
Tell HN: New features and a moderator - dang
Today we&#x27;d like to introduce five new features and one moderator.<p>1. You can collapse comments in threads. If you&#x27;re logged in, collapses persist across page refreshes and devices for a week.<p>2. You can tell which way you voted and undo a vote if you want. An &#x27;unvote&#x27; or &#x27;undown&#x27; link appears after a post&#x27;s timestamp when you vote.<p>3. Save and share the best stories and comments. Click on a post&#x27;s timestamp to go to its page, then click &#x27;favorite&#x27; at the top. Your favorites are linked from your profile, and you can browse other users&#x27; from theirs.<p>4. On the front page and &#x2F;newest, click &#x27;hide&#x27; if you no longer want to see a story. The next story in the list will slide up at the bottom. If you change your mind, visit &#x2F;hidden and click &#x27;unhide&#x27;. If you&#x27;re logged in, hidden stories persist for a week.<p>5. Find out which stories were the most popular on HN on a given day by visiting &#x2F;front?day=yyyy-mm-dd. You&#x27;ll see all the front page stories for that day, sorted by how much time they spent there. For example, Alan Kay&#x27;s AMA had the most front page time on June 20: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;front?day=2016-06-20.<p>Finally, I&#x27;m pleased to introduce sctb, a.k.a. Scott Bell, as a Hacker News moderator. Scott has been moderating HN incognito for a long time, but starting today he and I will be sharing the public part of the job. Since Scott is familiar with all aspects of HN moderation, you shouldn&#x27;t notice any changes in practice; this is just an internal refactoring to enable such innovations as vacations and a day off. Scott is my cofounder from Skysheet (YC W09), an excellent programmer with a meticulous eye for detail, and a thoroughly decent human being. Please welcome him and be nice!
======
aleem
Some UI issues and recommendations.

1\. The up/down arrows after a vote leave behind a clickable void. That means
you can still click that void after you have voted. If you changed the
visibility on .votelinks instead of the buttons this would get fixed. Though
even better UX would be to have togglable up/down buttons ala stackoverflow
and others.

2\. Why not provide the favourite link directly on the comment instead of
forcing an extra click and page load. If it's a UI clutter issue maybe
consider adding star and flag UNICODE characters. Again, having togglable
icons for the same would be nice.

3\. The collapse icon would be better off on the left for improved UI
consistency.

EDIT: UNICODE characters don't show in comment. Is this a bug? They show in
the textarea while composing the comment.

EDIT2: Add the following User CSS using your preferred browser addon for a bit
of cleanup.

    
    
        .togg {
          float: left;
          margin-right: 5px;
        }
    
        .votearrow {
          margin-bottom: 10px;
        }

~~~
hacker42
It would also be handy to have some visual guides for the indentation levels
of nested comments as on Reddit. I've hacked my own indentation marks using a
CSS injection for now, but this is clearly still not optimal:

    
    
        @-moz-document url-prefix(https://news.ycombinator.com/) {
          td { vertical-align: top }
          td > img { background: repeating-linear-gradient(to right, rgba(0,0,0,0), rgba(0,0,0,0) 38px, rgba(0,0,0,0.3) 38px, rgba(0,0,0,0.3) 40px); margin-top: 4px; height: 12px!important; }
          div.votearrow { padding-bottom: 3px; background: url('http://localhost/uparrow.png') !important; background-size: 12px 20px !important; width: 12px!important;}
        }
    

I've also increased the size of the voting arrow because it's just
uncomfortably small. By Fitt's law [0], smaller buttons require more time and
effort to click!

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law)

~~~
basseq
Riffing off your code, this extends the bars all the way up/down.

    
    
      td.ind > img {
          background: repeating-linear-gradient(to right, rgba(0,0,0,0), rgba(0,0,0,0) 38px, rgba(0,0,0,0.1) 38px, rgba(0,0,0,0.1) 40px);
          margin-top: 0px;
          height: 100%;
      }
      
      table.comment-tree td,
      table.comment-tree tr,
      table.comment-tree th,
      table.comment-tree,
      table.comment-tree tbody,
      table.comment-tree table {
          margin: 0;
          padding: 0;
          border-spacing: 0;
      }
      
      table.comment-tree td.default {
          padding: 0.5em 0.5em 1em 0.5em;
      }
      
      table.comment-tree td.ind {
          padding: 0 0.5em;
      }

~~~
hacker42
Slight addition using wider, shadowy gradients to conceal some aliasing
issues:

    
    
        td.ind > img { opacity: 0 }
        td.ind {
            background: 
                linear-gradient(to left, rgba(246,246,240,1) 0px, rgba(246,246,240,1) 14px, rgba(246,246,240,0) 14px),
                repeating-linear-gradient(to right, rgba(0,0,0,0) 0px, rgba(0,0,0,0.03) 39px, rgba(0,0,0,0) 40px);
         }
    

Screenshot: [https://i.imgur.com/f2WfHyp.png](https://i.imgur.com/f2WfHyp.png)

Unfortunately it breaks on the 'threads' page.

------
trjordan
Suggestion: Can you move the collapse button to the left of the username? One
way I tend to use nested comment threads is reading all top comments,
collapsing as I go.

Great stuff, overall -- thanks!

~~~
spicyj
That would certainly increase the number of accidental votes.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
As it stands, I have already accidentally clicked "ago" and gone to a comment
permalink when I wanted to collapse a thread. Not much better.

~~~
kbenson
Since collapse persists on page loads, hopefully it _is_ better now. Then
again, we can un-vote now, so I think we're back to having the behavioral
advantages and disadvantages being close enough that it's a toss-up what any
particular user thinks is more of a problem.

------
duncanawoods
Great features, thanks!

The one feature I can't believe I lived without that the HN Enhancement Suite
chrome extension provides, is highlighting unread comments since your last
visit. It actually makes it worthwhile revisiting e.g. a 200 comment thread
when there are now 300 comments without just reading all the same comments
again and being unable to spot the new ones.

If it became supported cross device by HN itself I would be very grateful.

~~~
dang
Yes. Another user has argued for this effectively and persuaded us to do some
version of it.

~~~
kuschku
The simple hack I use in my own extension to provide that feature on reddit
without Gold just simply logs the timestamp of every visit of the thread in a
cookie, and then allows to select "new comments since visit X", and then just
computes the comment time back into a timestamp, compares, highlights.

If HN would provide the actual timestamp in ISO format, as reddit does it, we
could've had that a lot simpler a lot earlier.

~~~
duncanawoods
For other people's interest - there is a "Reddit New Comments Highlighter"
chrome extension that does that for non-gold users.

~~~
kuschku
I could've saved a day of work if I had known that before, lol.

Although my thing nowadays uses an XPosed module to integrate with Relay and
uses a server, cause I wanted that to work.

------
splawn
I bet whoever has the top comment on this one is going to see their karma go
up and down as everyone tests out the unvote and undown feature. :)

~~~
JimmaDaRustla
Tested upvote, worked.

Tested undo upvote, worked.

Tested downvote, worked.

My testing is complete.

~~~
theswaagar
new user so pardon my ignorance but I dont have a downvote button. Do I need
to enable it somewhere?

~~~
jchendy
You need a certain amount of karma to downvote. I think it's 500, but I'm not
sure because I don't have that much yet. :)

Edit: it's confirmed at 501:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074198)

~~~
barking
I just upvoted you there because I'm nice like that.

~~~
jchendy
Thanks! Only three more votes before I get superpowers. :)

~~~
xenophonf
I upvoted you. With great power comes yadda yadda yadda.

Edited to add: PSYCH!! Now it's going to take 4 upvotes to get super powers.
BWAHAHAHA!!

Edited to add #2: Just kidding! You're 2 upvotes away again!

P.S. Dear friends, I'm sorry. I won't abuse my vast and terrible ability to
grant or deny imaginary Internet points ever again. -xf

~~~
__jal
With imaginary power comes imaginary responsibility, and don't you forget it!

------
Someone1234
I found a potential bug/oddity.

If you collapse a comment in a thread it also collapses when viewing the
comments page on a user's profile, and visually it is very hard to spot when
collapsed on that page due to the styling.

For example, open the below link[0], collapse this comment, then refresh the
link. The comment becomes quite hard to spot on that page. The red/orange star
or vote button is also strangely missing while collapsed, which further makes
it visually hard to distinguish.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Someone1234](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Someone1234)

~~~
dang
This is a side-effect of how regular the HN codebase is at its best: when you
make a change, you get it everywhere. It would require special code to make
this _not_ work on /threads pages. Perhaps we should do that, though.

~~~
Someone1234
Alternatively a style change would help massively. Even if the thread is
hidden it should have the same anchoring on the page as a thread which is not,
so the eye tracks the positional anchor.

------
minimaxir
Why is hiding stories available to logged-out users? Reloading just makes them
appear again. :p (EDIT: may be bug)

On a related tangent, why have all instances of "submissions" on HN been
replaced with "stories"? It's an change which IMO does not fit the usage. (A
Show HN wouldn't make sense as a "story.")

~~~
dang
> _Reloading just makes them appear again_

Well, that's true of collapsed comment threads as well, and I somehow doubt
that logged-in users are the only ones who see things on the front page they'd
rather not.

> why have all instances of "submissions" on HN been replaced with "stories"

Because posts to HN are either stories or comments? Happy to discuss this at
hn@ycombinator.com if you want to apply some lexicographical fine points.

~~~
minimaxir
> I somehow doubt that logged-in users are the only ones who see things on the
> front page they'd rather not.

Currently, the change is not persistent across reloads, which make the feature
(to hide undesirable submissions) not helpful. I'm unsure if that is a bug but
that does not seem intentional, and it reproduces on several browsers. FWIW,
it works as described on logged-in accounts.

(Edit: Scott mentioned in another comment about Local Storage issues. That may
be related.)

> Because posts to HN are either stories or comments?

Edited OP to note that "story" doesn't fit the tone of content unrelated to
news, like Show HN. It's not a big deal, but it was a recent change I found
odd and unprompted.

~~~
sctb
OK, we've disabled hiding for logged-out users for now, since they weren't
persisted (that part wasn't a bug) and had other issues.

------
lotharbot
How long does the "unvote" option last? Permanently? If I accidentally bump
the "unvote" button on a comment that's years old, can I re-apply my vote, or
only if it's an upvote?

~~~
dang
That is a subtle point and I was curious if someone would ask about it!

Unvote links last for an hour. This is because the main use of voting data is
to rank posts, and that's time sensitive. If we let people go back and unvote
after hours have gone by (let alone years), that would be rewriting history,
or counterfactually messing with it.

Even an hour is arguably too long. Since the main purpose of this feature is
to correct misclicks and over-hasty impulses, a few minutes would probably be
enough.

~~~
netcraft
I think a few minutes would be fine - but it would be nice to still know how I
voted after the fact.

~~~
dang
Hmm. Good point.

~~~
danso
How about in lieu of a stylesheet/visual change (since those seem to be few in
number over the years), have upvote/downvote status result in a HTML element
class attribute that browser-plugins can leverage for custom styling?

------
jedberg
I'm glad to see you guys finally got the resources you deserve to make these
changes!

I'm also happy you guys are stealing all the best stuff from Reddit and
leaving the other stuff behind. Great set of new features!

------
gedrap
What I find more annoying is that it's on the right hand side even though all
the other actions (vote on post, vote on comment, reply) are on the left hand
side. Seems like a trivial thing but that is annoying quite a bit.

>>> 5\. Find out which stories were the most popular on HN on a given day by
visiting /front?day=yyyy-mm-dd. You'll see all the front page stories for that
day, sorted by how much time they spent there. For example, Alan Kay's AMA had
the most front page time on June 20:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-06-20](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-06-20)

That's cool, I guess, but algolia
<[https://hn.algolia.com/>](https://hn.algolia.com/>) seems like a much better
tool for the task.

~~~
tedmiston
From your comment, I was curious whether they were pulling the results from
Algolia behind the scenes. The result sets for a given day look to be pretty
different with Algolia being ordered by points purely.

Front [0]

(92 stories hit the front page)

Top 10:

    
    
        1. Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
        2. Tell HN: New features and a moderator
        3. Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 3: Inside the disk drive
        4. Riffle: an efficient communication system with strong anonymity
        5. Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations
        6. Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
        7. Yoshi (YC S16) launches “set it and forget it” vehicle re-fueling service in SF
        8. A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
        9. Errol Morris's Secret Weapon for Unsettling Interviews: The Interrotron
        10. Friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins
    

Algolia [1]

(885 stories)

Top 10:

    
    
        1. Tell HN: New features and a moderator
        2. Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
        3. Pokemon Go is a huge security risk
        4. How we're scammed into eating phony food
        5. Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession
        6. Announcing TypeScript 2.0 Beta
        7. Elixir 1.3.1 released
        8. Hedge Fund Wants to Use Atomic Clocks to Beat High-Speed Traders
        9. A beginners guide to thinking in SQL
        10. Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations
    

Note: The Algolia date picker doesn't seem to like you starting and ending on
the same day. It changes start date to the day before, so perhaps this is
including a little more than one day of data.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-07-11](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-07-11)

[1]:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1468195200&dateEnd=1468281600)

------
ChuckMcM
Dang those are some nice features! :-) I really really love the collapse
feature. Does the collapse persist across new comments being added or are
those not collapsed? We'll have to see.

And final thought on the stories/submissions vs comments the challenge is that
comment is both a verb and a noun, you comment, and you can read a comment.
Whereas stories is always a noun. Submission is the correct name for something
submitted.

~~~
spydum
yeah collapse is nice, but curious what will happen on collapsed thread which
is added to...

i'm also confused, wasn't there already a "saved" section where upvoted items
went previously? seems like all which was done was renamed a few items (and
added the favorite which allows marking for later, without giving a vote)

~~~
dang
The old 'saved' list still exists, but has been renamed to 'upvoted' because
that is a more precise name. That list is private—we certainly don't want to
publish users' votes.

The new 'favorites' list is for highlighting the best stories and comments you
see on HN. That list is shared, because want people to browse each other's
favorites. The idea is to help disseminate more of the amazing content that
people post to Hacker News, much (most?) of which is only seen by a few
readers. And I hope that for dedicated HN users it will be fun to curate your
own list of highlights, plus see what others have on theirs.

Also if the most-favorited stories and comments turn out to be interesting,
we'll publish those lists.

------
jacquesm
I've been playing around with the 'hide' feature on the new page for a bit and
I've developed a simple workflow to help catch spam:

Look at a submission, decide whether to just ignore it, upvote it, flag it as
spam or open a tab and leave a comment or to watch it for later.

Then 'hide' the submission. Like that you can easily keep track of what you've
seen and what still needs to be looked at.

You could use the same method for the homepage.

It's a super useful feature.

Thanks Dan & Scott!

------
abtinf
Great features!

Request: Feature 5 most-popular-by-day is almost exactly what I've wanted for
a long time, except in RSS form - a feed that updates once per day with the
top 30 stories from the previous day in the order of most time on front page.
None of the external HN-specific RSS generators do it quite right.

~~~
dang
We'll look into RSSifying this if you'll email hn@ycombinator.com to remind
us.

------
theli0nheart
Thanks, folks, for the great improvements!

1\. The time-capsule feature is really cool. Traveling back in time to see
what sort of tech people were building / what other things were on the front
page when X popular product launched is going to be so much fun. Update: it
only goes back about a year and a half. See below.

2\. Undoing votes has also been something I've wanted for a long time. I've
accidentally downvoted/upvoted more times than I'd like to count when using my
phone.

3\. I currently use a bookmarking service to keep track of posts I want to
save on HN, but native favoriting is much better. :)

Also, welcome, Scott!

\--

Edit: I tried to view the front page [1] on the day I launched Breakup
Notifier [2] ~5 years ago, but I get an error message. Is there any way you HN
wizards can add the ability to go back further in time?

> We don't have this data before 2014-11-11.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-02-21](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-02-21)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2243650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2243650)

~~~
dang
Alas, we only started tracking this data in November 2014.

~~~
hnapi-user
I have historical rankings for all major list pages (/news, /news?p=2,
/active, /best, /classic, etc) since 2014-05-05, if it's helpful. Currently
27MM records.

~~~
dang
Sounds like it might be useful for getting the front page archive to back that
far. Can you email us at hn@ycombinator.com?

------
epaga
Huge thanks to you guys. Collapsing comments are working perfectly on iPad.

------
danso
> _1\. You can collapse comments in threads. If you 're logged in, collapses
> persist across page refreshes and devices for a week._

The most impressive thing to me is that this feature exists and yet HN seems
to have kept its good ol' fashioned <table>-layout. Obviously, it logically
follows that it is perfectly _possible_ to write a script to traverse a
hierarchy of nested-<tables>, just as it's possible to recreate the Apollo
guidance software in Brainfuck...but it's still impressive nonetheless.

~~~
krapp
Hey, we need _something_ to keep complaining about....

------
fmavituna
Hey, good job there, much needed improvements. Thanks.

There is a CSRF vulnerability in the "favorite" feature.

A very quick demo, Visit this URL:
[https://jsfiddle.net/o9hw1u75/embedded/result/](https://jsfiddle.net/o9hw1u75/embedded/result/)

Now visit your favs from your profile and you'll notice that "SQL Injection"
post is automatically added your fav list. Just like upvote system fav needs
to be protected against CSRF.

~~~
dang
Whoops, good catch! Will fix. Edit: still can't believe I forgot about that
after all these years...

------
akkartik
Thanks dang et al. for doing _such_ an absolutely stellar job. Even more than
this steady stream of new features, the key thing I've been noticing for the
last couple of years is a complete absence of laments about how things have
been going downhill. Keep it up!

------
Someone1234
I have a piece of feedback.

The new collapse button is at the end of the comment. This means that the
collapse button's position on the page changes based on username length and
duration wording (hours Vs. minutes, etc).

One nice thing about other websites which I won't name, is that you can read
and collapse all of the top comments without having to "seek" the collapse
button constantly. You can literally scroll and collapse as you read, it is
always in the same spot.

The functionality is most welcomed, and I'd take this design over not having
it. But it could be slightly better with a subtle design change.

~~~
dang
The argument against that is that with the collapse button so close to the
vote arrow, we would be guaranteed to get misvotes, especially on mobile. The
undo vote feature would no doubt help with that some, but only so much.

~~~
MrMrtn
To be honest I would rather have the vote arrow moved somewhere else. I'm
often more interested in collapsing a comment thread than voting. I'm not sure
if this is something only I care about though.

~~~
danso
It'd be hard to say what most users prefer. I would venture to guess that
we're all conditioned to vote before collapsing comments simply because we've
never had the option to collapse comments until today. So behavior preferences
will change over time.

However, I'll hypothesize that it's preferable (overall) to have more friction
on collapsing comments. A lot of great discussion happens in response to even
a mediocre top-level comment, and forcing the user to take a few extra moments
to skim the child-comments will increase the serendipitous discovery of these
nested gems. Furthermore, the problem of a mediocre top-level comment _with
mediocre nested comments_ being at the actual top of the discussion is
mitigated by the ability for people to downvote the thread, as has been done
(with varying levels of efficacy) until today.

~~~
pfarnsworth
>A lot of great discussion happens in response to even a mediocre top-level
comment, and forcing the user to take a few extra moments to skim the child-
comments will increase the serendipitous discovery of these nested gems.

Is this actually data-driven or just a guess on your part? My experience is
that a mediocre comment rarely ever gets good replies.

~~~
danso
Anecdotal; comment vote scores aren't exposed so I'm not sure if an analysis
is possible, even with what's been loaded on to BigQuery [0].

Maybe "mediocre" is the wrong word, as it implies an absolute judgment (on
some non-existent scale of "quality"). I guess my intuition is derivative of
the "don't judge a book by its cover", in that even if a submitted and upvoted
story is not something I feel like reading, I still might read the comments to
see the discussion.

Maybe someone internal to HN can do a quick calculation of how many child-
comments surpass their parents (while accounting for the differences in
visibility).

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502)

------
smnscu
Yay, some extra RAM for me! I was using this extension to collapse comments,
the new functionality seems to be identical with what the extension does.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
collap...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
collapsible-c/hockhafcdegocajmjhafgjncjpodihkd)

------
thehodge
Great features, the collapsable comments chrome plugin is one of the first
things I install on a fresh machine

------
panic
Awesome! One small bit of feedback: clicking [-] to collapse a thread moves
the nearby text ("user 3 hours ago [+ 5]") a small amount vertically. It would
be cleaner visually if it stayed in place, and it's easier to un-do an
accidental collapse if you don't have to move your mouse.

~~~
epaga
A bit more info here - it moves a small amount vertically only if both the
upvote and downvote arrows are visible. Collapsing older comments where only
the upvote arrow is visible doesn't have the same effect.

------
AstroJetson
Welcome Scott. @dang - Good luck with the initial "vacations and a day off". I
found that the initial incantations of these turned into a "Astro work day on
neglected home projects" by the life partner. Hopefully not too many down
rounds before you see a positive cycle.

Like the new features.

------
andy_ppp
Please make the Up and Down arrows 3-4 times larger and put a square around
them that changes colour when it's hovered.

Thanks a lot for these useful additions though!

EDIT: An image says 1000 words (slight exaggerated):
[http://imgur.com/LKyUaSl](http://imgur.com/LKyUaSl)

~~~
FollowSteph3
Especially for mobile ;)

------
Tomte
Ah, I noticed sctb a few days ago when he posted along the lines of "we
detached this thread" or something like that and wondered how many low-key or
sporadic moderators there are.

~~~
dang
One fewer now!

------
dsr_
Collapsing threads! Thanks!

~~~
cryptoz
The problem is that the collapse is on the right. It used to be this way on
Reddit too, but after users complained they moved it to the left. Right now
it's hard to collapse a series of top level comments in a row since you have
to keep moving the mouse around a lot.

Feature request to move the collapse to the left side, like on reddit?

~~~
egeozcan
For people holding a mobile phone with their right hand and using their right
thumb to collapse, works wonderfully.

~~~
jakub_h
Is there a reason not to have the mobile version slightly different from the
desktop one? You could keep happy both populations.

------
zbuttram
Looks like this means HN's JavaScript is no longer just a single short script
tag's worth. Definitely welcome changes, and thanks to those involved.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I've been using HN with JavaScript disabled and it has worked fine until
today. Only thing that didn't work for me was search.

But these new features require JS and that's fine with me. Not all JS is evil.

~~~
Cieplak
Same story here. Actually, I think all of these new features would work
without JS, using just CSS, except retaining collapsed threads across page
loads (although given that CSS is technically Turing complete it is probably
possible if the state were persisted server-side, which you can do with an
html form; personally I would just use JS and cut my hosting costs). Check out
this demo of CSS-only HTML:

[http://codepen.io/ekrof/pen/YqmXdQ/](http://codepen.io/ekrof/pen/YqmXdQ/)

------
jedireza
I love the hiding feature, thank you. I did noticed I can't hide YC company
"hiring" posts.

Ex: "GitLab is hiring a security engineer (gitlab.com)"

~~~
dang
Good catch. That's probably a side effect of job ads being treated differently
in the code. We'll look into fixing it.

------
ergothus
Bug: This appears as a "Please read about some new features. [x]" heading, but
clicking the "x" does nothing (including after page reload)

Otherwise: Awesome! The collapse feature in particular is something I've long
wanted.

~~~
sctb
It looks like this can happen if you have local storage disabled (perhaps
temporarily, if you're using an incognito window).

~~~
ergothus
Doesn't seem to be the cause for me. I've not disabled anything (in fact,
going into local storage I can see a few settings), and I'm not incognito.

~~~
sctb
If you'd like to email hn@ycombinator.com and include any errors you see in
your browser's console, we can help troubleshoot. Otherwise, we'll remove the
banner before long.

------
elsurudo
As someone who can never keep track of interesting links, I welcome the
"favorite" functionality as another system I will use for a while, until it
gets cluttered up and meaningless :) But honestly, good stuff.

------
pedalpete
I think many HN readers should take a good look at this list of features and
look at how long HN has been around. These may seem like obvious things, but
HN stayed very true to MVP for a very long time.

Any insight as to why now was the right time to add in these features might
help others identify timing of expanding on a core feature set.

------
daveguy
These are _awesome_ improvements. One change set, 1000% improved messaging. I
think the only thing left that I wish I could do is click on a parent link
from a given link (when you're in the middle of a long comment list and you
want to see the specific post to which a message is responding).

------
dragonwriter
> You can collapse comments in threads. If you're logged in, collapses persist
> across page refreshes and devices for a week.

This is a nice feature, though I'd prefer if collapsing preserved the "root"
comment and collapsed the responses, rather than hiding the root comment.

~~~
dang
We did consider that, but sometimes one wants to collapse a very long top-
level comment.

~~~
username3
Why not set a max height for the top-level comment and use overflow CSS?

------
metafex
When hiding the first and then the last story, this was the result:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/snip-
story?onop=news&id=1207282...](https://news.ycombinator.com/snip-
story?onop=news&id=12072827)

I guess that's not intended...

~~~
Nadya
Was able to reproduce, but only hiding first _then_ last - last then first
doesn't break things.

Was that intuition to test that? Hiding the first then the last story seems an
awfully specific test.

~~~
metafex
It was just pure coincidence.

------
valgaze
This is an interesting read:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js?fviVA4TBdTrpMa3yBUk0](https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js?fviVA4TBdTrpMa3yBUk0):

function $(id) { return document.getElementById(id); }

------
ixtli
I am happy to add "undown/unvote" to my list of internet words that should
have existed before but did not.

------
vitd
Just curious - why are things like "Gitlab is hiring" not hideable? I don't
plan to apply for a job there, so I don't care to see that story anymore
today. But I don't see a way to hide it.

~~~
dang
That's a bug:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074233).

Edit: should be fixed now.

~~~
vitd
Looks good! Thanks!

------
c17r
All good stuff. The HackerNews Enhancement Suite plugin for Chrome really
borks the page the now!

[http://imgur.com/CXaHIqO](http://imgur.com/CXaHIqO)

~~~
pgrote
Can confirm.

Hopefully, the extension will be updated soon.

~~~
etcet
I'll work on it once I get home tonight. I must be the only one who hates to
hear of new HN features :)

~~~
ibejoeb
Glad to see it mainlined! Wish I hadn't spent the past few days rejiggering
all this stuff, though...

There's a new proof-of-concept branch that doesn't break beyond some
presentational stuff. Would love to get some feedback and help proving it out.
It might not provide much benefit in light of these changes, but it could be a
good base for new features.

------
marcoperaza
Very cool. Great work!

Small suggestion: Maybe put a link to /hidden somewhere, like the user's own
profile page.

~~~
dang
Good idea. Will add to list.

~~~
smarks
I'd appreciate a link to /hidden as well, as I just spent some time hunting
around for one.

------
JamesBarney
"Scott is[...] an excellent programmer with a meticulous eye for detail, and a
thoroughly decent human being"

Worked with Scott, can confirm he is both a great programmer, and great human
being.

------
amyjess
Thank you!

#2 in particular is most welcome; as hard to hit as the buttons are on mobile,
I've misvoted a few times, and I'm glad I can finally correct that when it
happens again.

------
peterkelly
The collapsing comments thing is great, but what I'd really love to see is the
ability to display only the top-level comments, so then I can drill down to
sub-comments I'm interested in reading. Often I find that there'll be one sub-
comment thread I'm not particularly interested in (e.g. discussion trails off
into a completely different topic) and end up scrolling a lot to try and find
the next top-level comment.

~~~
acjohnson55
When I was at HuffPost, we briefly had a comment interface that let you switch
between depth-first and breadth-first comment listing. We retired it pretty
quickly with our entire comments system, but I remain convinced that some
version of that is the way to go.

------
aban
Great to see so many long-awaited features land today!

Awesome job and big a thanks to everyone involved.

------
fapjacks
Ah, I for one really appreciate the unvote feature! I have an awful habit of
mis-voting or accidentally voting when I just want to see a profile. Thanks!

------
Fenntrek
>Save and share the best stories and comments.

Tried using different bookmarking apps etc but always prefer native saving of
items on actual sites, great addition!

...Also welcome Scott!

------
geuis
I'm concerned about the "voting" feature. Years ago we had a downvote feature.
Basically, downvoting lead to a big decline in the quality and level of
discussion going on.

pg removed it because it was leading into a trend of people downvoting
comments because they disagreed with them, not because the comment in question
wasn't making valid points.

And if the collapse feature could be moved to the left, woot!

------
etendue
The new features notification bar at the top was really nice. Maybe it could
be used again in the future when the topbar goes black in memoriam?

------
mgr86
These are great! especially the collapse comment threads!

Welcome sctb.

------
OliverJones
Hey, dang and sctb, thanks for all the great moderating work. You've built a
fine site. Happy to hear you're getting a vacation!

------
ryanlm
The persistence of collapsing is a killer feature that I wish reddit had.

~~~
dothts
Try RES :)
[https://redditenhancementsuite.com/](https://redditenhancementsuite.com/)
lots of other nice features aside from collapsible comments (got no
affiliation to them, just a happy user).

~~~
ryanlm
I don't want to have to install browser extensions or configure reddit.
Seriously I get enough of that by using Linux desktop.

------
iraphael
Interesting to see more js in hn, esp with collapse-comments.

For a while now, hn has (in)famously had only a couple of functions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11307758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11307758)
(Not that the new features changed this dramatically).

------
SCdF
Yay, thank you HN developers, whomever you are! One more Chrome extension I
can disable :-)

------
sixothree
I would prefer it if all root level comments were collapsed by default. That
way people would be better able to organize their postings. Without it, many
threads seem to get the same root level comment multiple times.

------
joepvd
I wish you a nice and well deserved holiday, @dang! And good luck + fun,
@sctb!

------
a13n
I run a site called Product Pains where people can post and vote on feedback
for any product. Several people have contributed to feedback about Hacker
News. Interestingly, the top post is "Make comments collapsable".

[https://productpains.com/product/hacker-
news](https://productpains.com/product/hacker-news)

Hacker News stands out to me as a product that could be significantly improved
through aggregated user feedback. I encourage others to contribute and Dan +
Scott (Welcome!) to subscribe to feedback.

Thanks for the improvements.

------
B1FF_PSUVM
Feature request: a "fold all/none/random" button (top level, a single "link"
cycling through would be fine.)

Rationale and further spec: "ain't+anyone+got+time+for" reading 400+ comments,
not if they're doing anything else. Setting a profile value for the N comments
I'm willing to look at in a first pass would help, and a random sampling would
probably be fine.

Snag: desired behavior is folding off a single comment (i.e. hiding its text,
leaving the id and time), not all those beneath, as current hierarchical
folding obviously works.

------
gist
How do you reverse a hide on the homepage? I am not seeing anyway to do that.

~~~
dang
You have to go to the /hidden page. We'll add a link to that from your profile
(but it's not there yet).

It would be nice if there were a way to do this from the front or newest page
themselves but that's kinda inconsistent with hiding the thing.

~~~
bobwaycott
I notice when I navigate to /hidden there's a link called "hidden" that shows
in the header with all the other main links, but it doesn't show anywhere
else.

~~~
dang
You mean the 'hidden' label in white? That's just there to tell you what page
you're on. All pages have it (or should have), whether or not they're normally
linked in the top bar.

~~~
bobwaycott
Oh, gotcha. Hadn't noticed that before now.

------
nickpsecurity
The Hide feature will help with tangent arguments that add little to
discussion. The vote change will help with long-time problem of people
clicking wrong button. Great improvements. :)

------
cm3
Is there a place to ask for features?

~~~
dang
Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the way to ask us anything.

~~~
cm3
I was thinking more of a public place where others can see it.

For instance, I would ask for a feature that downvoting shall require a
mandatory comment or similar improvements to discourage anonymous drive-by-
downvoting which gives you no info as to what's objectionable/irrelevant in
your comment. From experience, 2/3 of the downvotes appear to be subjective
likes/unlikes leading to anonymous downvotes. In fact, I never downvote
anything, so I'd be fine if the downvote button was replaced with the FLAG
link. But there are some who see use in the downvote function, so that's to be
considered as well.

~~~
danso
FWIW, here's a fun solicitation from pg from nearly 10 years ago: "Please tell
us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363)

There are more than 1,700 comments (which would be a ton of comments on any
thread today)...so I only skimmed through, but I think I saw way more
suggestions that sound good that, for whatever reason, aren't implemented
today.

------
dredmorbius
Awesome! Now I need to dig out my list of suggestions for HN improvements, and
see how many you hit, but this is a _lot_ of them.

(Extending / changing markup to catch _underbars_ and include them on
highlighting would be nice.)

OK, misses a number of Mobile usability issues, but still an improvement.

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/286xclrgdn2hgbgrikrovg](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/286xclrgdn2hgbgrikrovg)

------
protomyth
Love the changes and thanks for the un-feature. My only wish now is making the
up / down arrows bigger, but the un might just make that a moot point.

Is this still written in Arc?

~~~
jakub_h
On a related note, I wonder how well an Arc implementation on top of (the
newly freed) Chez Scheme would work.

------
ChrisGranger
It's so nice to be able to collapse comment threads. That's a feature that was
a long time in coming. Now I have one fewer reason to use Greasemonkey...

------
Viper007Bond
Thank you so, so much! Reading anything but the first top level comment was a
complete pain on mobile and now I can collapse it to see other discussions.
Thanks!

------
0xmohit
> Please welcome him and be nice!

Welcome, @sctb.

(Just wondering: who won't be nice to a moderator?)

@dang, Is there a post available that talks about some of the tooling that you
might use for moderation?

------
harrisreynolds
This is an official welcome of Scott's official role!!

------
JoachimSchipper
This is useful. And welcome sctb!

------
tedmiston
Somebody had to try it...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=1970-01-01](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=1970-01-01)

    
    
        We don't have this data before 2014-11-11.
    

[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=3000-01-01](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=3000-01-01)

    
    
        Not there yet.
    

Nice touches :)

------
joshmanders
This is my first favorited story! Thanks dang and HN team!

------
logicallee
Welcome to Scott, people have long wondered whether you were using the royal
"we". We'll have to start writing "Dan/Scott". :)

------
prakashk
Favoriting doesn't appear to work for me. When I click on the 'favorite' link
on an article page, I am taken to my favorites page, and nothing is shown
added to the list. I only see the message "To add a story here, click on its
timestamp to go to its page, then click 'favorite' at the top."

Using Firefox 47.0 on Ubuntu 16.04. uBlock Origin shows "0 requests blocked".

------
Kinnard
Love the minimalism of the collapse/uncollapse!!!

------
rismay
Will Feature #5 be available through the Firebase API?

~~~
sctb
Good question! We can look into it if you don't mind emailing
hn@ycombinator.com.

~~~
modo_
In a similar vein - are there plans to make user favorites accessible through
the API? Number of favorites an item has received would be cool too.

------
tedmiston
These are very welcome and exciting improvements, especially on mobile!

Is there a way (through site or API) to see all users who have favorited a
given story?

------
manish_gill
Thank you for the great features! More than the collapsible comments, I'll
look forward to people's favourite list :D

------
orky56
Once collapsed, the summary gives a count of the child comments. However, the
gut reaction is that this correlates to upvotes/karma. I'm wondering if [-] &
[+] can be fixed to their appropriate size while the number of children is
supplemental to this. Not sure what the best way to format it would be but
worth exploring.

------
jpwagner
Thank you, these are all fantastic except #4.

The problem with the story-hide feature is that some days you may think
something is not interesting from the title, but then an hour later there are
100 comments.

edit: A solution is not "well then don't use the hide feature" \- Because this
feature is site-wide, in some cases, that momentum would never occur.

~~~
dang
I have mixed feelings about that feature too and am not sure if we should keep
it or not. It felt like it was worth trying, though. For one thing, it's a
stealth way of getting more people to look at page 2.

------
soheil
Love the collapse comments in threads feature.

------
chris_va
UI request

Can you make the "flag | hide | past | web ..." buttons have consistent
spacing from the left margin? I'd like to keep my mouse in the same position
while I filter through the articles on /newest, rather than hunt and click as
the "hide" button moves back and forth based on the username/etc length.

------
antouank
Glad to see the "collapsing" feature. It's definitely helpful.

Weird to see the "favorite" one. I implemented it on my reader[1], but almost
no-one used it ( I do though ).

Any update on whether auth will be given to the API consumers?

[1]: [https://hack.ernews.info/](https://hack.ernews.info/)

------
trop
Interesting! Would
[https://news.ycombinator.com/classic](https://news.ycombinator.com/classic)
get the "hide" treatment as well? (It doesn't currently.) Or perhaps one
assumes one doesn't need to hide anything on the classic page?

------
duck
Great to see new features like this that are simple and a good fit with the
current site.

@dang - Any chance you will be working on the API more soon? Would love an
easier way to build out
[http://hackernewsletter.com](http://hackernewsletter.com) each week. Thanks
again!

------
baby
Good thing for HN, but this is actually really annoying for people like me who
have been using the HN suite extension on firefox to place the [-] on the
left.

Now that it's on the right you:

* can't minimize and maximize quickly

* can't minimize a series of comments quickly (you have to move your mouse a lot to find the [-] every time

------
Pxtl
The comment-collapsing feature is nice, but the big [-] on every comment is
somewhat ugly, visually speaking.

~~~
vinchuco
I think it's the brackets. A simple - changing to + would suffice IMHO. Also,
it would help my OCD (exaggerating) to auto-collapse if I have visited the
page before, instead of collapsing all of the comments.

------
nxzero
Link to "hidden" stories should be on the user profile page and if you click
"hide" it should take you to the user profile page.

-OR-

Take you to the "HN.com/hidden" URL and tell the user to bookmark it.

-OR-

Just be on the main nav if you've hidden links and are logged in.

________

Hidden the link to unhide links that hidden... To hard to do.

------
ninjakeyboard
Upvote and collapse buttons have similar symbols. Could the upvote button also
not be the collapse thread icon? Have to collapse thread to see the comment
score (as [+25]) - could [-] not also mean that a comment was downvoted? You
have to know that grey means negative score.

------
profmonocle
Unvoting is a very welcome change. I've misclicked and accidentally downvoted
people a few times.

------
blatant
Welcome Scott!

------
drcreed
This update broke regular indentation for me; comments have no indentation at
all for me now.

My setup is: Chromium Version 54.0.2794.0 (64-bit) on Win8.1, uBlock Origin
with literally everything blocked.

I could start allowing scripts from news.ycombinator.com but I'd rather not
make an exception.

~~~
insin
Are you just letting us know you've determined that you can easily solve your
own problem in less time than it took to describe it, but chose not to; or are
you very subtly asking HN to inline hn.js into every single page because <%=
reasons %>? :)

~~~
drcreed
That I can work around a bug does not mean it doesn't exist.

As an aside, inline JS gets blocked too, so that wouldn't work. My point isn't
that it should be inlined; my point is that the styling should come from the
CSS and not from some untrusted script.

------
lettercarrier
I have a skimpy monthly data plan, and appreciate the fact that your changes
does nothing to increase data intentionally or accidentally (like Reddit).

I like the fact that the hide feature does not persist when I am not logged
in. I mostly use mobile and never log in (via mobile).

------
spydum
Interesting, not sure if this happened a while back or in part of this update,
but I am noticing you can only down vote relatively new comments? See here:
[http://imgur.com/0bNIi6B](http://imgur.com/0bNIi6B)

------
spdustin
_dang_ , I have to admit some surprise that you didn't "favorite" this post.

------
leesalminen
This is awesome. Thank you for all the work you do to keep HN one of the best
sites on the web.

------
josh_carterPDX
The "hide" new stories feature is awesome. Thanks for rolling this out. High
five!

~~~
josh_carterPDX
Ok, now I'm wondering how many flag reports HNs is getting now that I
accidentally hit it twice. :)

------
ifdefdebug
There is one thing I often think about when I see certain comments downvoted:
downvoting a comment should cost one karma.

After all, this score system is called karma. And hurting someone else's Karma
- even for valid reasons - is bad karma by definition :)

~~~
aws_ls
Interesting suggestion. I am not sure about it costing the same karma. The net
effect will then be, that the threshold of acquiring 'downvoting power' will
shift further upwards. For example, people who get to 501 karma, will have to
wait to get to decent threshold (perhaps 550) to feel comfortable down voting
even when they want to.

May be, they could just limit the downvotes per user, to just 10 per day or
something like that, so that nobody can abuse it.

On a different note, not related to your comment, a feature request (and
saying it here itself, just to have a single comment on this page):

1) I have always wanted to have some basic information about HN users, as I
hover over their handles. As of now, I need to click that link into a new tab
to see that. It could be a useful feature to have, @dang & @scott, while you
are at it.

2) Have a separate humor upvote. Often some comments (e.g. [1]) make you LOL.
But you can't do anything other than upvoting them, as reddit style 'LOL'
comments are not allowed. I think, we can do with encouraging some humor here,
if it can be managed.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12076046](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12076046)

Edit: Added feature req no. 2

------
Johnny555
I'm thinking of signing up, I've been wanting to play the game, but don't
really like walking around so this gives me the best of both worlds. I still
get the excitement of the gameplay without so much unnecessary exercise.

~~~
aws_ls
Are you talking about Pokemon Go? You seem to have posted on the wrong thread.
:-)

~~~
Johnny555
Ha, yeah, that's what I get for being distracted by the "New features!" banner
:) Too late to delete my post now.

------
z3t4
One thing that I find annoying is that when you get down-voted you have no
idea why ... If your post is opinionated you can figure out it's a silent "I
disagree", yet, without any reasoning. So you learn nothing.

------
rachkovsky
Great stuff! The only feature I need now is 'open links in a new window'
option. Yes, I know that you can do Ctrl+click or click with the mouse wheel
to achieve the same, but that is not the same!

------
FollowSteph3
A quick suggestion, can u move the logout link away from just below the
refresh buttons on mobile devices. I've hit that logout buttons more times
than I care to when trying to refresh a page.

------
pknerd
There should be a feature to highlight posts that don't get featured on Home
Page despite of being good. May be something like _Moderators ' Choice_ or
_Posts of the Week_?

------
Animats
Enough already. Turn off the banner after it has been dismissed once.

------
Artlav
1\. Awesome. Hm, it's kinda close to edit/delete button in your own ones.
Might be a good idea to separate them a little.

2\. Nice.

3\. Kinda convoluted, but neat.

4\. Kinda pointless. Would be less so if the unhide was accessible with less
friction.

5\. Neat.

Hi Scott!

------
FreeFull
I've actually written an userscript not too long ago to hide downvote arrows,
to prevent accidental downvotes.. Seems that's not too necessary now that
they're undoable.

------
username3
Can collapse only collapse the replies and not collapse the comment?

~~~
dang
Answered here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074272).

------
Mz
Welcome Scott.

------
macintux
Would undoing votes be (as) necessary if the UI didn't lend itself to mis-
voting? Especially on a touch device, the two buttons are a real challenge to
deal with.

------
amzpka
Is the hide feature known to work in incognito mode?

I do not see hide link with any of the stories on the front page. However it
is visible once I open up the story. Intentional?

------
proee
Would you consider adding custom color settings for the background and font
colors? You offer color settings for the top bar, why not for the rest of the
site?

------
dumbfounder
Option to hide viewed articles. I had a plugin that did it but as I view from
different browsers would be good to not have to download that plugin every
time.

------
ronreiter
I created a "best of Hacker News" page based on feature 5:

[https://linkedbbapp.appspot.com](https://linkedbbapp.appspot.com)

Thoughts?

------
jsingleton
Nice work, I was wondering where that favourite link came from. For a brief
moment I thought you had accidentally made upvoted stories and comments
public.

------
ahmedbaracat
Why not trigger the collapsing feature by tapping the post? I myself,
intuitively, thought this is the case until I noticed the tiny minus button :)

------
grandalf
One feature request: Notification of comment replies.

~~~
ytjohn
This has really been my main complaint of HN. Nearly impossible to have a
conversation if I don't notice a reply until I randomly decide to click the
number beside my username.

------
kup0
Very useful updates. Especially glad to see #2 and #3, as those have been
features where I've naturally run into their absence when using HN

------
EpicEng
>You can collapse comments in threads

Oh thank you so much for this.

------
andreygrehov
Great stuff! Minor bug with the threads collapsing and browser's Back/Forward
buttons. Thanks for all the hard work Dang and Scott.

------
bane
Awesome work, lots of long for asked for features and a new moderator! Sorry
ahead of time when my mouth(keyboard) gets ahead of my brain.

------
oolongCat
Why am I this happy about a very tiny change to HN.

------
DanielStraight
Should I be able to see the unvote link on older votes or is it only available
for a limited time or only on stuff voted on from now on?

~~~
dang
Answered here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073806).

------
dmvaldman
Feature request: Cache favorites so they never 404

~~~
dang
We do plan to make sure the Internet Archive has every story that gets posted
to HN. They made an API for this and at some point (hopefully soon!) we'll
start calling it. So that will help some.

Archiving pages as they were when they were submitted is one of those harder-
than-they-seem problems. We spent some time working on it and decided it
wasn't worth the investment it was clearly going to demand.

------
kazinator
BUG! I get a strange response whenever I hide the bottom-most item in the
page.

Appears gone now; it reproduced consistently just a few minutes ago.

------
JMiao
great to know you two are back together! i think i checked skysheet.com a
couple months ago to see if you finally launched. ;)

------
Analemma_
Hacker News, adding features that people have been requesting for years? Is it
April 1st already?

Nah, I kid ;) This all looks great, thanks!

------
Yhippa
Re: 5

> We don't have this data before 2014-11-11.

Aww bummer. Would have been cool to see what was the new shiny over time.
Still a cool feature!

~~~
gus_massa
Isn't it possible to simulate it? Just make a few wrong assumptions, like that
the sorting algorithm hadn't changed and that the hand assigned penalties were
applied all the time, and ...

(Alternative: sort by points instead of by time.)

------
oblio
The Hackernews server, slowly turning into the Reddit server 0.2 (minus
Reddit's famous performance problems) :)

------
anonbanker
favorites will save me a ton of karma, so I no longer have to post as
breadcrumbs to a great idea. thanks for that.

------
Tomte
Still, the most urgently needed feature is missing: telling me which comments
I haven't seen, yet. It's a constant nuisance in longer threads. Really, this
is much more vital than just about every feature you've introduced over the
last months.

~~~
dang
> _Really, this is much more vital than just about every feature you 've
> introduced over the last months_

That is a highly disputable claim, given the overall user feedback we've seen.

Such things always remind me of Jerry Weinberg's fable about how he couldn't
sleep because a dripping faucet was driving him crazy. He gets up to fix it in
the middle of the night, finally gets back to bed, and... now he can't sleep
because hears a gate creaking. Moral: when you fix your #1 problem, your #2
problem becomes your #1 problem.

------
mannykannot
If the [-] means I have downvoted a comment, it seems that I have downvoted
everyone everywhere. Sorry about that.

~~~
dragonwriter
The [-] is the button for collapsing the subthread rooted at the comment it is
shown on.

------
dylanz
Collapsible comments... thank you so much.

------
ausjke
Everything is good, just hope to add one more big feature, that is a mobile
app, something like what Reddit has.

------
deafcalculus
Could you please hide comments at depth > 2 by default? Comments on popular
posts tend to be deeply nested.

------
toephu2
Welcome Scott!

------
sjukfan
New features? The Apocalypse is near!

------
auston
THANKS FOR THE COLLAPSES!!! :')

------
therealasdf
Nice work. A suggestion: add keyboard shortcuts to help navigate and collapse
comments.

------
theycallmemorty
Thanks so much for the 'skip this flamewar button' aka the collapse button.

------
kazinator
It would be good to be able to hide non-submissions like job postings and
whatnot.

------
edwintorok
Looks like there is an unvouch for vouched comments too, or was that there
before?

------
nxzero
Please do user testing on the existing features before adding more features.

------
baudehlo
Still no ability to comment via the API? Apps are still scraping to do this.

------
dageshi
Thank you!

------
a_c
It is funny to see how similar comments on this post to that of youtube

------
harperlee
It would be great that hidden posts are also not show in /best

------
techolic
> You can collapse comments in threads.

Thank god we're finally having this.

------
aaronsnoswell
Yay! Been waiting for collapsible comments for ever! Thanks!

------
mrmondo
Thank you for your work and implementation on this :)

------
hxxbit
thank you so much

------
Shamiq
dang, this is excellent. thank you so much :)

------
astrodust
Having a Reddit-style inbox for responses to comments is urgently overdue.
Most new users would never think to click on "threads" to find replies.

~~~
brbsix
This still doesn't address new users, but you can use a third-party service
like hnreplies.com.

~~~
astrodust
That a third party service exists hints that this is a core feature long
overdue.

------
mathattack
Welcome aboard!

------
sidcool
Finally our prayers have been answered.

------
Globz
Thanks for the update this awesome!

------
Entangled
Collapsible comments, I love that.

------
ssebastianj
[Expand|Collapse] all comments.

------
msie
1 - FINALLY!!!!! 2,4 - COOL

------
0x54MUR41
Well done, Hacker News.

------
amenghra
Feels like april 1st!

------
hipcactus
Great Job!

------
edwintorok
I was clicking hide, hide, hide for the stories near the bottom of the front-
page until I got this back: [https://news.ycombinator.com/snip-
story?onop=news&id=1206078...](https://news.ycombinator.com/snip-
story?onop=news&id=12060787)

    
    
        ["      <tr class='athing' id='12065699'>\n      <td align=\"right\" valign=\"top\" class=\"title\"><span class=\"rank\">1.</span></td>      <td valign=\"top\" class=\"votelinks\"><center><a id='up_12065699' onclick='return vote(this, \"up\")' href='vote?id=12065699&amp;how=up&amp;auth=099c6eb692711a8f986d31bf0f7d86021ded1115&amp;goto=snip-story%3Fonop%3Dnews%26id%3D12060787'><div class='votearrow' title='upvote'></div></a></center></td><td class=\"title\"><a href=\"https://coding.net/u/jinzw/p/mathEditor/git\" class=\"storylink\">A WYSIWYG math editor</a><span class=\"sitebit comhead\"> (<a href=\"from?site=coding.net\"><span class=\"sitestr\">coding.net</span></a>)</span></td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\"></td><td class=\"subtext\">\n        <span class=\"score\" id=\"score_12065699\">63 points</span> by <a href=\"user?id=tvvocold\" class=\"hnuser\">tvvocold</a> <span class=\"age\"><a href=\"item?id=12065699\">1 day ago</a></span> <span id=\"unv_12065699\"></span> | <a href=\"flag?id=12065699&amp;auth=099c6eb692711a8f986d31bf0f7d86021ded1115&amp;goto=snip-story%3Fonop%3Dnews%26id%3D12060787\">flag</a> | <a href=\"hide?id=12065699&amp;goto=snip-story%3Fonop%3Dnews%26id%3D12060787\" onclick=\"return hidestory(12065699)\">hide</a> | <a href=\"item?id=12065699\">21 comments</a>              </td></tr>\n  ",null]
    

What happened? (refreshing the page makes it work again)

Edit: there it is again: [https://news.ycombinator.com/snip-
story?onop=news&id=1207486...](https://news.ycombinator.com/snip-
story?onop=news&id=12074862)

Steps to reproduce:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/hide?id=12074096&goto=news](https://news.ycombinator.com/hide?id=12074096&goto=news)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/hide?id=12073011&goto=news](https://news.ycombinator.com/hide?id=12073011&goto=news)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/hide?id=12074388&goto=news](https://news.ycombinator.com/hide?id=12074388&goto=news)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/hide?id=12074388&goto=news](https://news.ycombinator.com/hide?id=12074388&goto=news)
(last news item on front-page)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/snip-
story?onop=news&id=1207438...](https://news.ycombinator.com/snip-
story?onop=news&id=12074388)

    
    
       ["      <tr class='athing' id='12065592'>\n      <td align=\"right\" valign=\"top\" class=\"title\"><span class=\"rank\">1.</span></td>      <td valign=\"top\" class=\"votelinks\"><center><a id='up_12065592' onclick='return vote(this, \"up\")' href='vote?id=12065592&amp;how=up&amp;auth=7b542c4f6ee7726621bada191c3874162d4475d1&amp;goto=snip-story%3Fonop%3Dnews%26id%3D12074388'><div class='votearrow' title='upvote'></div></a></center></td><td class=\"title\"><a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-04/brexit-is-a-lehman-moment-for-european-banks\" class=\"storylink\">Brexit Is a Lehman Moment for European Banks</a><span class=\"sitebit comhead\"> (<a href=\"from?site=bloomberg.com\"><span class=\"sitestr\">bloomberg.com</span></a>)</span></td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\"></td><td class=\"subtext\">\n        <span class=\"score\" id=\"score_12065592\">200 points</span> by <a href=\"user?id=vool\" class=\"hnuser\">vool</a> <span class=\"age\"><a href=\"item?id=12065592\">1 day ago</a></span> <span id=\"unv_12065592\"></span> | <a href=\"flag?id=12065592&amp;auth=7b542c4f6ee7726621bada191c3874162d4475d1&amp;goto=snip-story%3Fonop%3Dnews%26id%3D12074388\">flag</a> | <a href=\"hide?id=12065592&amp;goto=snip-story%3Fonop%3Dnews%26id%3D12074388\" onclick=\"return hidestory(12065592)\">hide</a> | <a href=\"item?id=12065592\">146 comments</a>              </td></tr>\n  ",null]

------
internaut
Welcome Scott!

Three pieces of feedback generally.

1\. Thank you for the comment collapse feature! And having the patience of Job
generally speaking!

2\. Some comments really stand out as exceptional and a +1 karma doesn't quite
seem to be enough. Maybe if enough people save it into their favorites it
could be promoted in some way? Dark blue text would be a nice feature. Not too
intrusive but recognizable as a mark of quality.

3\. While the karma system mostly works to deter trolls it is also a somewhat
troubled concept. Each forum has political facets or biases even with the best
of moderation efforts and there are noticeable shifts over time too. Is there
a way to separate political point me-tooism and 'dueling' from forum
maintenance?

I have two ideas that might help here. Obviously moderators getting involved
is a good route to disaster, but maybe if one setting is a coarse filter to
prevent a user having to see any politics. Another setting (toggled by
discrete thread button) is to 're-black' a comment thread to see what the
dissenting views were (and odd cases like your post being grayed out right
now, maybe the flamewar detector got triggered by accident).

------
robmass94
Does anyone still use Greasemonkey? I created a small little script[1] a while
back. It's not nearly as sophisticated as the HN Enhancement Suite plugin, but
it adds some nice features. It previously added comment collapsing, but I
disabled it since it's now a permanent feature.

[1] [https://bitbucket.org/robmass94/hacker-news-
enhancements/src](https://bitbucket.org/robmass94/hacker-news-
enhancements/src)

~~~
lkbm
Yeah, I use Tampermonkey on Chrome, which is essentially the same thing--not
sure how big the community is, but it's not no-one. (For a long time, you
could just use Greasemonkey scripts natively as extensions on Chrome, but they
nixed that when they decided all extensions need to be on the Play Store,
iirc.)

------
justinlardinois
Thank you so much for #1. When you're scrolling a deeply nested comment thread
it's hard to tell what branch you're on sometimes because all the indent
levels sort of just meld together to the eye. In the past I often would open a
comment on its own page just to isolate its children.

------
dingo_bat
> Scott is my cofounder from Skysheet

Off-topic, but if anyone is interested in educating a non native speaker: why
is the word "my" used here? Wouldn't this mean that Scott founded the author?
Which doesn't make sense. Or does it mean that the author and Scott are both
co-founders?

Thanks for any input.

~~~
graeme
Many people have cofounders, but Scott is _their_ particular cofounder.

It's like saying "my dog" or "my house". The use of my doesn't change just
because the noun changes.

~~~
graeme
I should add that if humans _did_ have founders, then we would say "my
founder".

But we don't. So understanding of that phrase depends on us knowing the use of
the noun cofounder.

~~~
dingo_bat
Yeah I get the grammatical usage but I don't know how humans can have
cofounders. My mom and dad kind of cofounded me, I guess.

~~~
dang
Super late to this, but I have a weakness for grammatical puzzles. I think you
put your finger on something rather obscure—the sort of thing the people on
Language Log would come up with competing explanations for. Here's a guess
about what is going on.

The "my" in "my cofounder" is different from how "my" usually works. Normally
it expresses an "of" bond, as "my father" means "father of me". But here, it
expresses a "with" bond, as in "cofounder _with_ me", not "cofounder of me".
Think of "my" as being bound to "co" rather than "founder".

The reason why the "founder of me" meaning doesn't arise here is partly
because (as graeme pointed out) we never speak of founding a person in
English. But it's also because the phrase already mentions what Scott is a
founder of (Skysheet), so "cofounder" has a natural object nearby to bind
with.

Compare this to a phrase like "my coworker". There, the "with" meaning is
unambiguous, but that's because "work" doesn't normally take an object, so
there's no competition for what "my" should bind to.

------
ebbv
Welcome Scott. These are all good features, thanks.

------
winteriscoming
Thank you for adding these new features, like them!

A couple of things:

1\. I upvoted this submission, but I don't see any unvote link anywhere (I
even refreshed the page and am currently logged in). Am on Firefox 35.0.1 (if
it matters).

2\. Would have liked the favorites to be private and not accessible to other
users (just like comments/submissions that I upvoted), but all the same, I am
happy that we now have support for favorites. Just curious - was there some
specific reason why you decided to go with making favorites publicly
accessible to other users?

~~~
winteriscoming
>> I upvoted this submission, but I don't see any unvote link anywhere (I even
refreshed the page and am currently logged in). Am on Firefox 35.0.1 (if it
matters).

I just read a comment in this thread that the unvote link lasts for an hour. I
don't recollect if I actually voted an hour before I started looking for the
unvote link. I didn't start looking for it immediately after I voted this up,
so it's likely that an hour had passed.

------
dimino
I recall vaguely that one of the reasons for not allowing collapsable comment
trees in the past was related to the desire to make it difficult to continue
comment trees, which was a good thing (more comments is generally bad, beyond
a point, was the underlying philosophy).

Does this represent a departure from that philosophy, or was this never part
of consideration for the feature?

~~~
dang
Not sure I follow; introducing collapses makes it harder to extend trees (once
they're collapsed), so wouldn't that argument go the other way?

In any case, we didn't think much about that concern in discussing the new
features. We did (and do) worry about whether they will lessen the impact of
HN's having a single communal front page and threads, now that people can hide
and collapse things they don't want to see. That's something we'll try to
watch out for, though I'm not sure how to measure it.

~~~
dimino
From what I understood, once you start needing to collapse threads, you're
already at the threshold of "more comments are detracting from the quality,"
or that was the theory, anyway. I'm almost certainly misremembering.

I feel positive about this change though, I just was curious about the
decision making process is all, thanks.

------
ddorian43
We need to hide jobs too if possible.

~~~
dang
Please see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074067).

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074198)
since it had nothing to do with that subthread.

------
Noseshine
How about a feature "mark all read" (on the frontpage)?

------
Aelinsaar
1.) I stopped reading there for a minute, because I had to wipe away the tears
of joy. Seriously, thanks for this one!

------
xkeemy
Disable HN Enhancement Suite

See collapse is all the way on the right and realize unread highlights are
gone

Renable HN Enhancement Suite

------
sgt101
3 doesn't ring true - why should I care what anyone favorites?

~~~
dang
You needn't! But we hope it will create an interesting new way to find
excellent stuff on HN that one otherwise wouldn't have seen. So much
content—both good and bad, of course, but much of it superb—streams through
this site that no one can see it all. Not even those of us whose job it is to
monitor it.

Maybe this is just my jaded moderator perspective, but it sometimes feels like
more attention gets paid to the bad stuff on HN (the latest flamewar, the
latest shockingly offensive something-or-other) than to the brilliant, often
quietly brilliant stuff that shows up here every day. That's clearly
backwards, so we need new ways to give the best posts the attention they
deserve. Shared favorites lists are one effort in that area.

~~~
sgt101
Ok - let's give it a go and see if it works!

------
sdegutis
These mostly seem like bad ideas:

#1 This is the only good feature listed. It helps people skim comment threads
for a relevant discussion.

#2 Without this feature, people are encouraged to think before voting, and
only vote when they mean it.

#3 Without this feature, people are encouraged to use HN as a transient source
of news and intellectual discussion, and not twitter.

#4 Without this feature, people are encouraged to go away and do real stuff
until enough time has passed that the front page is new again.

#5 Without this feature, people are encouraged to read or discuss an article
based on its own merits, not just what appeals most to hivemind upvotes.

~~~
jacquesm
Tough crowd. I think all of them have their uses. The good news is you don't
_have_ to use them and how others use them is not really your problem. You're
speaking about 'people' as if you speak for others, when in reality you only
speak for yourself.

~~~
sdegutis
Just giving my feedback. Don't really care how it's used, or even if at all.

