"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!
Specifically I would like an RSS feed for individual users so that if I like all the links submited by a particular user I can follow them easily.
I've just made a realy quick and dirty bookmarklet. It's only tested in firefox 2 and it's not quite how I would like it to work but it's a start. I'll hopefully update it later to work better.
Just add the following URL as a bookmark:
javascript:(function(){var d=document;var b=d.body;var c=b.insertBefore(d.createElement('center'),b.firstChild); var dv=c.appendChild(d.createElement('iframe'));dv.id='ifrm'; dv.height='30%';dv.width='100%';dv.src='http://news.ycombinator.com/submit'; d.getElementById('ifrm').scrollIntoView(); })();
Let me know if it works.
we've all got more ideas than time, and it's a shame to let them languish in our individual imaginations. so how about creating a public clearinghouse for ideas where they're a) subject to reddit-esque competition, and b) "open source" -- available for anyone to pursue.
it'd be a meme pool.
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.
maybe the stories to open in another window also.
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.
As it stands, there's no real way to do it in a bookmarklet. Firefox's XSS security policies won't allow it.
Without ajax I'm sometimes discouraged from voting at all, because it's difficult to find my location after a refresh, especially on long pages.
It's one of the features of Slashdot that I like. The flip side of tags is that they make search a lot easier to implement.
1. Lack of focus and quality:
In my experience, users frequent a site because it has quality content and they leave when the quality of the content declines. Digg and more recently Reddit, are experiencing a loss of focus and quality and as a result are losing their initial users. Diggs quality is so bad it is now pointless to read and much to my chagrin, Reddit seems to be following suit. Reddit seems to be drowning in a rising tide of noobs. Apparently, there arent enough old users around to down-vote the crap posted by the noobal hoard. From a quick read of comments, it seems many long-time users are angry and feel disenfranchised. Its because of this that those users whose content made Digg and Reddit popular in the first place are now leaving those sites and taking their great ideas with them.
2. No troll guards:
Nothing poisons an online community quicker than a few nasty trolls. Another one of the reasons that Im pulling away from Reddit is because it is getting mean. Both the links that are posted and the article forums are being destroyed by trolls stomping around unchecked. I hope Reddit can fix this problem. If not, Im going to stop spending my time there.
The impression that I get, Paul, is that your goal is to make this YC News a start-up news site and a community of potential founders; not simply another social news site. The only way that I can see to maintain quality content and to filter out the trolls is to institute some form of moderation. Straight democracy leads to anarchy; thats why I think a news site needs to be a republic. I dont think, by any stretch of the imagination, that Slashdot is perfect, but they do have a system where moderators are selected from heavy and moderate users on a rotating basis. The system filters out new and spam accounts and gives preference to high karma users. It seems to keep the trolls in check. It also encourages people to take more ownership and to participate in the community.
Slashdots FAQ explains their moderation system here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520
There is also a brief discussion of their anti-troll rules here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm2000
Thanks for setting up the site. It scratches an itch that Ive had for a while.
1. A lack of focus and quality in the content. 2. No troll guards.
1. Lack of focus and quality In my experience, users frequent a site because it has quality content and they leave when the quality of the content declines. Digg and more recently Reddit, are experiencing a loss of focus and quality and as a result are losing their initial users. Diggs quality is so bad it is now pointless to read and much to my chagrin, Reddit seems to be following suit. Reddit seems to be drowning in a rising tide of noobs. Apparently, there arent enough old users around to down-vote the crap posted by the noobal hoard. From a quick read of comments, it seems many long-time users are angry and feel disenfranchised. Its because of this that those users whose content made Digg and Reddit popular in the first place are now leaving those sites and taking their great ideas with them.
2. No troll guards: Nothing poisons an online community quicker than a few nasty trolls. Another one of the reasons that Im pulling away from Reddit is because it is getting mean. Both the links that are posted and the article forums are being destroyed by trolls stomping around unchecked. I hope Reddit can fix this problem. If not, Im going to stop spending my time there.
The impression that I get, Paul, is that your goal is to make this YC News a start-up news site and a community of potential founders; not simply another social news site. The only way that I can see to maintain quality content and to filter out the trolls is to institute some form of moderation. Straight democracy leads to anarchy; thats why I think a news site needs to be a republic. I dont think, by any stretch of the imagination, that Slashdot is perfect, but they do have a system where moderators are selected from heavy and moderate users on a rotating basis. The system filters out new and spam accounts and gives preference to high karma users. It seems to keep the trolls in check. It also encourages people to take more ownership and to participate in the community.
Slashdots FAQ explains their moderation system here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520
There is also a brief discussion of their anti-troll rules here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm2000
Thanks for setting up the site. It scratches an itch that Ive had for a while.
Also, I need the "save link" feature.
Good site so far.
In my mind, however, what would be more useful for us budding founders is a place where we can share our ideas and projects in their early embarrassing states. It would be nice the be able to get feedback right at the beginning when I have only the the vaguest idea, and then to be guided by feedback as the project develops and matures. I would not be comfortable to share my pre-pre alpha project on reddit. And people would not be interested.
I believe that the search-space is too great that we should ever worry about other people stealing our precious idea. Starting from one point, different people would diverge and develop in different ways.
I don't know. But I would really welcome more openness. I think when an idea is interesting, and new, people would rather cooperate, and help along. Competition only happens (I hope) when people are chasing after the roughly same fad.
2. 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.
bookmarklet set (I often use my "reddit this" bookmarklet to get back to the comments page for an article I've clicked)
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.
Or simply an email or RSS notification... you wanted to spark the discussion, right? So give me a way of knowing if I've sparked anything!
Also, it'd be nice to see on the list pages something along the lines of "N comments (most recent M |minutes|hours|days ago)"
Or there could be a 'Top Discussions' side by side with 'Top' so there's a different filter for people looking for news (which you want to be recent and not obscured by long running threads) and people looking for discussions (which I'd argue will be more valuable if the popular ones are kept around for a while).
Open for abuse, most definitely, but if the purpose of this site is to build community, I think those topics that get discussed should be more easily accessed. Ideally people would appreciate some valuable discussion and upvote the thread, but this thread here is a perfect example of one that should probably stick around for a while, but has nearly 3x as many comments as upvotes.
Just throwing ideas out - tell me if I'm crazy.
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.
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.
Also, threads you comment on should show up in your profile so you can keep track of ongoing conversations.
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?
Dup detection seems brain dead to implement; is there a deliberate reason news.yc doesn't have it?
Also bug report. When I enter some characters in comments such as and it goes a bit funny.
Edit: correction, I guess the user pages show just submissions and not comments, for any user. So I guess I'm requesting comment history.
Hardly takes any time to plug the feed to FeedBlitz/FeedBurner.
Please add a link from a comment's permalink page to the page it was commenting on.
(It turned out to be a lot of work. The software used to think in closures and I had to make it be able to think in urls as well.)
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...
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.
This raises a quandry as to whether I should cross-post, or just move on and hope that the discussion happens in the one I picked.
(Note, this is the harder case, of near-dupes: the two articles are different, but \begin{precog} most of the discussion will be about the product they reference.\end{precog} Hence it is semantically reasonable to merge their comment threads.)
So, as a oneliner: add a way to merge duplicate articles.
I'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.)
[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."
Alternate row coloring would increase page scability for story listings.
-Zaid
* clean urls (because they are cool) ~ http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
- ie: '/comments/363' instead of '/comments?id=363'
- '/user/bootload' instead of '/user?id=bootload'
* ability to view posts by date
- ie: '/2007/mar/12' or '/2007/03/12' (eg if I use YYYYMMDD format)
* inline urls such as 'http://foo.com/bar' interpreted as links
- ie: http://foo.com/bar becomes a clickable url
* long urls are automatically converted to tinyurls
- noticed twitter doing this automatically now
You could also make a like/dislike bookmarklet the way reddit does...
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.
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.
Here is the problem I am facing. I m trying to post a link to http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/earlystagevc/2007/03/web_20.html - but when I submit, it takes me to another posting for which the URL is http://earlystagevc.typepad.com. So, baasically othe system thinks that I'm trying to update the old posting or something, and it ends up not showing my post.
Try submitting this.:
URL: http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/earlystagevc/2007/03/web_20.html Title: Web 2.0 Bust?
Thanks for answering my question, I noticed your comment http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9074 did not show in pg's comments page http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg
I assumed that comments displayed on the page are sorted by time
Normally I hate "me too" posts, but I feel this feature is important enough that I wouldn't want you to think other people didn't agree. Thanks.
Example:
I write a comment (1)
I write another comment (2)
I write another comment (3)
I write another comment (4)
Someone replies to (1)
I write another comment (5)
Current sort order:
5
4
3
2
1
- reply to 1
Proposed order:
5
1
- reply to 1
4
3
2
e.g.
url: http://howtowriteagoodemo.com/consider.html
title: How to make a demo that people will truly consider
description: Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.
This would result in --
<a href="http://howtowriteagoodemo.com/consider.html" title="Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.">How to make a demo that people will truly consider</a>
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.
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 understand that this is an error on my part, but that doesn't alter how frustrating it can be.
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).
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)
It might be nice to have a chronological sort, or maybe, for just blank url posts, to have the first comment always appear first.
-uses a monospaced font
-newlines get turned into <br> so that lines show up next to eachother
- < and > get html escaped
- extra spaces and tabs get turned into s to preserve indentation
Cheers, Ralph.
Cheers, Ralph.
Cheers, Ralph.
If this isn't a bug, the request is for a more transparent karma system.
Testing: italic bold [link](http://benhoyt.com/) -- hmmm, can you do named links?
I saw this feature on other social sites, it works pretty well.
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
:)
Paul, might you modify the submissions page to have some guidelines?
Point people to the Feature Requests thread as they clearly don't notice the link at the bottom of the page. Remind them that this is Startup News so it would be good if the posting was applicable. Tell them where to find Slashdot if that's what they want. And explain that they are not the only ones with RSS feeds so they don't need to just copy links from there to here.
Personally, I think news quality has degraded since karma came along. Some people are clearly keen to move up the leader board and starting a new thread is one way to do that. How about not rewarding karma for a thread's score? It can still be voted up by others to show it's interesting but karma must be earned by quality comments on the thread. Either that, or let us down vote threads to penalise non-applicable threads.
Better statistics may help show some light. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18085
I hear it is easy to do:
I tried to write 'cliché' (cliche with acute accent) and it appeared garbled in the forum. Some problem with unicode?
I have found out you can use escape characters here: cliché - cliché. I don't know if you intend this.
Some tests:
´a - á
´e - é
´i - í
´o - ó
´u - ú
^a - â
^e - ê
^o - ô
~a - ã
~o - õ
~n - ñ
¨i - ï
¨o - ö
¨u - ü
thorn - þ
eth - ð
,c - ç
Some tests of random html:
bold italics This Is A Big Header!
This may or may not show up between horizontal lines.
This is separated by nonbreaking spaces.
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.
Most relevant excerpt (MRE): "You can still see dead stuff if you set showdead to yes."
The rest of the comment for context: Your comment is still alive
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969
even though the post you commented on was deleted.
I just added deletion. When something is deleted, it really goes away. This is different from marking something as dead. You can still see dead stuff if you set showdead to yes.
Deletion is for submitters who change their mind; marking stuff as dead is for editors to do to spams and offtopic submissions.
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."
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).
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.
The current method seems to be posting your email address in the comments with something like, "Hey, email me about that . . ."
2. If no URL is given, prompt the user to submit a comment before creating the thread. If given, always display that comment at the top of the page.
(def codetree (file)
(trav + 1 (readall (infile file))))
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))))
(def codelines (file)
(w/infile in file
(summing test
(whilet line (readline in)
(test (aand (find nonwhite line) (isnt it #\;)))))))
(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)))))
(def copy-tree (tree) (trav cons (fn (x) x) tree))
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)
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.
))))))) 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.
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.
This would to some extent help facilitating potential co-founders -- since that's a constant them on this board.
-------------------------------------------------------------
This would to some extent help facilitating potential co-founders -- since that's a constant them on this board.
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.
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'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.
Why "atom" instead of "leaf"? Especially since you acknowledge it's a "tree"?
(isnt it #\;)
(when (and (regex-match "[0-9]" foo) (is it 4))
(print "it is 4"))
Unset variables are not null; that would lead to horrible bugs. But I don't think boundp exists either. So far I haven't needed it.
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.
Numbers _are not_ functions! This kind of attitude is what gets you python's list formatting operator:
>>> "%s" % ("a string",)
'a string'
>>> "%s" % ["a string"]
"['a string']"
I've been burned by that before, and I'm not exactly stupid.
(I don't think this posted the first time. Forgive me if this turns out to be a double.)
edit: Bah, I can't get this code to format properly. How's that for ironic ;)
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.)
list_format("%s", ("a string",)
list_format("%s", ("a string",)
("a string",).format("%s")
["a string"].format("%s")
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.
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.
Locks seem to be on their way out.
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.
"%s".format("a string") #yields: a string
"%s".format(["a string"]) #yields: ["a string"]
"%s".format(("a string",)) #yields: ("a string",)
http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/lw-conc/index....
(The paper is also notable for giving a complete operational semantics of the system it discusses.)
(But this stuff isn't in GHC mainline, and won't be, for now, because it needs serious performance work first.)
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.
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.
[item://363|Feature Requests] or similar.
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.
Often I want to jump to reading the thread on news.yc after reading the link itself, without having to find that story again on the news.yc page.
Regardless, you can get around the 100 character limit on news.yc by editing the title after you submit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless you're talking about a whole "category" of submissions, in which case I have no idea how to divide submissions into different types.
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.
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.
If the user enables this option, their email address is shown as an image (or otherwise spam proofed) in their profile to other logged in users.
E.g. you want to submit http://example.com/#part2
But first check if someone has submitted http://example.com/
Right now you either have to submit your less-preferred URL, or browse around and use google to see if the less-preferred URL has already been submitted.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137
where the author meant to use the asterisk as a multiplication symbol.
Or, if someone else sets up a wiki, could a link be added to it on the navigation bar?
We NEED search, unless you don't want to have a page that serves as reference for people, but only to make them consume articles.
Please, give us some way to be able to check past entries.
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)
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.
What's the point ? What is this suppose to demonstrate ?
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.)
If what I'm looking for already exists, I can't find it.
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.
Re #2, I always thought there was a unique url filter on submissions, but I've seen a couple repeats recently.
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.
http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
links to YC are like this :
http://news.ycombinator.comitem/?id=101703
must be a typo.
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.
The rationale is that to me, there's quite a difference between a comment that has 1 karma because there was no upvotes/downvotes and one that has 1 karma because there was 20 upvotes and 20 downvotes.
So, we could have something like:
5-3=2 points by username
Those old links really should be transparently re-mapped to /item?id=<num> instead.
Also, having the Y icon match the custom color would be great.
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.
Please, I love this UI. Just please add Mark as read/ignore all unread articles on this page
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.
This is claimed in the "Formatting fixes" entry in http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html , but doesn't appear to me now.
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.
Only external links: http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?-ask
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 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.
it's such a pain to follow a conversation when you must scan a sentence like "7 points by vikas5678 11 days ago" to know who is talking.
though if the reddit model is frowned upon; why not a one time undo instead?
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
Steps to reproduce:
go to your comment page -> edit comment page -> delete comment
Directs you to "No such item" after the comment is deleted.
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.
As much as we copy and paste snippets from articles around here, I think it'd really help readibility of posts and encouraging debating quoted points.
'cause feature requests go here.
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.
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.
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...
My browser keeps caching the "get back to work" maxvisit screen, resulting in "expired link" when you click on "override".
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156530
for an optional dark skin. Anyway. Here is the style made specifically for the Stylish addon in Fx, as per suggestion of PieSquared.
I've used Liferea for 3 years and AFAIR I didn't have any similar problems.
Reddit's feed is fine (in case you share the code - I'm not from around here...).
If one exists it should be more visible
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.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183903
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177270
I'll probably start submitting links twice from now on
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 greatly appreciate the ability to reset my password using the email that I entered.
PS Please send that email (My old account was D_T).
(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.
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.
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 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.
The way I envision it happening is you would have to go thru clickpass on ycfeed.com.
I believe this would make the discussion and exchange of ideas flow much better.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92629
Unfortunately, I don't think that fix ever worked in FF3 or IE7.
Also unfortunately, after some tinkering, I can't find an easy way in CSS to get the same effect in FF3 as in FF2.
The best I've achieved with a simple change is to cap the expansion with a 'max-width' on the PRE rule, like so:
pre { max-width:60em; overflow: hidden; padding: 2px; }
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.
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.
Titles are easily abused therefore It is not a good idea to vote based only on title without reading comments and/or a linked page.
It could diminish a number of bait-like sensational titles too.
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.
BTW, they don't get any Google juice, because links are all nofollow unless they have a certain number of points.
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.
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.
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.
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]
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=[URL's id]
And an annotation bookmarklet like:
javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/gotolink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22
Can the headline at least warn you? Or link to the comments, and include a PDF link in the body?
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.
google: create poll site:news.ycombinator.com google: search ycombinatorEdit: I just realized SearchYC has this feature. An advantage over feeds and Google.
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.
This comment was at -8. Its text was invisible in this thread.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277053
No problem. However, I expected to see the text when I clicked on the link for the comment. As it is, I can't metamoderate (by upvoting, disagreeing with the -8 if it was in fact unfair) or read an Evil Comment that spawned an interesting thread.
An option to turn off (or adjust) the fading/invisibility for negatively modded comments, or a default to show text when a comment's link is clicked, would leave the current system relatively unchanged but allow determined users to read the forbidden content.
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?
Example of broken HN page here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=279251 because of overflowing code here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=279640
Curiously, I could not duplicate on other comment threads on today's (08/21/08) front page.
IE 7, Win XP Pro, 1024x768, Start Bar on left side of screen.
edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282950 in the thread has a long blockquote.
Several times in the past week I have clicked on a thread, read the thread for comments, clicked the article link to read, clicked back, and then hit "reply" on a comment. Half way through formulating a comment I think "oh, I wonder if the article touched on $foo" and then have to either unwind the stack or open a new tab to news.yc and retrace my steps. Being able to control-click from the comment page would be ++handy.
Thanks for the site, really enjoy it.
So the coverage of RSS Feed must be longer than currently it is. Preferably it must be at least one day (24 hours) long.
Thanks a lot.
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.
Or is there a third-party technology that I'm missing that will solve that flaw?
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.
I would rather just be able to say "this person is rude and unpleasant, never show me their comments again".
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.
Putting in a link maybe called thread start and making it go to the beginning of a thread would be a good idea.
Example:
5 points by vaksel 2 days ago | link | thread start | parent | flag
parent brings you up one message, thread start would put you at the beginning of the thread.
Alternatively, an RSS feed of your "threads" page might work but I'd prefer an icon personally.
On a tabbed browser, a sequence of HN tabs looks like this:
(Y) Hacker News | Aa... (Y) Hacker News | Bb... (Y) Hacker News | Zz...
Where (Y) is the Y-combinator icon. So, I can see which tabs are HN, but I can't see what they are about (save for the 1st 1 or 2 letters of the title of the discussion, and a little browser-provided ellipsis).
If the "Hacker News |" was removed from the beginning of the title, I would still see that the tabs were HN, because of the YC icon. And I would also be able to see the first 15 or so characters of the title of the discussion, which would help the navigation.
For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446438 posterous.com -> tom.posterous.com
A nice feature which would encourage interaction after reading pieces.
Could you put 'up' or 'top' link at the bottom, next to 'More'?
E.g. each user would receive one "bigpoint" per week. The bigpoint could be given out to any story/comment and would count like 5(?) normal votes. Unused bigpoints should not accumulate (or only to a small backlog of maybe 2 or 3).
I imagine this might help to make the extra-ordinary content stand out more.
What do you think?
(attribute a title opstring)
(def byline (i)
(pr " by ")
(let u i!by
(tag (a href (user-url u)
title (string "karma: " (karma u)
" | created: " (text-age:user-age u)))
(pr u)))
(pr " " (text-age:item-age i) " "))
New users should be put on a waiting period, and/or need a minimum comment karma level, before being allowed to post.
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!
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?
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!
I want to see kind of analytical tool for my karma.. and see how I am doing!
Let me explain: Can you program a tool that would draw charts of your karma history... so you can see if your karma is raising or not? And it would be great if you can let the users choose to display their karma in specific dates!
There is something more advanced also... Can you analyze the topics that user is writing about that helped him in increasing his karma? Also recommend a stories for the user to comment on... that's related to the user's interested topics based on his/her previous comments.
I think this is hard somehow... because it needs so much of analyzing, data mining... and some logical factors to work with!
What do you think? :D
Just a message box that would appear on the page that someone replied to one of my comments.. and this message box should appear only when there are new replies... along with links to the specified comments!
What do you think? :)
Guidelines for comments shown beneath the "reply button."
Guidelines for submissions shown on the submit page.
We ( as synopsis authors ) would invent shortcuts for rating and summarizing the content that would fit to the right or be truncated. And when a user clicks on comments, the full synopsis is always at the top of the comments.
And maybe the descriptors that different users would implement ( like their own tags/ratings for the content ) would become unique to that user, eventually, and have contextual meaning to that author. Each synopsis author would have their own tags that they could reuse. Only people who subscribed to that author could see their synopsis so authors' silly or cryptic or worthless synopsis descriptors would not clutter HN readers' experience unless they subscribed to a particular s-author ( synopsis author ).
So each user could have a customized right-hand HN site by subscribing to other synopsis authors and each synopsis author would have their own ways ( tags, most likely to start ) for communicating concise summaries/likes/dislikes of the content posted on HN.
This is the thread that started this suggestion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503983
I wanted to move this thread here, since it is more appropriate.
You can make a karma threshold, to prevent/reduce abuse. Also you can let users have the option to enable/disable this feature.
http://mld.dreamhosters.com/hn.png
Basically, new links open up in an frame, with a slim Hacker News bar at the top. The idea would be that as you're reading an article/finished reading an article, you'll be more likely to vote if the button is right there, rather than if you have to go back to HN and search for the post.
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!
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>
<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>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.
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.
I created my account about 2 months ago, however when I go check my comments, I notice that I have comments made from more than a year ago.
I'm guessing there's someone else with an account named "lee" who closed his account?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280852
The other post gives a nice example of where the problem actually occurs. Note that contrary to what the other item says, the issue isn't actually "code" tags per se, but "pre" tags.
http://scotchi.net/2009/03/patch-to-fix-rss-feed-for-newsyc/
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.
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.
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.
If an user wants to enable his "wall" then he can add his contact info on the profile page e.g., http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=d0mine
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575855
to have the title for the site be user-configurable. That could be helpful for people who don't want to display a title of "Hacker News" on a work computer.
My friendly suggestion is that if we must change the name of the site, which I like just fine, it would be helpful to call it "Helpful News," so that all of us who are habituated to calling the site HN could continue doing that without confusion.
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).
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.)
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!
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.
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.
Only upvotes on comments and non-url submissions should count.
The two stories:
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.
But if someone gets high karma by writing an RSS reader and autoposter for TechCrunch, that doesn't mean their comment feeds would be more insightful.
IDK, maybe it's a bad idea. I just think it would be interesting to see average karma per comment post and read those people.
Perhaps a solution.
I would like to have the option of reading the highest rated article of the day. Just one article on the page. The 'active' page has a lot of articles. I just want one article. Period.
What do you think about that idea?
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.
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 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.
Because people are able to edit their comments after you have upmodded them, the comment may change so that you no longer agree with them.
Having this would allow people who edit their comments after gaining attention to be moderated in a more effective manner...
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think that would be super cool.
People who are not looking for a job are just not interested
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 week, it would be "erlang" and "_why"
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.
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."
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.
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.
(Personally, I'd be happy if I never have to see another Techcrunch link again.)
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.
convert -resize 57x57 favicon.ico apple-touch-icon.png
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.
This makes it easier to scroll past the end of the indented thread to find the next top-level comment.
- filter news by date - order by no. of comments - order by poster's rating
eg I want to see the most discussed stories of last week (yeah I don't have time to check HN every day, sorry!)
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.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=864911
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec...
There are quite a few questions I would of loved to post for general discussion. Alas the discussions are limited to the posted news item.
Perhaps adding a general/daily discussion form where users can talk about general issues would greatly improve the experience.
Keep it up Boris
So my new suggestion is to add an option to delete your own suggestions from the suggestions threads :)
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 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.
I assume that was your intention ?
This in turn will give the few people that are very active lots of voting power.
The karma here is not so much 'quality' (though that is a component) as much as it is an odometer.
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.
o Suggest users who upvote similar items.
o Highlight items that have been upvoted by
other users who upvote things that I upvote.
I've just started using the noprocrast function. I find the 'retry' link expires well before the 180 minutes of wait is up.
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.
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.
1. date/time or "minutes ago" of last comment
2. first 40 characters of that comment...
Most of the people I like to follow are already on the leader board. It sure would be nice to know who's on-line right now and what they're talking about without having to drill down 20 times.
Possible additional benefits of this enhancement:
1. People may take an extra moment or two to examine their comment's quality if they knew it would shortly be on a "master" page for all to see.
2. An additional route for people to join a conversation they're interested in.
>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.
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
1. You should be including a LINK element pointing towards your RSS feed in the page's HEAD so RSS-hip user agents can pick up on it.
2. Serve your RSS feeds with a proper mimetype. text/xml instead of text/html.
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.
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 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 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.
The situation is this: sometimes I open a number of pages in tabs when I am not signed in, then read and vote on them all. The first time I vote I get the login page and everything works nicely, but if I later try to vote again on a different tab that doesn't know I was logged in, I get redirected to a dead page instead.
Repro: 1. When signed out, open a couple pages in tabs. 2. Sign in on one of them. 3. Try to use an up arrow in the other tab.
You should end up on a blank white page.
Many threads on HN and elsewhere get burdened by 1:1 dialog that adds little or no public value. "Why am I being downvoted?" dialogs are one example.
I propose adding a "reply privately" function. A private reply is only visible to commenter and parent, and appears in-thread.
Effectively, this creates a new 1:1 communication channel, without having to add a PM engine, while preserving the message's context.
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.
Even better would be a "make public?" checkbox next to it.
Govind
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215
Simply compare the "title" field of the referenced page. If it matches, perhaps compare the domain name, ignoring any "www". Or perhaps not bother. The number of occasions the title matches when the page is different should be sufficiently small.
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.
fizzle more
EDIT: I put a space in between the url and the closing asterisk. I'm not aware of whether or not an asterisk is a valid character for url values.
Also, real-time updates in newcomments would be nice.
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 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.
Example - Open Source Open World: http: Comments: http:
Thought of this after watching a recent frontline: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/
One interesting thing that the creator of Second Life said: when discussions happen in a virtual work they are much more like real interactions. So if all HN discussions moved to 2nd life, that would help solve some of the issues with trolling, etc. This then begs the question: would other less drastic measures like avatars help?
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.
The site seems to be working better, though this may be seasonal, so thumbs up pg and rtm for recent changes.
And it would look just as nice on other platforms.
Over the last few days, I've looked for music/white noise that people listen to while coding, and this kind of discussion pops up now and again. It pisses off people who've commented on the older discussion, and possibly disenfranchises newer readers who see all the negativity on the repeat thread.
Net result: it's difficult to get a nice, complete list.
What's needed is a list of books/music/white noise sources/software tools/hardware/useful websites divided by topic/[insert stereotypical geeky obsession here] that people can upvote and comment their favourite.
My suggestion would be to scrape the past discussions on these topics and let the readers sort out the jumbled data, as a start. Crowdsourcing one of the brainiest audiences on the web, bound to work out.
Bonus for Paul Graham's wallet: more book sales.
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.
I generally have hacker news open in the background throughout the day. If I leave it for a while I inevitably get "Unknown or expired link" when next clicking on the "more" link at the bottom.
For example, (I assume this link will give the same result for everyone) http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=x4ipaJEME2
Why do the links expire? I'm sure there's a good back end reason but as a user it seems weird that the site dies if you ignore it for any length of time. Its like a Tamagotchi.
- Sorting posts. ie Say I want to view only posts from New york times.
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.
def _format_date(dt): """convert a datetime into an RFC 822 formatted date Input date must be in GMT. """
# Sat, 07 Sep 2002 00:00:01 GMT
return "%s, %02d %s %04d %02d:%02d:%02d GMT" % (
["Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri", "Sat", "Sun"][dt.weekday()],
dt.day,
["Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun",
"Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec"][dt.month-1],
dt.year, dt.hour, dt.minute, dt.second)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329998 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329090
Scrolling half way down makes it hard to see & read the comments.
Maybe a ajax thing that keeps the current comment scrolling with the page at the top.
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.
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.
-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 don't think adding downvoting to submissions will mean HN==reddit, but a solution for those that think so: have "flag" display the number of times something has been flagged and have this negatively affect page rank similar to downvoting.
Benefits:
-Adds the positive aspects of downvoting as mentioned below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366325
-Avoids downvoting submissions for mere disagreeance. Since the functionality is called "flag", rather than displayed as the complement to the upvoting action, it is explicitly only for objectable submissions and not because you simply disagree with something.
-Allows site to maintain status quo if moderators are busy/away. The site is self moderating.
-Allows better tools for moderators to solve problems quicker, for example they could filter submissions based on the ratio of flags to upvotes to see where their limited attention is needed.
-I don't think downvoting submissions with a karma prerequisite would be a major problem giving how well the comments system has worked. Set the karma requirement for flagging to same as comment downvoting could work.
-If you're still concerned about flag abuse of this new flag system, "flag (#)" would require the flagger to select a reason from a drop down-box of a limited lists of reasons that you decide are valid for flagging. This informs users of your desired direction for the community within an interface mechanic.
I think this is win win, it addresses the problem by simply expanding a current feature, but you probably have some ideas have your own in this area.
If someone's not allowed to vote, how about a little courtesy of not wasting their time on voting?
There should be a way to write a username and have it linkified. If I write @pg it should show up as simply "pg" and be a link to http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
Or something like that...
Text with asterisk
Code with *asterisk
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.
Edit: Also, it would give "n minutes ago" a reference point.
<a href="...">Facebook is using a trick to make people use faceb...</a>
Changing it to include the complete, uncropped post title would be a nice addition:
<a href="..." title="Facebook is using a trick to make people use facebook">Facebook is using a trick to make people use faceb...</a>
Then you could see the complete post name on hovering the link.
Hacker new site doesn't open in Firefox 3.5.9. Is this a known issue? The HTTP response headers seem to be the reason behind this bug. This is what the headers look like -
TTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: private
Connection: close
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Notice the missing "H" in the first line. Firefox fails to understand this response and dumps the entire HTML as Text. I saw this bug 3 weeks ago and am surprised that it hasn't been fixed yet.
- Avlesh (http://webklipper.com)
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.
Call it "tracking" or "following the user" if you will.
I'd love to click "follow" next to that comment. Then I want my view on hacker news to be heavily weighted by the mods from the people I follow (you could make it a mod on the normal ranking, like a reordering of the top stories). A friend comment view would be even more useful - like the thread view for any user, but collected among friends. A synopsis view of the comments without the full thread and only the first 200 chars of the comment would be easy to digest.
Generally I think the solution to making HN not suck is to let me ignore completely the parts that suck.
Otherwise, systems without Verdana installed show a serif font.
Thanks.
Sure would be nice to have a single page with everything saved right there. Then I could just search the one web page for what I'm looking for. I could also put these in a spreadsheet or database for future reference.
Also a more flexible layout, better suiting devices with limited screen sizes (read mobile, aka iPod/Pad/Phone) would be great.
forgetting a passwords happen, especially with remember password features in browsers as standard.
i'll just have to use this account until my next memory problem....when I will create wtf2.
Unless Hacker News has an (undocumented?) feature that lets regular posters / certain karma thresholds / whatever have a large or infinite number of votes, this appears to be a bug.
I'm running Firefox 3.6.8 on OS 10.6.whatever is latest.
Summary: Wired.com graph shows that while the web continues to grow (in terms of bandwidth consumption), it is not growing as fast as other internet services such as P2P and video and consequently has a lower overall % of traffic than several years ago.
So my suggestion is, add a new HN section called 'Summary' which finds all these comments (which will be recognizable by the 'Summary:' text at the start of the comment) and lists them in one place for quick reading.
Obviously the more people that do it, and know to use the same 'Summary:' convention, the better it will work. Bad summaries will be handled naturally by the downvoting in the original threads.
http://imgur.com/jAg1J.png from http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=n8uYJzau87
In the image, there are two identical items called "The Top Idea in Your Mind".
For example, the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem.
It's supposed to have an apostrophe in the word "Else's", that's how it is when it's first written. But HN removes the apostrophe.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363&user=pg
The URL truncator will append three periods (not a &helip; character) to the end of a URL. In some cases (say for a URL of 62 characters), the last character will be removed and replaced with three periods. This increases the total size of the URL text to 64 characters.
The algorithm appears to be
def truncate(word, postfix = '...')
if ((word + postfix).length > 64)
word = word[0, 64 - postfix.length] + postfix
end
word
end
def truncate(word, postfix = '…')
if (word.length > 64)
word = word[0, 64 - postfix.length] + postfix
end
word
end http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor#Quartz_Extreme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor#Quartz_Extrem...1. whether or not the page has already been submitted to HN
2. how many comments, if any, have been made in HN discussion about the page
My preference would be for a way to add that information to the page dynamically when the page is first loaded, on the server side, so that no client-side scripting (i.e. JavaScript) is necessary. If for some reason it is decided that it must be done with JavaScript, though -- well, I guess beggars can't be choosers, as they say.
As far as I'm aware, no reasonable way of doing this exists right now (short of something complex like automatically searching HN and screen-scraping). I'd really appreciate an API for this kind of thing being added to HN (and reasonably well-documented) so that I can make use of it on a site written in Ruby (not Rails, mind you).
If interested in updating your community features and overall style so more appealing and user friendly, please let me know. I would like to bid on the project and share my ideas.
A dupe made it through today with identical URLs; but a special character was URL encoded using 2 different capitalizations:
http://steveblank.com/2010/10/13/too-young-to-know-it-can%E2%80%99t-be-done/
http://steveblank.com/2010/10/13/too-young-to-know-it-can%e2%80%99t-be-done/
(There is an "E" that was capitalized in the first submission.)
http://works.example.com HTTP://does.not.work.example.com
When a submission gets flagged, a "reason" string is entered by the flagger. This could be done via javascript event binded to the flag link, or by redirecting to a "flag" page that gets the id of the submission being flagged. The flagger then either types a short string, or selects from a limited set of reason from a dropdown box. The reason string is then displayed at the top of a submissions's comment page when the flag is approved as [dead].
The reason string could be added in the title, appended to the byline, as an autosubmitted comment, or as a new heading... whatever is easiest to implement.
Ex. if submission X is [dead] and a user has "show dead" enabled, when they click on submission X it will now say "spam", "duplicate", "inflammatory", "automatic" etc.
This would prevent issues like: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801727 A post was most likely harmlessly flagged and [dead]ened for being a duplicate of one by a cofounder, but a user who saw it interpreted it as persecution.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748045
appears 3 times on the front page of the "ask" section (at least at the time this comment was posted).
It would cut down on the need for comments like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815316
I am proposing to change the comments page linked at the top-level menu to a ranking scheme similar to the one that ranks threads in a submission's comments page, but favouring recently posted 1-vote comments less.
Comments are more interesting than submissions in many cases. Such a page would support bottom-up (comment to submission) navigation on the site better. I know there are some features for bottom-up navigation like the on: feature on the comments page, but isn't very useful unless the comments are good. This would allow me to explore articles I would have never found to be interesting looking at the main page but when framed in the right context with an excellent comment would be very interesting.
The usage statistics of the top-level threads and comments links could support or reject a rethinking of the functionality that those pages provide.
http://pastie.org/pastes/1270964/download
It has already been reported in: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630931
1) I'd like to see what people I respect are voting for, in the hopes of finding things I otherwise would have missed.
2) I'd like to someday make a recommendations system that would work for HN, and starting now to create a corpus of permission-cleared votes would help if I ever get to it.
3) I think it might have a positive effect on social dynamics. While there is in theory greater potential for retaliatory downvotes, I hope that instead people would act more considerately if they felt that others could review their behaviour. I don't see any way to test this other than by trying it out.
I think this option would best be a simple checkbox on each user's settings page: "Make my votes visible to others". The votes would then be visible from a link on that page for others to view. Ideally, it would also be possible to view these from an item-centric viewpoint, accessible from the 'link' page.
If the idea were to catch on, I'd eventually like to see an 'Open' list, parallel to 'Classic', whereby one could view the entire site as it would appear if ordered only by users with their votes set to be visible.
Thanks!
[Originally here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878591]
[up] 3 points [down] by author n hours ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1917605
To encourage HN users to ship code, allow them to display an icon next to their user name once they have shipped their project. This would work on the honor system. To make the implementation simple, users can self-manage the icon. Perhaps a "ship" icon could be displayed that linked to the product if applicable.
This will help create a culture of "shipping" through a shame/pride/credibility/game achievement effect, as well as help users keep the HN addiction in check.
Background:
When one upvotes a comment or submission, the up-arrow disappears right away, but there is a bit of network lag before the upvote is actually sent to the server. On some networks, this lag can be significant. Lag on my network has caused me to sometimes upvote an item, close the window immediately, come back later, and then realize that the upvote wasn’t counted. This is more of a problem for submissions, where not only does the submitter not get credit, but the submission also fails to get added to my Saved Links page.
The only way to check whether an upvote has been received is to refresh the page, but that also has the effect of canceling any upvotes-in-progress that have not finished, and requires one to remember which item you upvoted.
My current workaround, after I upvote something, is to leave the tab open, view other pages for a while, and close the tab when I come back to it later. However, this has the disadvantage of me having to remember, when I return to a tab, whether I left it open because there was still something to read on it or simply because I was waiting for an upvote to finish.
Sometimes I read a really good comment and would like to save it to read again later, but there is no site function to do that. There is already a Saved Links page, so expecting me to bookmark every page I like can’t be a reason to not include this feature.
Upvotes/downvotes send conversational signals that incite responses, whether those responses have intrinsic value or not. So do critiques. Seeing the name of someone who just critiqued your comment in a list of your upvoters might neutralize some pointless flame wars.
To an extent, we already have this feature informally, because "I upvoted you, but..." has become an idiom on HN. I think it'd work better if it was automatic though, and it might incentivize "feel-good" upvotes.
After many years of enjoying Hacker News I now have a long list of great articles that I have liked, upvoted and in a sense 'bookmarked'. Right now, even though we can view these articles on the website, we can't download the list in any useful fashion or format.
Actually, adding RSS feeds to other pages like "best", "new" and the new function "over?points=" would be very useful as well...
A list of HN members with average karma scores over 6{arbitrarily selected} sorted by dates they joined with the earlier you join being the high up on the list you will be.
Also, a minimum time of a 100 days{arbitrarily selected} on HN before you can appear on the list.
Hopefully, it will motivate new members to contribute quality content given the possibility of early recognition.
Specially for jobs or networking purpose it would be really helpful to search posts by location.
Currently hacker news answers w3m's post request with this error message:
Post request without Content-Length.
This issue has also been reported on the arc forum: http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=4419
Fine if this is even just for high-karma users; but there has been some complaints about moderators going too far, and this would add some accountability.
Some of the top comments on these posts are simply giving the clickable link, which contributes nothing to the conversation. Why not allow links to be clickable in the text field and consequently get rid of all this "spam"?
E.g., if someone doesn't like techcrunch.com, they can add it to their blacklist, and they will no longer see techcrunch.com stories.
There's maybe a dozen sites (TC isn't one of them) which regularly appear on HN, and which I'd be happy not to see. But I know others don't feel this way about those sites. This seems like a relatively easy way of improving everyone's experience.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772650 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218455
Sorry, I realize this is not a feature request, per se, but I didn't know where/how to submit bug reports.
(See: I typed this, clicked "add" and was redirected to the login page. :))
I'm not asking for a personalized vote list though, everything should still be anonymous.
Further, what about an integrated keyword search and a simple duplicate check before a submission is posted? That would greatly improve things, at least those news-related.
Limit the number of links submitted per account per day to 1.
Why
Prevents spammers and karmafarmers from submitting the entire TechCrunch\Wired back-catalog at a rate of 25+ a day.
Further Analysis
Increasing the scarcity of a resource (link submission ability) will increase the value of items it is traded for (links). HNers value independent news related to code or unique analysis. HN already gets the independent submissions people want. They just die an early death on the new page due to overcrowding by links from webzines\newspapers with a profit incentive for maximum linkbaitery. This feature reduces the rate of dropoff for independent news.
5. Android’s OS is tougher to build on.
8. Building a “smooth” app on Android is harder.
THESE are the reasons I should build on Android? Am I being Punked!?
I think upvoting an article is similar to 'starring' it - and I often find myself wanting to return to interesting articles I've found via HN.
Every so often, people post good links with an anchor in the URL, just because they didn't notice it. It is almost never the case that it's done intentionally, so it would be nice if HN spotted the anchor and warned the user, suggesting to strip it from the URL.
Of late, we see lots of HNers complaining about kind of subjects being submitted and the high Noise to Signal ratio. Would it make sense to provide moderation ability to HNers with 10k+ karma and discourage such topics here?
maybe making it public would stop people from making repeatedly bad comments.
Sometimes, I read a comment that is either stupid, irrelevant or annoying in some fashion, and while they don't warrant a downvote, I want to rid my future reading experience on the thread from it. A Hide feature that remembers the decision like a flag or vote would fix that.
The Hide count for a comment could also be used as an extra variable to tweak HN's algorithms - such as where comments are displayed in a thread.
1) Revert to showing scores for top level comments. This will allow people to know whether the top-of-page responses are well-liked by the community, and how fast this approval drops off as one scans down the page. It will also privilege top level comments, subtly discouraging people from pinning their answer to the current top-of-page comment when it's not really a reply.
2) Keep hiding scores for replies (as it is now). This seems to be increasing civility, and discouraging quick quips. It might even make sense to discount the points internally, giving yet more emphasis to the top level. This emphasis is important because the top level dictates the overall position on the page (things move as blocks). Hiding the response points will also encourage people to vote up threads as a whole, which helps with the case of useful questions which lead to good answers.
3) Now that top-level is emphasized, add a 'fold' to the page. But instead of basing it on number of comments, cut off at a negative point level. As they currently do, downvoted items will migrate toward the bottom, becoming fainter as they go negative. But rather than eventually displaying a fixed negative number (-4), just put it below the fold and only visible with a 'show all' link. This will discourage trolling and piling on, as once a comment is below the fold it's unlikely to attract many additional viewers. And it will encourage others to 'clean up the page' if they feel their vote will have a clear consequence. Starting to fade at 0 and folding at -4 seems like a good start, but one could also fold earlier or even bring new unvoted comments in mid-fade.
I think this hybridized approach would be easy to try and has advantages over both individual systems. Thanks!
It would also be good to separate advice from news. Lots of popular submissions are industry gossip, but others are useful tips.
Would you like that as an addition to the book section already found in the Library page
http://ycombinator.com/lib.html
that is linked to from the bottom of the main page, or somewhere else?
I'd really like a rolling reader submitted list on the main page, but this is also good.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510757 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2511398
Besides, it looks like all you need to get "Green" certification is to pay the certifiers $10 / month...
Most of my downvotes tend to be in disagreement, whereas if I could disable it in my profile, I'd never be tempted to click that little arrow...
On a side note, I didn't want to do an "Ask PG" thread for such a small request, but this topic seems pretty dead. Last comment from PG in this thread was 1026 days ago. If you're still reading this but just in silence, any chance you'd reply to confirm that posting here isn't a complete waste of time? (Disagreeing with and therefore ignoring feature requests is perfectly fine, but if they're not getting read, this page might as well be deleted.)
It would also work for 'if you think this person is clever, you might like to read things posted by these others'.
Free SSL certs are available from StartSSL (https://www.startssl.com). If you need help setting it up, contact me. My rate is $45/hr at 30 minutes = $22.50.
In its current intended use, a reader has to poll the HN site for interesting topics. This is frustrating because it's not very efficient, unless you had advertisements on the site... This is a pull type of access to information.
The feature I would like is an information push option. It would be the possibility to subscribe to a digest with a point threshold I would specify. I would for instance specify a threshold of 100 so that every day I get a mail containing HN titles with urls of posts that passed 100 points.
A more Simple and efficient variant, from HN perspective, would be to provide an alternate display to new, like new50, new100 that is like new but shows only posts with more than 50 points or 100 points in the order it reached that threshold. This would be a way to get the best of HN without the unpleasant feeling I could miss any of them if I don't check the front page frequently enough.
Make it new+ new++ and new+++ with hidden point threshold values that you may adjust to get dayly, weekly or monthly ~40 best ranked posts holding on a page.
I love this site, and I like to read more than the 1st 100 posts. But by the time I get to the 4th page, the "more" link at the bottom has expired. To continue, I have to start from the beginning and quickly click the more link fast enough so that it doesn't expire.
That's just silly.
I frequently get "unknown or expired link" when clicking the "more" link after browsing to the bottom of the page. It's constantly frustrating.
If another page of links was shown to me, I'd be much happier. Just show the next page instead of an error. Just give me more links.
Splitting news.yc from the YC app, hours, etc. system might also be nice, so people can blackhole hackernews without losing YC functionality.
Reloading the front page will not show stories that I've deleted.
That way my valuable front page slots will be full of stories that I have upvoted, or forgot to vote, or that simply are new :)
Why is this a good idea? Because more than a few of us would probably be good trading partners for various things.. domain names, services, and $DEITY knows what else. But with no official market, people are left to just spam HN with their "domain for sale" and "service trade opportunity" things. And I expect more than a few people have domains, startups, whatever, for sale, but don't post because they don't want to be seen as spamming the site.
Edit: Disclaimer - I have no affiliation with, or commercial interest/stake in, hntrades.com. I just mentioned them because it's the only HN Marketplace site I'm familiar with.
I would like the votes, comments, and user submissions of the users I'm following to help curate a personalised version of the front page that is of specific interest to me.
Doing this would mean that, when I found people that I thought were intelligent, the front page and threads I was looking at would not reflect the general user bases opinion, but the opinion of the members of the user base that I hold with highest respect.
Lynx says "Content-length:" in the POST requests it sends, which are thus rejected.
Or at least accessible by crawlers if the user allow it.
Use case: I'd like to see all the links I have upvoted to be indexed by Trunk.ly so that I can find them later if I want.
Please can we get sub domains for google domains displayed. Especially now that we have google plus, I'd like to know what the actual service a link is coming from is. Google code is especially confusing. There are lots of project announcements at I initially assume come from google but are just hosted on google code.
There's a story in the RSS, it's not in the front page, and I can't search for it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2806018
I totally fubared the formatting in that post. The first problem is the asterisk in "fXckwits" (replaced with an 'X' here). I thought the formatting rules were that text surrounded by asterisks would be bolded, _if_ the asterisks were surrounded by whitespace. Parsing bug?
I tried to fix in one edit, apparently my edit timeout window's expired, so the post stands as is slightly borked.
I guess I can't be f*cked anymore ;-)
Better yet, RSS feeds for every item, story or comment.
I've been surprised sometimes how an entire thread will form under a comment of mine, and in the end there will be 2 or 3 sub-comments voted at 20 while mine stays at 1. Shouldn't I, in those cases, receive some votes for starting such a discussion?
If your comment was actually well written, or useful, or whatever people decide deserves upvotes, then you'll get them for it. If it wasn't a good comment but it happened to start a discussion, credit goes to people having an interesting discussion.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2868110
I would love to see a tab for people submitting their products, i.e. a show HN tab ...
Also, there is an oddity in the way comments are organized. They go like this:
font tag that sets the comment color
"first paragraph text NOT in a p tag"
p tag
"second paragraph text"
p tag
"third paragraph text"
...
p tag
font tag that sets the comment color
"final paragraph text"
If there is no specific reason for this odd layout, fixing it would make the site a little more friendly for those who want to tweak it with user stylesheets. (I'm tweaking the font size, to make it easier to read on my aging eyes).
Can you just put the page number in the URL? Or redirect to the front page after 5 seconds?
thanks!
I'd like to read people's comments in the context of their previous comments. Other readers may be much better at this than me but I find it hard to index what people are saying against just a handle.
It would be great to see some more clues to people's identities appearing next to their names - not necessarily a photo but perhaps a snippet of who who they are / what they do (their about section perhaps). It doesn't have to be there all the time, onmouseover would be great but it would be nice to easily get that reference.
I may upvote comments which are valuable, but not the story itself, making it hard to come back to those valuable comments later.
Now, the current position of the voting arrow is nice demarcation of the beginning of a post, and it also serves to indicate the nesting depth of a comment. Something serving that purpose is still useful. But maybe this more conveniently-located voting option can be implemented with an onhover so that it's visible at the end of only the post that the mouse is hovering on (a few other sites have comment boards like this).
As Hacker News holds a superior quality content on many topics that I(..anyone curious to learn) am interested in, it would be great if I can search through these articles than spending hours altogether on Google, where everything gets dumped at.
Could also comment upvotes be saved and showed in the same way?
And as a less important sugestion, but cool reverse way of thinking, could stories and comment downvotes banish that items from my view of the HN site. Thanks!
(Just explaining what I've seen.)
Using a < silently truncates the remainder your text from the input field.
* But I couldn't find a better place to report this error.
I guess this is a user-side configurable hellban / killfile.
It would be nice if either story headlines I haven't been shown yet could be highlighted, or ones that have recently moved onto that results page could be highlighted, so I can tell at a glance which stories I might not have seen yet.
I hate going down the line of stories on the main page and get confused by a job posting for a YC company. It kinda feels a bit deceptive to not have it stand out - given that it is completely different.
If not a MAJOR color change to the entire title, have something subtle (that is a different color) that acts as a visual cue to tell us it is not a 'regular' HN story.
Thanks.
https://github.com/nex3/arc/commit/0efaa1b189c4ed54c4f91a7ec...
It only adds a viewport meta tag and some styling which applies to small screens only by using a media query.
Please use it! Afterwards the site will look like this on the iphone: http://minus.com/lGBmQmM4CrdHE
Sidenote: Why can I commit directly to the github repository? I thought that by clicking edit, I would create a fork and work on that and create a pull request later. Strange. Or is this some kind of open-to-all repository?
I'd love it if submitted links always appeared on the my "submission" list. Currently, they only appear if the link is a new submission, with submissions of existing links being treated as an upvote and added to "saved stories".
This is a reasonable default for the scoring purposes, but caught me today when I was looking back for a story I was sure I'd submitted some time ago. Because I went through the process of submitting it, I thought I would be able to find it by scanning my "submissions". No such luck.
In the absence of a personalized recommendation system, I also find it useful to look at what else my favorite posters have submitted. Since "saved stories" are not visible to others, whereas "submissions" are, this is lost information.
Didn't get any responses to test it yet, but they promise exactly that.
An alternative approach would be to display a random subset of new articles from the past n minutes on each display of the new items page. This is particularly true for times when several articles are submitted per minute, which will only become increasingly common.
That way each submission would get more time (from a smaller audience) to be picked up and more quality items would be upvoted.
If the whole article was the description that would also be OK; so I could read everything from my RSS reader.
- this is cool
- seconded
+ view 120 more uninteresting comments
- not so cool
- my point of view gets lost
A list of 10 similar titles would be nice also, as the submitter may not have the time so do an indepth search for a similar article or may be limited by platform.
Italic seems to work fine for that.
I noticed that the Kenyan TLD uses a similar approach to that of the UK where there is a controlled secondary domain (.co.ke) under which all commercial sites are kept. This is not visible on the front page. I noticed this on this item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033
Expected outcome: show one level more for the Kenyan .*.ke domain space.
However, if you look at it from HNSearch instead, its caption is there: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=doit
What's going on?
I often leave HN tabs open, then start writing a sketch of a comment, then continue later, and notice the link has of course expired. This means going back, reloading the page, and re-pasting the comment. Irritating but bearable.
However, this doesn't work if my noprocrast period gets switched on while I'm reading other articles. I know noprocrast allows submissions, but it needs me to submit with the old link. And the link never gets too old.
I bump into "Unknown or expired link" almost every day.
As a solution, I'm imagining updating a timestamp each time I view an article I voted up (to limit the scope of this feature). Then, when I re-visit the comments for that article, any comments with timestamps more recent than my recorded one are emphasized in some way.
it would be great if there was a link that would go to comments, and comments had a little script that would forward automatically to the story based on originating url, and some query string param.. it would just need to differentiate the page loads that happen after browser back button was hit (possibly originating url would be different)
it would also be great to turn this thing on for all links in settings page, but a separate link next to each story wold also work..
(maybe even time of submission?)
I've lost count of the number of times when I've unexpectedly wanted to revisit an article from days/weeks/months ago and have utterly failed to find the site by search/browser history (I visit from mulitple machines), etc. I really don't want to have yet another service to sign in to for saving interesting links - and even if I did - they're not always things that I think I wanted to save at the time.
What I'd like to see is:
- opt in to have links pass through a intermediate step so the outbound step is saved in my profile on HN - include the URL and the HN piece (comments, etc)
Seems very simple to do, and would make it so much easier to refer friends back to what I've read without having to rely on my poor memory or rigorous bookmarking.
The domain-parser has a little glitch; in an item like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033 it says "co.ke", which I guess is just the sort-of TLD Kenyan websites use. Instead, I think "mocality.co.ke" is the desired result here.
Feature request: the text of a job ad should have the same contrast as a standard HN post or comment.
This would aid in keeping page formatting within bounds, and also in scanning the scope of the threads.
an optional zoom level would probably solve my problems, on the desktop my browser remembers to always keep HN zoomed in a few steps, but on the iPad it's tiny.
Details: To read HN more conveniently both on desktops and on iPad I would like to have fewer headings per page, have them in larger font etc, I am writing my own, magazine like (or Flipboard like) HTML viewer. I don't want the data from HN to travel via my server, fetching it directly from the browser.
However fetching RSS from the client side, at least on Chrome, and going forward on any modern browser, would require obtaining permission from the Cross Domain site. Currently RSS returns none. Chrome reports error, will not allow JavaScript code to process. For the development purposes I fake it via proxy (Fiddler2) but once coded it would either require RSS returning the right header, or me channeling this request via my server (Google App Engine)
Since the point of having RSS is to publish it to other services, I presume you would not object to such use of your data. If you do, please let me know and I'll stop.
I plant to make HTML/JS/CSS open sourced once it is done.
Contact: Michael Kariv michael_kariv@yahoo.com
Latest one that I've seen is this guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dailyllama , but I see lots of cases all the time, such as this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3755037 (who wasn't very happy about being hellbanned).
None of these people are trolls -- one of their posts must have been downvoted early on, and they've tripped some sort of automatic mechanism. Perhaps you shouldn't hellban people like this unless one (or more?) of their posts has been explicitly flagged (rather than just downvoted)?
From a comment thread, it is of course simple to get to the original link, but not the other way around.
With an inverse RSS feed, it will be much easier in Google Reader to share both the comment thread and the original link with Google+, or any of the services that support Google Reader Send To.
Some comments are so good that I want them for later reference.
When I upvote a story I know that it will be there in my saved stories for later enjoyment. Same for upvoted comments? Thanks.
(sum (map (fn (score)
(if (< score 1) ; don't penalize users if answers are domnmedded
0
(+ 1 (floor (log (score))))))
children-scores))
It could of course be computed offline after the thread has settled.
It would for reward people who ask questions that elicit either lots of answers or an highly upvoted one.
By using a logarithm, people would not be able to cheat by upvoting every answer to their posts (someting I automatically do out of courtesy, BTW, but many people don't).
----
Another thing: When the comments scores were visibles, people would rarely get more than two or three downmods unless they were obnoxious. There was a rule either tacit or explicit, I don't remember, not to downmod people lower than that, and if they were, it was corrected by other members of the community.
I have the impression that the score go much lower now, and are sometimes fatal to new users, who end up hell-banned and don't get a second chance. It may be nice to display the scores when they are below one.
Currently, with dark colors it's occasionally difficult to read the text.
This is a code markup example. The problem I'm seeing is that, lacking a clear blockquote text citing markup, it's also used for citing text. Which, in the case of long lines, leads to the example I'm trying to replicate here: a single line of long, horizontally scrolling text.
Just sayin'.2- Comment karma should be shown publicly rather than privately. ie each comment should show value.
3- Comments within a thread should be able to be sorted by comment score.
4- Submitted links for same news stories should share karma points. Several times you submit the same story only to see someone else collect karma hours later.
5- Increase transparency on how comments ranking works.
6- Increase transparency on max submissions and comments allowable per day.
Best Regards,
Sergio Stephano
When titles are changed by mods, it frequently neuters them. From "Today my company came out of stealth mode" becomes "Ex-Facebooker closes $1.4M financing round." Clearly not a change for the better. Please keep a copy of the original title and add an account-wide toggle to switch between moderated and original versions.
2) Order the comments feed by "most recent active" (so Max(childDatePosted) DESC THEN BY Max(posted) DESC".
Happy to dig into the Arc if you'd like a hand.
Old member: This has been on here n times!
New member: But hey, as a new member, I appreciate it!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4189220
A way for new members in particular to see the "Catching Up With Hacker News" classic content they appreciate (on their front page, by default) seems like it could help mainstream them into the community.
Proposal: The downvote arrow takes you to a "confirm" page with a "reason" text box. If you want to downvote you are encouraged (required?) to enter a reason before confirming your vote. This page also shows otherwise hidden comments by other people explaining their downvote.
Advantage: Allows downvoters to explain to the commenter why their comment is being downvoted without cluttering up the main discussion page. Ideally produces a better and more functional community.
It would be helpful if instead the More link simply gave me the next 31-60 ranked articles, even if they were duplicative with what I'd seen before.
Thanks!
I would enjoy if it rotated a bit through different creative reminders.
Examples:
"have you exercised 150 minutes this week?" (low activity has been purported to kill as many people as smoking, and a bet a lot of we computer users are in that demographic.
"Any hobbies interesting you at the moment? Why not work on them for a bit?"
"Get back to work!"
"Go get out of your comfort zone"
And maybe some inspirational quotes.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/paul_valery.html
Thanks for thinking about it!
tl;dr: Let any user add any tag/category to any article, allow each user to up/down vote each tag once (to increase categorization quality), and allow all users to filter HN articles by tag - and tag properties.
Result: When we have only a short time, we see only the types of article that most interest us. When we have more time, we can browse through new or untagged or little tagged articles and apply/vote tags.
Why? Because HN and the HN community are good at curating articles of interest, and I cannot find a better community for suggesting the types of article I'm interested in, but that type is, broadly, off topic.
Longer version, more rationale, details....
I wandered into HN when I was a hackerpreneur - but I'm not anymore.
I stay because of the high quality of articles and comments - but the articles I'm mostly interested in are not about hacking code or hardware or startups, they're about cognition, hacking the mind, pedagogy, etc. Ya know, the off topic stuff.
But the real off topic gems tend to drown in a sea of on topic stuff.
So I spend a fair amount of time filtering through the first four or five pages of stories every day, looking for those non-coding&&non-startup gems that spark my interest. I'd like technology and crowd-sourcing to make this easier for me....
Let anyone add a tag/category to a story, e.g., hardhack, softhack, hardknocks, cognition, mindhack, etc. - AND let everyone vote up/down the tag/category: Voting tags would make them fluid and make the most sensible ones apply to any story.
(The most popular tags, or the most commonly used ones, would populate a dynamic list - this would allow the tag system to grow organically.)
Next, let me filter HN by tag/category, using as many/few as I want. Or none.
I'll start viewing with filters turned on and find recent stories of interest. When there are none (or not enough for this period of distraction), I'll look through recent untagged (or little tagged) stories, and apply tags, or up/down vote tags.
In other words, when I have little time, and need a distraction, I'll find one on topic for me; when I have more time, I'll help manage tagging so that you find one for you, next time you need one.
(Why am I not a hackerpreneur anymore? Well, that's off topic, but tl;dr? My values and interests have changed as I near the big 5-0, I'm not completely enamored of my current gig - IT security consulting - and I've come to realize I don't really want to start or run a business. So I'm irrationally edging back into undergrad studies in a very different field from my original studies... ...but I'm still here because of the very high signal/noise ratio.)
I often read HN at work. The page interface is very simple but the bright color of visited links makes it easy to navigate and spot new top stories.
The problem occurs when I go back home and check if any interesting news were added. I have to navigate through a long list of links and the only way of knowing if anything new popped up is to read all the titles again.
It would be helpful if HN could memorize visited articles and change the link color accordingly regardless of the browser history.
Lighting sucks at times and muscle memory might be a key off.
This way, newcomers impact on what is HN vs what was HN (regarding comments habits and what should make it to the frontpage / what should not) could be less dramatic.
On Chrome 10pt HN type is 12px on Firefox it's 13.3333px (Mac OS X).
There are other alternatives listed in their farewell message. Since they're no longer in service the 'notifo' field in profiles on HN and the arclanguage.org form can (should?) be removed.
Personally, I hate notifications, but of course, tastes vary, and some people really do love getting an endless stream of notifications. The trouble, or course, is which service to integrate, and how triggering should be done. It's not as simple as it might seem at first glance. Worse yet, HN (actually news.arc) runs as a single thread on a single system, so the performance impact of adding notifications might make them infeasible.
There have always been mean/dumb comments on HN, but in the past they were routinely downvoted to -4 and then ignored. The problem is that now, people have begun upvoting them, and there are more upvoters than downvoters. Thus, the reason this is a problem is a change in voting patterns, due to a shift in community makeup and expectations.
Partial solution: when a mean/dumb comment is killed by flags or moderators, send an automated warning to anyone who upvoted it and apply a token karma penalty. Increase in severity for repeat offenders -- from a larger karma penalty to no longer counting their votes to a hellban. This educates those who simply don't understand that mean/dumb comments don't belong here, and removes those who continue to intentionally violate guidelines.
When a submission is active and has comments, the link to the discussion page reads "# comments" where the "#" is the number of comments.
After some period of time (yes, I know it's more complicated than just time), the comments on a submission are disabled. Of course, this is good, and it stops the stupid bot that always posts "This is why we can't have nice things."
The trouble is when comments are disabled, the various submission listing pages reads "comments" without the leading number. Since we're trained to expect seeing a leading number from active threads, the expectation when seeing just "comments" is that there are no comments at all. It would be better if closed submissions are marked "# closed" or better "# comments (closed)".
Although it seems you have a special exception for this "Feature Request" thread to allow submissions even though it's ancient, it still reads just "comments" without the leading number, and hence, we've got no clue how much reading we might have to do.
It would be better to use '(closed)'.
When your anti-flamewar code kicks in to slow down posting by preventing replies, the 'reply' link is also replaced with '----'.
It would be better to use '(paused)' or '(wait)' or best of all, something more informative to describe what is going on. Simply not being able to reply to a post and the 'reply' link showing as '----' fails to instruct the user of the reason, so you're wasting a valuable opportunity to teach them something.
You could even replace the 'reply' link with a link to something else (instructions, guidelines, faq, ...) as well has have more descriptive text for the temporary anchor.
(Someone posts this on every such article anyway)
However, it is annoying to re-read the same comments I've already read. Sometimes I'll refresh a discussion 5+ times to see the new comments, and it's harder and harder to find where the new comments are located. I suggest that comments posted < 30 minutes before be marked somehow as "new", either through CSS or some visible indicator.
On a related note... any chance we can get confirmation on passwords being hashed/salted?
2) Please put a mark on the last clicked news so we can vote or discuss it (often a dozen minutes after) without having to look through plenty of tiny moving gray links.
I'm not saying that these posts are bad per se, but I would bet that most HN users like either one type of post or the other and not both. I would also bet that the Techcrunch-types outnumber the LtU-types, so trying to move the discussion towards more technical topics is a losing battle in the long run.
So here's what I'm suggesting:
1. Let submitters add tags to their posts along with their titles.
2. Let people whitelist the tags that show up on their homepage.
3. Using data from 2, it should be possible to cluster tags together, and make ad-hoc subreddits. I'm not entirely confident that subreddits are a good idea, but having the tag co-occurrance matrix would indicate whether it is or not.
Adding tags this way is much less drastic than diving straight in to subreddits, and it has a path to end up at subreddits in the end if that ends up making sense. And if subreddits don't make sense, it should at least make search work better.
The byline of this thread currently reads "2041 days ago", and it's really hard to make sense of that, since dividing by 365 usually takes more than a split-second.
Thus for submissions and comments older than X days, change the byline from "X days ago" to "Month DD, YYYY".
Both 100 and 365 would be okay values for X.
EDIT: Alternatively, extend the current pattern of "minutes ago", "hours ago", "days ago" to "months ago" and "years ago".
Inspired by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580767
-------------------------------------
Currently the downvote icon is directly below the upvote icon. This gives a small margin for error and I have noticed a few times were people have accidently downvoted an artcle due to this. Instead of the layout we have now ( A= Upvote icon and V= downvote icon):
A Name n minutes/hours ago | link
V
I propose that a layout such as this:
A Name n minutes/hours ago | link V
At least to me it would make more sence from a usibility regard to avoiding misclicking and more useful for those upon smaller screen sizes as well.
Also, rendering text normally (black) rather than grayed-out when a text based submission gets above some threshold would be beneficial.
Sure, parsing links on text based submissions will allow manipulative people to put their comment in a privileged position, but the current implementation detracts from discussion. For example, it's typical to see a follow-up reply for the sole purpose of having clickable links, but due to reply ranking, one usually finds the reply too late. Another issue is mobile devices where a copy-and-paste of a plain text URL is painful.
Obviously, I don't know the stats necessary to grasp whether or not you're fighting with flag-bots or even users who flag too aggressively, but I know you have code running to deal with these two issues (you publicly mentioned how the weighting works eons ago). Since you have the capacity to roughly determine good flagging from bad, a single good flag should be enough to reverse the decision to parse links. This should be enough stop the "privileged positioning" problem.
As for combating the "link harvesting/spamming" side of problem, I think the most you could do is mark the parsed links as "nofollow" in the text based submissions (as usual). It's not a perfect solution, but it's still better than nothing, and it's equivalent to how you handle link based submissions.
Since iOS allowed saving web pages as icons on the home screen, I've had a link to Hacker News on the first page of apps on my iPhone. iOS looks for an image in a specific location and will use that as the icon for the bookmark. If it can't find one, it'll take a screenshot of the home page.
Since updating to iOS 6, my home screen bookmark icon for Hacker News has started changing to the icons for websites that HN links to. For example, my icon currently is a purple 'Slate' logo after reading a story at Slate.com. The only way to change this is to recreate the bookmark until this happens again.
It'd be great if we could get a HN icon that iOS would use instead of failing to the default and now changing often.
Implementing this is as easy as placing specifically named and sized images in the root directory of the domain.
Specific naming and sizes can be found here: http://gigaom.com/apple/how-to-create-ios-device-home-screen...
(correction) looks like you can use HTTPS, but it is optional. It should be required on login page at least.
Is it possible to provide a 'download all' link for a user to get their own comments, submissions, and saved stories?
Sniffing the POST request that emacs/w3m sends:
Content-length: 38
I get the feeling news.ycombinator expects the more common form "Content-Length" (capitalized l), but according to the HTTP 1.1 spec: "Field names are case-insensitive." (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-4.2)
So my request is to fix that to adhere to the HTTP spec, thus allowing us poor emacs-w3m users to login as well.
I have a huge noprocrast.
Having to /logout just to check out a story or its comments that I got linked from somewhere else (and that I know I really want to check, specifically) is really annoying.
To me, this is a completely different use-case than browsing stories on the front-page. Browsing of the front-page is a significant threat to my productivity, hence the huge noprocrast. Browsing of stories I have a direct link to is not a significant threat to my productivity.
Hence, the suggestion above.
Please, please, please, include summary in RSS.
RFC 2616 states that HTTP headers are case-insensitive; yet HN's RSS service responds happily to "Host:" and badly to "host:". Would be very grateful if this this problem could be corrected in the HN RSS service.
I see that SSL is now supported on the site, so please make this the default.
HN covers lots of subjects (IT, scientific news, business news, social and lots of other stuff) while not providing any tools to sort out what one doesn't need/interested in.
During 2 days I've received ~1k news. For me there were 12 useful. I've skimmed through a 20-screen long list to find those 12 and didn't even try to look through all others because there is just too much of informational noise. So please add some categories or tags to news.
Thank you.
What I want is a very long front page that I can use to explore the past few days' articles without the annoying not worth the trouble to read beyond the front page current interface.
Edit: To clarify: I mean for the URL field at the submissions screen. It's probably not a good idea to implement this in comments because in many languages the double-slash indicates a comment.
Every now and then I hit the flag link by accident when I click on the comments. As I'm mostly reading on my phone click means actually touch on the tiny links...
There is some evidence here that hiding it to avoid egotism isn't worth the loss of function: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430542
See, respondents to the comment had to manually create a child comment "+ 1 for this idea!" to get their message out. That's not efficient, organized, or quantifiable.
I also wonder how much having no comment scores even contributes to eliminating egotism and hive-mind behavior.
For example, yesterday the user dweekly submitted a post about his new idea and after my initial comment, told me he would welcome further feedback. A tagging system would, in this example, notify a user like dweekly that someone had made a follow-up comment or reply.
Just a thought.
every single time I go to the site I unconsciously eyeball that karma count to see if it went up or down. it can be very distressing and distracts me from the content of the articles. would prefer some other kind of notification method that someone may have replied to my posts.
However, I also get That username is taken. Please choose another when I try to register the same username. Have I been banned? If so, would you like to start indicating that in the interface somewhere?
For example: "You cannot login because this account was banned" or "The user account you tried to lookup no longer exists because it was banned" ?
Account: alexcr
(Many people read the commentary on HN before actually reading the linked article)
upvote.onclick=func(){ hideButton(); doRequest(); }
upvote.onclick=func(){ doRequest().onsuccess(func(){ hideButton(); } }
What would be especially nice is if the "visited" state of the links followed my account around from computer to computer. Once that's in place, a little "x" next to each article that I can click to hide it would be magical.
Case in point - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=slmt - nothing from what he said justifies a hellban.
I think instead of deleting the post it should just remove the username and make upvotes/downvotes not impact the poster's karma. Or maybe just make the post sink to the bottom of the page and not allow voting on it.
It's a small price to pay to be future proof though.
HN1: 1-day timeconstant
HN7: 7-day timeconstant
HN30: 30-day timeconstant
HN365: 1 year timeconstant
HN is interesting on multiple scales, and things of intellectual value, especially things that take more than 20 minutes to ponder, are getting lost to the cruelty of exponential suppression.
Thanks for HN. It's useful, fun, and addictive.
A first-level reply notification is what I have in mind, i.e. don't notify me if someone replies to someone who replied to me...
1) I'd like to be able to actually see the URLs of "dead" submissions; sometimes they're awesome and have been autokilled due to sites being blacklisted, which I don't support
2) I'd prefer if "showdead" weren't so hard to read. It's just the wrong color on Chrome to be readable when deselected AND even worse when selected. I'm fine with it being hard to read when deselected, though.
3) Maybe allow people with karma > certain amount to turn off the low contrast color, too. I realize I can do this in the browser but it's a pain on mobile browsers. I like high-contrast.
Back button, copy selection, retry ... but oops, entire selection was not copied, so now the half page of text is gone for good.
Thanks for wasting my time with a years old bug. There is no reason that new story submission page needs to expire. I should be able to start typing in that textarea, walk away from my computer for a week, and then come back, finish, and submit. No state is necessary.
( For a visual example, see: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2010/09/msg01682.html )
The biggest problem is the voting arrows, which are far too easy to hit accidentally, and up/down votes cannot be changed.
Allowing changing of votes for a brief time (1-5 minutes) would be useful.
Improving display contrast -- setting a darker border and lighter main body area, would be vastly appreciated. Contrast isn't too bad, but can suffer under adverse lighting conditions.
A mobile-specific presentation would avoid resizing / sideways scrolling.
> Please provide a quoting markup. Existing workarounds of either prefixing with a greater-than sign
Or indenting text to present a
* Bullets would also be useful # As would numbers. And proper line breaking.
A collapsed view of comments (available through a Chrome plug-in) is another nice-to-have.
The same way the "ask" tab works. It would help make sure the community easily sees every new project.
I see interesting projects fall off new really quickly pretty often. Launching projects is such an integral part of the community, it makes sense to make the site work better for it.
Base it on "HN Launch" in title or something?
Unknown or expired link.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Hacker News" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/rss ">
(warning: one space after url)
To the main page for RSS autodetecting by browser plugins/etc.
Thanks.
These comments are usually useful and helpful, but not interesting.
HN has "Showdead". Could HN have "ShowMinor", with a user selectable "this is a minor post" checkbox?
"I enjoyed this post! Here's a few things I spotted: you use your instead of you're, and you use it's instead of its" [X]MINOR
So I can keep track of the most popular news sources for the demographic of HN readers. & Keep up on these same sources myself.
Something great (and simple) would be to create an API for that. The first useful feature would be to get a listing of comments for a given post. The second one (a little more complex) would be to allow HN user to comment via the API. A simple listing for the moment would be great.
This way there could be a similar plugin to Disqus for instance but for HN. It could help some post get interesting comments.
Thanks,
Is this fixable?
Example: single quote (') displays as ' in the title bar, or &#x27 in the HTML data.
Example case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838757
Remove the trailing slash and the link works.
Not sure when this started happening.
The error:
An error occurred.
Sorry, the page you are looking for is currently unavailable. Please try again later.
If you are the system administrator of this resource then you should check the error log for details.
Faithfully yours, nginx.
https:/%20%20%20%20/%20%20%20%20news.ycombinator.com/%20%20%20%20item?id=5859307
As a result clicking in a link in a RSS reader will fail to open the page in a web browser.
The story link is fine thought.
This is while using the feed: http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
I can't pin down the exact date when it started, less than a week ago for sure, possibly this WE?
I've been fooled by the fact that I only had the issue with HN but none of my many other feeds. My best guess is that you're using the HTML entity "/" instead of the straight character "/" for URLs. Somehow RSSOwl handles this fine in <link> elements, but not in <comments>.
I'll submit the issue to RSSOwl.
I know there are several browser extensions for these features, but as native functionality it would increase the UX for everyone, not just those that know of the extensions and are fortunate enough to have them enabled all the time.
I'm not a particularly old member here by any means, but it's become very obvious that this community is too large for the current constraints on it. Minor changes, like implementing a separate area for political discussions would act as a sort of "release valve" without sucking up precious real estate on the front page.
My reasoning is as follows: there's no stopping wave stories like the NSA scandal from being submitted to Hacker News, people are too invested in hearing about it. Besides, there's some justification for it, being that it has a technical basis despite being political.
Moreover, it would lessen the impact to the front page for polito-technical debate to have its own "arena" of sorts. I would also motion for these to have separate karma/upvote/"staying power" treatment, similar to Ask HN: threads.
P.S: May be i am a new guy here...and there are other methods there which i dont know
This way, the top stories or homepage will have more diversity and content.
It's true you can write anything you want in your profile's "About" section, but is there a possibility to have a little pop-up window that appears when you hover over someone's username? It only shows you their workplace and education because, as far as I've seen, HN isn't attractive to hackers only, there all sorts of people who use this platform and it would be nice to know what is their background, for example, when commenting. It could bring more quality and dynamics to discussions because then you'll know what you can ask others and what are their expertise. I don't want it to become similar to a facebook profile, but the two previously mentioned information lines are far more important than others such as age, location, etc.
There is a chance that this will turn our screen into a popcorn bowl but I think it can be managed by having a little delay or something else.
This invariably confuses new users.
I suggest the thin black bar be the height of a line of text, and it contain the text “R.I.P. Doug Engelbart”. This text could link to an official announcement of the death, or to a HN page discussing such a link. The text should probably be a light shade of grey.
Alternatively, without expanding the thin black bar, the text could appear in the orange header bar, and be coloured black. In this case it should probably be centred between the “submit” link on the left and the username / “login” link on the right.
Thx
The only way to do it now is to get the front page and to xpath your way down to the score html element. For that I would have to know stories identifiers. Sadly, RSS stopped publishing those recently - it now contains them as a part of href attributes for links leading to comments. Not to say I had to rely on HTML page layout.
Things would be much easier if RSS contained a score for each news item.
I've been zooming in a ton before upvoting (which works fine) but it would be nice to avoid that.
This is not perfect, since users have the option to pick multiple poll choices, but it helps to know how large the sample pool is in a measurement.
I see no particularly good reason for the site to give up on me just because I took awhile to read articles before clicking "More" at the bottom of a page. From my perspective the page was still open in a browser window so it should have remained functional.
Also good for those mea culpa moments when one realises a comment has been misunderstood.
The changes are as far as I can tell, always good.
It might alleviate some complaints if comments added before a title change, have the original title when the comment was made attached to the comment in some way.
Also, the document formatting is a little inaccessible. The submit page should have either a link to the document formatting, or just verbatim contain the document formatting page content. This probably won't help people who have been on HN for a while, but it would definitely be useful to me.
The top navigation is also a little confusing at first; I would expect that "comments" would show only my comments. I did not have an expectation of what "threads" would show.
EDIT: Forgot to put that an explanation of some of the more strange behaviors in FAQ would be nice. For instance sometimes there is a reply button to comments and sometimes there isn't.
If this is fixed, I will sigh one less time each day.
I mean it is pure text page that is gzip'ed and should barely add 1k more to make it 100 instead of 30.
If not 100, then 50 as a compromise?
<font color=”red”>green text</font>
https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/456556/1653002/49d37416-5b...
https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/456556/1653003/49d42960-5b...
1.- A Hacker News for _______ (finance[1], bitcoin[2], architecture[3], etc)
2.- Filter Hacker News (exclude ___[4], by tags[5], etc)
Food for thought.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844565
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867232
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860611
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6866403
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563739 (expired link)
I just submitted a question. Under the entry in new is this text:
1 point by dded 0 minutes ago | discuss | edit | delete
1 point by dded 0 minutes ago | delete | edit | discussAt the very least demand they contain, say, ten characters of contextual wording to discourage this lazy kind of argument.
Today I ended up with something getting double posted and this struck me as odd since it was always such a basic feature on many other community services such as forums. In the past I also recall being shadow-banned temporarily for a double post.
Difficult to explain. In short, I actually have a six years old account with karma in the top 100, but today I wouldn't be allowed into HN anymore. I temporarily disabled my main account for productivity reasons a couple of months ago, and since then I created 3 new accounts when I was drawn into controversial discussions. After a good start, two of them were hellbanned, both times rather to my surprise (that's why I am on the 3rd now). I don't expect this one to last very long either.
I felt a bit guilty for taking part in controversial topics, but at least I figured the controversy stayed in those threads. I am not a troll, merely somebody who wants to understand things as objectively as possible and therefore is not always aligned with the mainstream opinion.
I was going to suggest to ban controversial topics rather than controversial users, but since that would sadly involve all topics involving female coders that is probably not workable. So perhaps an idea would be to punish controversial comments less if they appear within controversial topics? I assume I was hellbanned because I received too many downvotes, or maybe the majority of mods just don't like me.
I'm sure I won't be missed, and perhaps all is working as you want it to be. I don't think we really can escape our own filter bubble. But HN is pretty much my only news source, so naturally it saddens me that today I apparently am not welcome anymore - and probably lots of other people feel the same.
This is somewhat annoying. If you have a page with 5 or more interesting links and then after some minutes want to continue, it breaks the xp on ycombinator entirely. I usually leave the page. Why in any hell don't you even just link to the start (or include the header bar)?
I bet it's because of caching the query, to avoid post sliding over page indexes after time, or whatever you thought with that non-session and non-user token. But. It. Is. Somewhat annoying, to cut the ?x=whatever just to return to news.ycombinator.com.
Use a timestamp to refresh the query or go back to use old school bad page indexes, but please fix something, at least the error message. Please!
Can we improve how this functions to prevent so many duplicates?
Perhaps a ban on links to thenextweb.com??? I see before all these submissions one (that gained traction with HN comments) was to medium.com https://medium.com/p/24eb09e026dd
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...
Like, you declare claims, say how they depend on each other, and participants could say which claims they agree with, and which they don't. Within each claim, there'd be a thread where you discuss it.
I think that this would seriously improve the quality of discussion.
* There's value in just seeing a list of ideas to help with brainstorming.
I think that this will lead to more startups being started, which is a good thing. It'll help people who don't start one because they don't have an idea. And it'll lead to some pretty good ones being started because the wisdom of the crowd will produce some good ideas.
Whether or not this succeeds depends on the community of users. HN has the perfect community for this. Thus, I propose that an "ideas section" be added to HN where you could add and vote on problems and startup ideas.
This feature could also come with the ability for 500+ karma to make such private comments visible (to make sure this privilege isn't being abused).
For example, in the following thread I would love to tell users why their comment does not constructively contribute to the discussion, but I also know that my comments on their comments don't contribute to the OP. There are many comments on there where a downvote is sufficient, but there are also borderline comments that merit an explanation as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115
This is now common practice on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The pipe+"link" is unnecessary clutter. It's also more clear, since "link" is the ambiguous verb/noun.
https://github.com/jcs/lobsters/commit/73b8df5eb7d9cc0de3189...
This feature would significantly reduce noise around major events, and likely prevent second order noise as people try to piggy back on with tangential analysis, derivative stories, or redundant commentary.
An idea along those lines: every item (submission/comment) should have a separate set of children that are 'meta/correction/derailing'. (That is, there's 'reply' and 'reply-meta'.)
Users would have to choose (or earn?) 'showmeta'. (So, no clutter for those who don't want to see that level. But perhaps even people without 'showmeta' see the meta subthreads on their own authored items, and a count of unseen metas-in-reply-to-them.)
Minor editorial nits like typos/headline-improvements/URL-improvements ought to be raised in 'meta' replies... and normal replies can be moved to 'meta' if appropriate, even beyond the normal edit-grace-period - especially if their point become obsolete by parent/admin editorial action.
Perhaps meta-items even have a one-tick way for the parent/admin to acknowledge they've been seen, mark as agreed, or mark as addressed.
All in the spririt of subtle-behind-the-scenes work to keep the "foreground" that most see on-point and high-quality.
(Better to continue this conversation at hn@ycombinator.com.)
Put random new posts that don't have any votes on the front page of those who meet a high karma threshold. Currently a single vote in the new queue is a gigantic step towards hitting the front page and being noticed. When that one vote matters so much and there's so much luck involved in getting it before even newer posts come in, it's no wonder people are creating voting rings. I think this could hugely reduce the luck factor in quality posts getting noticed.
Here's a preview of what I'm imagining: https://i.imgur.com/ZNQTn7q.png
I would say that's newsworthy and worth resubmitting once, but by the current rules I'd risk being banned.
One problem with allowing people to resubmit is that they'll probably resubmit too much. It will also push non-resubmitted stories out of the new queue faster. The first might be able to be solved by encouraging the community to be responsible; the second by increasing the number of items displayed on the /newest page from 30 to 120.
There is another way to solve new queue randomness: create a page where submissions come entirely from HN members that each user may select. For example, I'd be interested in tptacek's submissions, along with tokenadult, cperciva, yours, etc, so submissions from those members are what my page would show. Each user would be able to select their own list of users that they're interested in. But this might be a bad idea because it will make voting ring detection a lot harder.
Another idea is to create a page showing submissions from members that you yourself select. I'd be happy with that, but that's a bad idea because it would divide the community. Pg's short experiment with highlighting users with high average karma proved that this is a horrible situation.
Or just chop titles at 80 chars.
I would find it easier to trim down characters and make replacements if I had a guide. Without the guide it is tempting to remove whole words and sometimes that becomes misleading or link baity.
If it's true that the toxic comments problem has stabilized (fingers crossed, no jinx), the thing we're going to work hard on next is story quality.
If a story has had a significant discussion within about a year, though, we'll kill reposts as dupes. Ditto if the story is off-topic.
The standards are more stringent about people reposting content that they're trying to promote. Deleting and reposting is particularly bad.
I know some people want precise rules, but we're not likely to go there. We want to encourage prudence, not gaming. But we will eventually expand the guidelines and the FAQ to explain more of this stuff. In the meantime, it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com.
As for your feature suggestions, my instinct is against relying on solutions that fragment the community. It's part of HN's DNA to have one community, one front page, one set of posts. The temptation is strong to let it burst at the seams, because there's so much. But I think we're better off finding ways to enhance quality within that constraint, rather than breaking it.
If desired, this page could also be used as an out-of-channel means for the moderator to tell the submitter why the changes were made, or why the submission was killed. It could also serve as a page linking to discussion of earlier (or substantially similar) submissions.
If there were two different categories of [dead] - comments and submissions - we could show dead on one but not the other.
The notifications can be on the site itself, like a little box in the corner that shows the number of unread notifications, Facebook/StackOverflow/Google+ style. And/or set up notifications as emails (though personally, I already get tons of spam in my inbox, I'd rather just have on-site notifications).
I find that keeping up with news on HN is essential to me learning new things and becoming more skilled in my field. However, HN caters to a wide variety of interests, and it is time-consuming to have to sift through a bunch of posts on topics that I'm not really interested in.
1. The ability to delete your own comments indefinitely, instead of having a window of only a few hours within which to delete your own comments.
2. The ability to flag your own comments for moderation.
I suppose one possible reason for not allowing comment deletion after a certain amount of time is that it forces people to really only make high-quality comments, otherwise they'll be downvoted and they won't be able to do anything about it after a few hours.
But if you're trying to improve the quality of Hacker News threads with high-quality comments, then I argue that it's counter-productive to force low-quality comments to remain by not allowing users to self-delete them after `X` hours.
Both Reddit and Stack Overflow allow users to delete their own comments indefinitely. Heck, Stack Overflow even encourages you to delete your own comments, if they don't contribute useful information to a post.
Specifically, I'd love to see whose comments are the most upvoted, without having their total karma and average karma skewed by getting to the front page.
It's not uncommon for a front page article to get 100+ points, but it's rare for a comment to get 100+ points.
The reason for the ratio of votes to how many you can delete, is because its likely that HN karma per user correlates with the quantity of posts per user. With that in mind, someone who has made many more posts may have a need to delete more posts in the future.
This would balance the needs of the community to not have holes in its conversations, but also allow individuals to strike a particular comment from the record.
I do not know what I should flag. Should I flag things that have terrible titles?
"10 articles every programmer should read" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743952
Or should I flag the obvious (but rare) off topic spam that makes it through the filters?
I believe HN users want to reduce mod-work, and that they would be happy with slightly increased friction on flagging.
[flag - should not be on HN]
[flag - HN Worthy but terrible title]
[flag - train wreck comments]
I believe this would increase flagging. I suspect it would make modding easier but I don't know and maybe I'm talking nonsense.
Whatever the timeout is these days, it is simply not enough. Not for editing posts on a phone on a bus, which should be a core use case in 2014.
I seem to see this frequently. It is jarring 100% if the time. I can see a rational for it maybe 10% of the time.
I have tested this fiddle and found it to work in both Chrome and Firefox: http://jsfiddle.net/LRaJj/
----
Alternatively, and perhaps even better, use unicode ▲ as up arrow instead of gif, as suggested earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238956
After submitting a bunch of links, some of them making a front page, I noticed that there is a fairly strong effect of social proof.
People check /newest, see that some post already has 1 or 2 upvotes, check it instead of some without any upvotes (someone upvoted, might be good!). The upvoted one gets even more upvotes (because more people are reading it), and it's on the homepage.
A bunch of my submissions made the homepage and from what I've noticed, the threshold is about 7-10 upvotes in the first hour. So can we fairly say that a dozen of people decide what's on the homepage? Maybe.
While the sample size is really really small, 8 of 9 links I submitted and got more than 4 upvotes, made the front page. But I guess with a greater sample size, the general assumption would still hold true.
The obvious disadvantage of hiding score is that it's harder to tell what is worth attention (especially during peak hours when there is a new submission every minute), but maybe it would help to bring more good content to the front page (as opposed to content that a dozen of people thought is good).
SVG for the arrow:
<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewbox='0 0 10 10' width='10' height='10'><path d='M0.5,10L5,1,9.5,10' fill='#999'></svg>
data:image/svg+xml;utf8,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg'%20viewbox%3D'0%200%2010%2010'%20width%3D'10'%20height%3D'10'%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D'M0.5%2C10L5%2C1%2C9.5%2C10'%20fill%3D'%23999'%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3EThank you!
Infinite scrolling on the main page. I'm not sure much more needs to be said.
See this for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7837247
View it on mobile (chrome on iOS) to see how unusable that thread is now.
When reading comments, I often find myself scrolling back up to check OP's name to see if the comments I'm reading are first hand.
It's a simple one that would drastically improve readability IMO.
Presently LastPass and other password managaers will submit the last form found on the page (the create account one).
Which means users with password managers are constantly hitting the account creation page and then have to go back and attempt to click the login button before the second form is submitted (again).
I always have to cmd+click the open them in a new tab :(
We need a spam filter for crap like that.
Tried to use Algolia's API and IFTTT without much success.
While it would be easiest to use an external service and just add the link, I think HN should consider creating its own archive of all submitted articles. The articles, links, commentary, and voting data could one day be a great corpus for future scholars (and current-day CS researchers).
Blogspot is a common problem for example, trailing slash, etc.
It would be cool if resubmitted stories had links to the previous versions – it's always nice to see the old comments, as well.
I've spent under 5 minutes editing text only to get it upon clicking on "Submit"