on interesting posts on the main page, read through each new tab, then return to n.yc, and click on more to get to the next page (i visit irregularly, there're more'n one page of posts on some days). its probably half an hour or so when i return to click that more link, and its gone by then. irritating.
none of the other news sites have this problem. you're a news site, not an application; act like one.let me flip my page without have to buy the paper all over again.
ps: i see someone has raised the same concern wrt posting, but my use case is even simpler and just shouldnt happen.
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.
A way to find all your comments that are above or below (> >= < <=) a certain karma value. Or at least, a way to see all your posts that have less than 0 karma.
Recently I have seen the proportion of weak submissions become very high, high enough that I think a down vote arrow for submissions to help weed out content would be beneficial.
I would like to see the following recurring problem fixed: when adding a comment, once one hits the submit button, the app just hangs, then displays a blank screen
Karma should be a function of whether highly rated posts (either submissions or comments) also have highly rated responses. This would encourage good dialogue and minimize the influence of anonymous knee jerk voting.
I guess hackers shouldn't fat-finger or forget their passwords once creating an account, but I'm pretty sure some user named 'dowski' did just that. Maybe he's not a real hacker, but he'd like to login again. So I'd like to request a reset password feature or something.
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.
I think a formatting cheatsheet would be quite useful. I was just commenting a few minutes ago, and I wanted to put some rather large URLs in my comment, but I couldn't figure out the markup to link a text string to the URL. (It's just occured to me that perhaps I should have just tried HTML. If that's the case, I'm stupid.)
Reddit just added a feature that puts a dotted-line box around the headline you just clicked on, to make it quicker to find the headline to either up or downmod or comment on when you return to Reddit after reading the piece.
A nice feature which would encourage interaction after reading pieces.
I could not find a place where I could provide feedback with respect to your rss feedback. It returns text/html rather than text/xml which results in chrome misbehaving (adding all elements to <head> tag)
1. Search function, so i can search for a story-- over time, not just on a single page
2. please explain how the point system works. do the points go with the author or article,and how do some articles have more than others?
RSS feed that sorts by age, not popularity. The current RSS feed is all sorts of chatty, showing me a ton of repeats. Its annoyance factor is about to eclipse its usefulness for me.
If what I'm looking for already exists, I can't find it.
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.
+ collapse threads
+ passwd recovery
+ search
+ ability to bookmark interesting articles/posts
+ rss/per user subscriptions
+ rss subscriptions for the different lists
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.
Rate limit down (and up) voting, so you can't vote on a bunch of stuff very fast, but you won't notice the rate limit if you are reading the stuff you vote on.
0) API
1) obfuscate email addresses in comments
2) an effective way to enter code in comments and submissions and have it render nicely (this is HACKER news, right?)
Without "mark all unread articles as read" (per-page, say) the flood of articles is unmanageable without reverting back to an rss reader. Yet doing so adds a level of indirection that removes any impulse to rank items, diluting the quality of the article ranking .
Please, I love this UI. Just please add Mark as read/ignore all unread articles on this page
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.
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.
Can the RSS feed have a link to the yc comment thread as well as to the submitted story ?
Often I find the comment threads a lot more useful than the story itself.
Please add item summary abstracts (or better yet complete text) to your RSS feed. Publishing headlines only doesn't convey enough information to decide whether the article is worth clicking through to.
A phoenix-like quality where ongoing arguments are pushed up according to popularity ... or at least featured on the side in a box somewhere, like, "most active discussions".
I'm enjoying using news.ycombinator.com, but I fear it will eventually suffer the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. The problem on the internet is a lack of scarcity. I'm beginning to think the only way to really solve the problem is through submitter fees. Without fees, I fear it will turn into a self-promoting free-for-all.
Think about the problem in terms of email spam. If email cost $0.25 to send, the spam problem would be gone. If a submission to Digg cost $10, their spam problem would mostly go away.
When everything is free, it's just one big race for the bottom. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
Think about the incentives you are creating. This fee would just get written into the contracts of viral ad companies, while enthusiastic users would be deterred by the psychological barrier of spending money to do something that feels like just saying "hey guys look at this".
Can you link the RSS item to the HN page rather than the submitted story? (e.g. see reddit)
By linking to the story and not the HN post, when following the link one has lost access (like a dangling pointer) to the comments. Currently I must mouse-click the "comments" link in the RSS item instead of using my RSS reader's ability to follow the link, which is a PITA.
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).
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.
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.
It would be great to have a RSS for the saved items. Just to aggregate them in FriendFeed.
If it is already possible, I'm sorry, I don't have found it.
Please add some text in the body of the RSS feed. All I see is a subject line and an empty body. Sometimes that's not enough to determine if the post is interesting enough.
I find it totally confusing as to how to post a comment. You really need to have some instructions, it is completely unobvious. I ended up posting the same thing three times because the comment never seemed to show up and then deleted the second and third ones.
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.
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 . . ."
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
copy google reader....except don't delete things I haven't read that are 2 weeks old, and allow me to mark all items unread in a feed I just subscribed to...so I can read old posts when I have time....
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.
In particular, simply adding the "title" attribute to the HTML "a" tag is enough for many browsers to display a description on mouse-over (i.e. no JavaScript magic required).
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.
Man, I know there was an uproar when all PDFs were sent to scribd... but having a feed reader link randomly link to a PDF is really obnoxious. For some reason, those links in google reader decide to embed acrobat, rather than opening in sumatraPDF like all my other PDFs.
Can the headline at least warn you? Or link to the comments, and include a PDF link in the body?
A phoenix-like quality where ongoing arguments are pushed up according to popularity ... or at least featured on the side in a box somewhere, like, "most active discussions".
that's more of a bug (or a misunderstanding on my part..) - if I try to upvote an entry without being logged in, HackerNews thinks that I already voted for it once I log in.
Not sure I've parsed your grammar correctly, but rewarding the community for participation by letting them downvote only when they reach 20 karma is a good thing.
Also, downvoting past 1 karma in general is a bad thing. It adds bias to the comment for future readers.
It really seems like downvoting in its current form is fine, and if any changes need to be made then capping downvoting at 1 karma might be a good idea.
You mean down-voting past 1 points? Why it add bias for future readers?
I also don't see why you need to reward the community. The right to down vote is not different from the right to up vote, and any user should have it. Up vote is simply "I want more of this", and down vote "I want less of this".
The same machinery used for up-votes of bad links can be applied to down-votes of good links, so you can protect the site from general stupidity.
Well, when you downvote, you're really saying "The community should have less of this", not "I want less of this". Karma is global, not different depending on which user looks at it.
Therefore, if the community has deemed a comment as stupid (karma < 1), any future readers will read the comment through tinted glasses. But wait a minute, the community really hasn't said that. It was only one or two users that did.
Let's reexamine the purpose of karma on a comment. The purpose is not simply to punish the poster of a comment if it gets downvoted. It's to move the noise down to the bottom of the thread, where it can be ignored.
So I propose an alternative: Let silly comments stay at the bottom with one karma point, and encourage users to upvote more interesting comments higher. This way, users won't be biased against any comments (They won't know if a comment has been downvoted because it might simply be that no one has upvoted it) and the noise can still stay at the bottom.
The problem is that each vote change the number of points, so if you happen to be the first down-voter, it will become zero. But if another user up-voted the same item just before you, then your vote change nothing.
I seems that reddit solved this problem by not showing the number of points for new messages.
There could be a "new" status, marked in a special way, which explain why you vote it not showing. After enough users voted, and using the editor vote to change the weight of other votes, move the item to voted status, and show its point count.
when creating an account, please have a second password field for confirmation. Without that, it is far too easy to fat finger the password when creating an account.
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.
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>
What about a help page with current and in progress and rejected features? (give us a wiki and we'll write it)
I wish a way to sort|filter comments by points, date, etc. exists, but I don't know if I'm the only one. I've tried to search in this thread but I've found nothing looking for "filter" as searching by "points" is impossible (well, possible but futile)
currently working on my own reader and it looks like this is not implemented: so i need to parse the feed every time, instead of fetch from the db when etag is unchanged.
