Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator - pg
======
JoshTriplett
Please change page titles from "Hacker News | $TITLE" to "$TITLE | Hacker
News". Right now, my tab bar shows a pile of orange [Y] icons that all say
"Hacker Ne...", which makes them impossible to distinguish. The [Y] icon
already tells me the tab points to Hacker News, so an excerpt of the title
would help more than the site name.

~~~
grillermo
+vote for this idea, same problem here

~~~
shawnjanas
+1 this idea as well

------
drp
Showing subdomains on all google domains would be nice.

There are lots of submissions from sites.google.com that seem much more
clickable because they end with (google.com). Similarly I'd be more likely to
click a link from code.google.com.

------
d0mine
Please remove _up-vote_ buttons from the main page for _unvisited_ links. An
absence of these buttons could enforce a vote-after-read policy.

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.

~~~
JoelSutherland
It would also be good to cap the number of upvotes at 50 or so. Now that
submissions are getting 100-200 upvotes they are on the front page for days.

~~~
CalmQuiet
I don't have a problem with such active discussions being on front page for
days... Since, for my part, I can't necessarily make it here daily.

------
tptacek
When you upvote a comment, _if you have authored any parent comment_ in the
the thread, your nick should be listed in the comment metadata ("Upvoted by
commenters: tqbf, RiderOfGiraffes").

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.

------
ivankirigin
Let me follow people. I just learned about Bret Taylor's account.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154>

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.

~~~
patrickk
Hacker Friends:

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpg...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpgnhefebefiabhmbfn)

------
ericb
I edit posts extensively before submitting, so I frequently see "Unknown or
expired link."

This error is a minor tax on carefully worded, carefully considered posts.
I've lost posts following this error due to back button/refresh mishaps. I
could post, then edit, but then people are voting and replying to content that
is changing.

~~~
LPTS
I second this.

~~~
initself
Third.

------
nkurz
It's embarrassing to make the claim, but I think I have a solution worth
trying regarding the display of scores.

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!

------
andrethegiant
Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲ to make the upvote
triangle look crisp on high-resolution displays.

------
vegashacker
I've noticed that sometimes the domain name shown in parens next to the link
is kind of useless. Take, for example,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449670>. "tumblr.com" is not useful in
this case, but "titocosta.tumblr.com" would be more helpful--"oh, it's
someone's personal blog named Tito Costa." Interestingly, it looks like
sometimes you already do show more than just "domain.com", as in
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449221>.

~~~
tvon
That's been bugging me too, primarily with google.com.

To prevent wasted space you could ignore certain prefixes (www), or you could
have a whitelist for hosts to show the prefix for (tumblr.com, google.com,
etc).

------
pg
I noticed a several people suggesting features in other threads, so I'm
starting one explicitly for that. I know there's a lot that needs improving;
the site is pretty bare-bones at this stage. So propose whatever new features
you think we need, and vote for the ones that you want most.

~~~
sharpshoot
This is more a content issue but to really build the community is have more
fully fledged profiles - with location, bio - make it one or two lines max and
a website or blog link. If we are what we think/read then it would be a great
starting point in finding cofounders or people who are on the same wavelength.
I would also agree on seeing the latest comments - and maybe highlighting
posts which you've commented on/ or submitted showing if there were new
comments that you haven't read. So show "7 comments | 3 new" so it would be
easy to come back to your home page and see how the discussion has evolved.

~~~
davidw
Yes! That's something I don't like about reddit - I spend my time giving them
free content, and I don't even get a link back to my own web site:-/

------
DanI-S
I'd love to be able to see the names of people who have repeatedly upvoted
your comments. It'd be a great way of finding people who share the same kind
of mindset, enhancing HN as a 'people discovery tool'.

It would also work for 'if you think this person is clever, you might like to
read things posted by these others'.

------
Tycho
I've noticed that HN users are often thoughtful enough to write short
summaries of linked articles in the comments section. For instance

 _Summary: Wired.com graph shows that while the web continues to grow (in
terms of bandwidth consumption), it is not growing as fast as other internet
services such as P2P and video and consequently has a lower overall % of
traffic than several years ago._

So my suggestion is, add a new HN section called 'Summary' which finds all
these comments (which will be recognizable by the 'Summary:' text at the start
of the comment) and lists them in one place for quick reading.

Obviously the more people that do it, and know to use the same 'Summary:'
convention, the better it will work. Bad summaries will be handled naturally
by the downvoting in the original threads.

------
jonhohle
Truncated URLs may be longer than the original URL if they were just left
alone.

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
    

There doesn't seem to be a need to add the postfix length to the check. This
should suffice:

    
    
        def truncate(word, postfix = '…')
          if (word.length > 64)
            word = word[0, 64 - postfix.length] + postfix
          end
          word
        end

~~~
jonhohle
Edit: Here is an example:

    
    
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor#Quartz_Extreme
    

becomes

    
    
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor#Quartz_Extrem...

------
juanjose
SEARCH

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.

~~~
gojomo
<http://searchyc.com> works pretty well; as does searching Google with
[site:news.ycombinator.com YOUR_QUERY].

------
Hexstream
I think it could be interesting to see the "karma-change tally" (don't know
how to call it) on stories, people and comments.

The rationale is that to me, there's quite a difference between a comment that
has 1 karma because there was no upvotes/downvotes and one that has 1 karma
because there was 20 upvotes and 20 downvotes.

So, we could have something like:

5-3= __2 __points by _username_

~~~
mnemonik
A greasemonkey script could probably do this, it was done for reddit:
<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/31002>

------
fharper1961
Add a footer to the comments page.

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.

------
3ds
I would like to be able to read HN on mobile devices more easily. I commited
some code on github that achieves that:

[https://github.com/nex3/arc/commit/0efaa1b189c4ed54c4f91a7ec...](https://github.com/nex3/arc/commit/0efaa1b189c4ed54c4f91a7ecf80aeb65edad478)

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?

------
tzs
Please, if it wouldn't be much work, change the mechanism for coloring down
voted comments to be via the stylesheet instead of via font tags with color
attributes?

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"
    

(Not using actual tags to avoid any quoting problems, and closing tags
omitted). This leads to amusing results--for instance if you use a user
stylesheet to try to set comment colors, by coloring all the paragraphs under
the comment span, it only actually colors the middle paragraphs. The first and
last paragraph of each comment are not affected.

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).

------
nkurz
Down-voting is awkward. Some feel it should be reserved for extraordinary
circumstances, others that it's essential for every day curation of the site.
Frequently, the person being downvoted does not know what they did wrong. But
if all downvoters were to explain their reasons, far too much attention and
page space would be spent on poor comments.

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.

Credit: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4208938>

------
bigfoot
Every time someone asks for a search function here, someone answers with
<http://searchyc.com>. This is a perfectly valid answer, but you should rather
ask yourselves, why are people constantly asking for that? Because you don't
have a "search" link in the HN header, e.g. right next to "new". It'd be fine
if it'd just point to searchyc.com.

------
ericb
> HN should put a little entrepreneur badge next to your name for having
> shipped a product. That would motivate some people.

<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.

~~~
roryokane
Note that not everyone on HN is an entrepreneur. As a programmer, I don’t want
to feel shamed for not having shipped a product when that isn’t even one of my
goals in the first place. If there were such an icon, one of the states would
have to be “don’t care” or “unspecified”. I think that should be the default
initial state for everybody, but the problem then is whether people will be
honest enough to change their icon from “unspecified” to “not shipped” on
purpose.

------
cperciva
Make it possible to lose karma by submitting garbage stories, either via
downmods or (IMHO the better option) by making submitting a story "cost" a
certain number of points of karma (which of course will be regained if the
story gets voted up).

Recently I've seen two trends, both of which significantly diminish the value
of Hacker News:

1\. Some users are flooding Hacker News with submissions (in one case I
counted 18 submissions in one day), and even though most of their submissions
aren't being voted up, enough submissions are to make them accumulate lots of
karma (which I assume is why this is happening).

2\. The same stories are being posted many times by different users. I'm sure
this is partly the result of #1 -- with the floods of submissions users might
not realize that a story was submitted before -- but the fact that there's no
"penalty" for useless submissions probably contributes as well.

~~~
pchristensen
I like the idea of submitting "costing" karma, but maybe you get a couple
freebies a day. Maybe an escalating cost schedule so it penalizes people who
submit their 15th story as opposed to their 5th.

Re #2, I always thought there was a unique url filter on submissions, but I've
seen a couple repeats recently.

~~~
cperciva
I think there's a unique URL filter on submissions; but not a unique story
filter on submissions (which would be a rather difficult AI problem).

Even with different URLs, there's really no need for 10 different stories
about the MacBook Air to be posted here -- it would be much better to have one
Hacker News item and have URLs to other articles posted in comments.

------
jwecker
marking a comment up or down should use ajax- especially so browser history is
preserved (pressing the back-button to get to the front page). I assume
comments can be marked into the negative range for those hopefully rare
occasions where it's needed? [please don't test it on me!]. Other than that I
love the minimalism.

~~~
papersmith
>marking a comment up or down should use ajax

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.

~~~
eli
It doesn't even really have to be AJAX. You could solve the problem just by
setting up an #anchor so that when the screen reloads after voting, it just
the user back to where they left off.

~~~
culix
I would like to second, third, or fourth this. Having the page jump around
when I vote on something really makes me not want to use the site.

Normally I hate "me too" posts, but I feel this feature is important enough
that I wouldn't want you to think other people didn't agree. Thanks.

~~~
youngnh
if you have firefox and greasemonkey, this script might be what you're looking
for: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8951>

------
bluecalm
Upvote/downvote arrows are too close togheter to comfortably use on phones,
especially that the actions are not possible to reverse. Some UI idea is
needed here imo. I like what Reddit is Fun app does: you need to touch the
post and then upvote/downvote appear below it next to each other.
Unfortunately that wouldn't be natural for desktop/mouse users. As it is now,
downvote rights which just appeared on my account make it that I can no longer
upvote anything on mobile, risk of accidently hitting the wrong arrow is just
too big.

------
gedrap
I'd suggest hiding upvotes count in /newest page.

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).

------
JayNeely
Please make it more clear that the e-mail field in your HN profile isn't
publicly visible. Many people (
<http://searchyc.com/comments/e-mail+in+my+profile> ) leave comments like,
"contact me using the e-mail in my profile", not realizing no one else can see
that info.

Even better would be a "make public?" checkbox next to it.

------
michael_nielsen
The ability for each user to create their own personalized domain blacklist.

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.

------
polemic
Could HN have an opt-in to save your outbound link click history?

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.

~~~
jcr
The feature you want already exists. If you look in your profile, you'll see
at the bottom a link called "Saved Stories". It's a list of every submission
you have up-voted.

------
tokenadult
The suggestion was made

<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.

~~~
deno
Hacker News is great name! Maybe instead of adding such feature to webapp code
Firefox extension / Greasemonkey script would be sufficient?

------
nkurz
I was wondering if you'd consider adding an opt-in setting that would make
users' votes visible to others, both for comments and for submissions. I'm
interested in it for a few reasons:

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>]

~~~
kirubakaran
I was working on something like this for a while. May be I'll dust it off and
release it :)

------
Hexstream
I just noticed the comments link is grey, whether or not you already visited
it. Lately, I start by looking at the comments thread in case there's an
upvoted comment saying the article is a waste of time, in that case I don't
even bother clicking through to the actual article. But since I only followed
the comments link, I can't tell later on if I had checked the comments and
then decided to skip the article.

So the feature request is obviously: Make the comments link black and then
grey, just like article links. But seriously, an even better feature would be
if we could mark an article as "Not interested" so that it permanently falls
down from our own main page. And to avoid that our main page gets filled with
lower-ranked articles as a consequence of deprecating articles, maybe the page
should just become emptier and emptier instead.

------
bonaldi
You need a meta outlet. Deleting threads about moderation won't wash: a site
won't allow itself to be secretly moderated, especially in ways it doesn't
agree with. Every single online community learns this; every one benefits from
the meta outlet they create.

~~~
akkartik
Yeah. Just add a 'meta' list to the lists page
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/lists>). It won't be hard, and it won't take up
much space. I'll even help build the feature.

------
JayNeely
Text-wrapping, or text scroll-boxes, for overflowing code.

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>

~~~
ivank
I think all this needs is overflow:auto and a max-width. I've been solving
this problem with a Greasemonkey script.

------
nadim
I'd like to see nicknames anonymized on submissions and comments until you
vote them up or down. This would make votes count more on the merit of what
they are saying than who is saying them.

~~~
anon9023
How about allowing the poster to mark their submission as anonymous (perhaps
you forfeit any up vote credits this gets).

------
networked
Suggestion: this thread should have the comments sorted differently than
normal with a heavy biased towards newer comments (e.g., everything posted in
the last year is sorted separately and placed ahead of everything else or
comments are simply sorted by their date). The thread is a bit of a mess right
now; the proposed change would make it easier to navigate and provide exposure
to newer feature suggestions, which I assume are more relevant because the
suggestions older than X that aren't implemented have either been reviewed and
rejected or placed on a shortlist somewhere.

------
marcamillion
Can you change the color of the text for the Job posts plz?

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.

------
walterk
To encourage more people to visit the 'New' page and upvote stories, give
users one point per day for visiting it.

------
rrrhys
Bold OP's name in comment thread.

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.

------
paulnelligan
As already requested in the following thread:

<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 ...

------
culix
I would really like https encrypted login, so people can't see my password
when I log in to the site. Is this feasible?

------
tewks
I'm not sure what the solution is, but it can be difficult to vote on a
touchscreen.

Perhaps a mobile stylesheet where the vote arrows are to the left and right of
the screen would suit, though I'm unsure of the aesthetics would be suitable.
The current design is pretty attractive.

~~~
jiaaro
Totally agree. the voting needs to be a bigger click target when I'm on the
iPhone/iPad

------
reitzensteinm
I'd like to see the source code, or at least a part of it, to see what Arc
looks like in action.

------
msg
Comment ranking seems to be according to freshness and quality of the top-
level comment, but a good comment responding to a crappy top-level comment
sinks with it. I find that sometimes good discussions are deep on the page
with their +0 to +2 initial comments, which makes it less likely that I will
discover them.

I suggest that you use the freshness and quality of the whole comment subtree
(normalized by the number of comments in the subtree, eg mean) to get those
gems higher. Something like the square of points (negatives counting as
zeroes) would raise the effect of good comments and lower the effect of bad
comments and low-point side discussions.

------
awt
User vote/comment RSS feeds in order to allow integration with friendfeed.com.

~~~
twism
<http://ycfeeds.com/>

~~~
awt
This is really cool. I'm subscribed to pg's feed now via FF. It would also be
cool if I could post my upvotes to FF as well.

~~~
twism
Thanks. I'm working on that but News.Yc is designed in a way that your votes
on comments are anonymous. Your votes on submissions are also anonymous to
other users but you have to be logged in to see them.

The way I envision it happening is you would have to go thru clickpass on
ycfeed.com.

------
inmygarage
I would like the ability to see the homepage from a specific date - a "time
machine" feature where you can enter a date and it shows you the home page
from that date. TechMeme has this feature and I use it regularly (archives
box, right column, bottom).

------
joshwa
Please, when visiting already-submitted-stories via the bookmarklet, DON'T
consider that an upvote. I'm just using it to find the comment thread.

~~~
joshwa
I should note that this is the way the reddit bookmarklet works... they're the
ones who have set my expectations/habits.

You could also make a like/dislike bookmarklet the way reddit does...

------
chegra
A HN Rising Star list

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.

------
roryokane
Please delay the disappearance of the upvote arrow until the upvote has been
received and acknowledged by the HN server. The up-arrow could stay as-is
until the upvote has finished sending, or could be dimmed.

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.

------
ivankirigin
list the subdomain for posts on plus.google.com

Currently confusing with just google.com

------
BrandonM
I would like to see a convenient way to see my upvoted comments (in order of
most recently received upvotes). The motivation is this: after seeing that my
karma has gone up, I'm curious which of my comments was deemed interesting.
Currently, I have to scroll down the threads page until I notice one that
looks higher than I remember. This is so clearly inefficient and error-prone
that I think a software solution is necessary.

This is not completely motivated by narcissism :). I feel that by noting which
of my comments are appreciated, I can see which aspects of my writing styles
and my thinking are found to be interesting by others.

------
jonnytran
Add a page to <http://news.ycombinator.com/lists> that lists the
sources/domains of submissions sorted by most-submitted (or highest voted
among all submissions from that domain).

~~~
jonnytran
Close enough. <http://searchyc.com/top/list>

------
kirubakaran
When we mouse-over a username, please display karma|member-since.

~~~
brett
This worked for me:

    
    
      (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) " "))
    

I didn't really look into the performance cost of calling uvar for every
byline; that's probably not ideal.

------
ColdHawaiian
Please provide more tools to help users moderate their own comments. In
particular, I think the following features are sorely needed:

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.

~~~
malandrew
I think a nice comprimise would be to allow each user a certain number of
deletions relative to the karma they've earned. i.e. for every 100 upvotes,
you're allowed to delete any post of yours indefinitely/permanently.

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.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Please consider enhanced duplicate detection as outlined and discussed here:

<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.

~~~
alanthonyc
On a related note: somebody else suggested the ability to merge duplicates.

~~~
tvon
Yeah, trying to prevent duplicates is an impossible battle.

------
rms
Next to the email area in user profiles, add a checkbox for display/don't
display email in profile.

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.

~~~
ecommercematt
Many users aren't aware that the email field isn't public because it is
visible when they view their own profile page while logged in. While your
suggested solution is better, it might be an easier and quicker fix to simply
add a note next to the email field indicating that the email address is only
visible to the administrators. Then, if a user wanted to make his email
address available to readers, he would think to pop it into the "about" field
(perhaps with some obfuscation).

------
notatoad
can it be made more difficult to accidentally flag or downvote? i find myself
fat-fingering those buttons a lot on the ipad and it doesn't seem very fair to
the submitters.

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_.

~~~
anthonyb
The other option would be to allow an undo of your vote/downvote, perhaps only
within 5 minutes or so, to prevent abuse.

------
jacquesm
It would be very handy to have a flag link right on the noobstories (and maybe
even on the 'new') page instead of having to first click 'discuss', then
'flag'.

HN can be quite slow sometimes and that extra click could save a lot of time,
especially if the 'flag' call could be made an ajax call, that way keeping the
noobstories page clean would be simply a number of clicks on spam stories.

This thread seems quite dead, if there could be some kind of response that
this suggestion is useful or that it won't be happening then that would be
appreciated.

------
jrs235
It appears "people" are submitting the same link but with a different value
after a hash (#) at the end of the url and the system doesn't recognize it's
already been submitted. I've seen half a dozen "How I lost my $50,000 twitter
username" submissions to thenextweb.com in the last 12 hours.

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](https://medium.com/p/24eb09e026dd)

[http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twitter-
username/#!tSomB)

[http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twitter-
username/#!tSonU)

[http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twitter-
username/#!tSoD9)

[http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twitter-
username/#!tSoJy)

[http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twitter-
username/#!tSoSn)

[http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twit...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twitter-
username/#!tSo71)

------
snprbob86
In the spirit of accountability and openness, please add a "history" link next
to headlines or posts which have been edited. Version control is a good idea
for source code, so why not for discourse?

~~~
CalmQuiet
Or maybe make viewing it _optional_? I really appreciate the cleanness of the
pages under the current system.

~~~
snprbob86
I don't think it would be much clutter if it only shows for edited posts. It
would probably also cause an overall reduction in the number of edits.

------
mark-t
You should have to enter an explanation when you downmod something. Then the
recipients won't be left confused, and it will enforce responsible use of the
privilege. I feel this is a better solution to the abuse problem than only
allowing downmods for 24 hours.

~~~
palish
Yes! Seconded.

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.

------
akkartik
I think comments are where the action is. Three simple things that get most of
the bang of markdown IMO: Working permalinks for comments, paragraph dividers
and clickable links.

~~~
wicked
There should be a page which lists the submissions that have recently been
commented on. Otherwise, it's essentially meaningless to make thoughtful
comments on old threads. Having a *hide* option would be welcome too.

~~~
pg
there is a prototype of this at news.ycombinator.com/active

~~~
danielha
That works well. A listing of the most active is better than a listing of
recently commented on. What's the threshold for most active?

------
grinich
Make the comment "link" text just be the date of comment submission. (e.g. "15
days ago")

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.

------
pg
Not logging users out when we restart the server. (If you find yourself
suddenly logged out, that's why. Sorry, will fix.)

~~~
jwecker
(he finished this)

------
kgermino
Collapsible Comment threads. (as described in
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1864844>)

------
altay
ideas.yc.com.

we've all got more ideas than time, and it's a shame to let them languish in
our individual imaginations. so how about creating a public clearinghouse for
ideas where they're a) subject to reddit-esque competition, and b) "open
source" \-- available for anyone to pursue.

it'd be a meme pool.

~~~
danw
You might want to try http://www.cambrianhouse.com/ as a place to throw ideas
around.

------
joshwa
please let me undo my votes! I'm reading on an iphone now, and it's _really_
easy to hit the down button instead of up, or vice versa.

~~~
gojomo
Putting more space between the up and down could help -- for example putting
the down vote on the other side of the total or even further right.

------
yread
The detection of duplicate URLs could be improved, for example removing
trailing # like in

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329998>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329090>

------
joshwa
Would love to see the "inbox" feature of reddit, so I can see when one of my
comments has been replied to.

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)"

~~~
eli
I just wanted to emphasize how important this is to building a dialog (and a
community!). I don't want people replying to my comments, so right now I
basically have to bookmark each thread that I've commented on and remember to
come back and check.

~~~
joshwa
Yay! Witness the new "threads" feature! Thanks, PG!

------
marrone
A simple api would be nice.

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.

------
abc3
A visual cue that indicates when a follow-up comment on a post is from the
post's author.

For example, when someone on Hacker News links to a post by Mark Pilgrim, I'd
like to be able to scan the comments to see if Mark has contributed to the
comment thread.

------
ISL
A parallel view of HN, using the same source, but with a much longer time
constant.

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.

~~~
tolas
this would be really interesting

------
BrandonM
Bug report: In order to include a < or > sign in your post, you have to write
&lt; or &gt;. This is fine (although a bit cumbersome), but when you later
want to edit the comment, instead of placing &lt; in the text box, < shows up
instead, so that every time you want to edit the comment, you have to change
every < to &lt;. (The same thing occurs with >, too.)

I'm thinking this problem would be easy to fix, but I'm also curious: why
can't we just write e.g. < and have it be converted to &lt; 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.

------
golem_de
"Unknown or expired link."

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!

------
Udo
My avg score hasn't changed in about 2 months, it's exactly at 2.17 and has
always been. I'm curious, because I read how this score is calculated and it's
supposedly the average of the person's last comments - only in my case it
can't be. Other people don't seem to have this "problem", does that mean my
account is flagged somehow? Or is it in truth the average of only the first
comments when an account is fresh and then stays the same forever?

~~~
Udo
Update: by virtue of what is probably a time correlation-causation fallacy, I
can now report that posting here helped and the issue seems to have gone away.

------
vikas5678
search for posts! give us search!

~~~
initself
I second a search feature, which would be particularly helpful for some of the
interesting "Ask YC" posts.

~~~
OpenWebU
I third it. I can't code, but I'd be happy to help design a search -- my
contribution to the community.

------
punjsingh
Please look at the authentication system password recovery when all I can
remember about an account is the email address. Thank you.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3963671>

------
intellectronica
Warn and suggest to strip in page anchors from URLs.

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.

------
dredmorbius
Mobile / Desktop UI / markup enhancements.

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 
    

Are awkward.

* 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.

------
makecheck
I see this problem in every social news site, and also here: it seems that
over a few days, 3 or 4 posts will eventually refer to exactly the same
"news". But unless the duplicate submission has the same URL, the redundancy
isn't detected.

Users should be able to flag new posts as duplicates, and identify the "older"
headline to use instead.

If enough users agree that a post is redundant, then it would become "merged".
The oldest submission on that topic is then rewarded all vote-up karma points
from all duplicates, and displays all comment threads. In addition, the
duplicates either go away or are displayed side-by-side with the original in
all lists, avoiding the problem where the "same" story is front-page news
under one title and page 5 under another name.

------
brett
You wrote on reddit that an RSS feed is coming. If you're prioritizing that
would be my first choice.

~~~
akkartik
Counterpoint to all the calls for an RSS feed: Do others find reddit's front-
page feed useful? Nobody at a social news site has yet figured out how to do
the RSS feed right, IMO. I find myself using my browser to read reddit a lot
more than my aggregator. For example, it's hard to capture the action on a
comment thread, or to create filtered feeds by user. Here's one idea:
http://features.reddit.com/info/xjvr/comments If user-specific feeds are
infeasible (for server bandwidth or computation reasons) it seems RSS feeds
are low-priority.

~~~
danw
I would quite like RSS feeds.

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.

~~~
xirium
As a stopgap measure, access [http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-
bin/search.cgi?...](http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-
bin/search.cgi?p=0&q=author:danw) and then subscribe to the RSS feed.

------
johnrob
Incorporate the age of the most recent comment next to the comments link:

52 points by pg 355 days ago | 432 comments (2 hours ago)

or something like that. It's nice to know if a comment thread is still active.
On the flip side, I am less likely to comment if all of the other comments are
several hours old.

------
rw
Please force wrapping to the width of the page.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228233>

~~~
gojomo
A previous fix for FF2 had been applied after this thread:

<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; }
    

(And this still is glitchy, compared to the FF2 behavior.)

I think the main difficulty is in how TABLEs expand to the size of their cells
-- it's easy to fix with a DIV-based layout, in my tests. (DIV-enclosed PREs
are clipped the same in FF2 and FF3; TABLE-enclosed PREs are clipped in FF2
but grow the page in FF3.)

So my long-term suggestion: drop TABLES, move to DIV-based layout. (This might
be a simple change in the ARC HTML-writing code.) In the meantime, add the
'max-width' to the PRE rule to minimize the annoyance in FF3/etc.

------
boristhespider
I find myself flapping between news.ycombinator.org and news.ycombinator.com
(also .net), and cookies are not shared. Picking one and redirecting the
others to it would be appreciated.

------
dstillz
Just because I upvote something doesn't mean I want to save it!

------
Anon84
I think it would be good to be notified, say by email or a separate section of
HN, when someone replies to one of my submissions/comments. It would also be
nice to be able to have some submissions monitored and be notified whenever
someone comments on it.

I believe this would make the discussion and exchange of ideas flow much
better.

~~~
apotheon
I just don't have enough time in my day to scroll through pages of discussion
for every discussion here at news.ycombinator every day, checking to see if
anyone has replied to anything I said. It is primarily for this reason that I
don't come back to news.ycombinator very often, but I'm on reddit all the
time. After all, pound for pound, I actually find the topics here more
interesting than those at reddit, but it's just too damned much work to stay
abreast of new developments in discussion.

------
jseliger
This is a bug report, not a feature request, but I couldn't find an obvious
place to put it. I appear to be able to upvote comments an infinite number of
times: if I click the upvote button once, it disappears. But if I hit enter,
the vote keeps climbing. I have some screenshots of this in action.

Unless Hacker News has an (undocumented?) feature that lets regular posters /
certain karma thresholds / whatever have a large or infinite number of votes,
this appears to be a bug.

I'm running Firefox 3.6.8 on OS 10.6.whatever is latest.

~~~
corin_
It's a bug, but only with the front-end, only one vote actually gets
remembered.

------
notabel
From an HCI standpoint this would be tricky, but it would be great to have a
system for handling dupes and near-dupes by merging their comment pages. For
instance, right now there are two articles about the recent demo of
Metaweb/freebase. I commented on one of them, returned to the mainpage, and
realized that the other (which also had no comments) was now higher ranked.

This raises a quandry as to whether I should cross-post, or just move on and
hope that the discussion happens in the one I picked.

(Note, this is the harder case, of near-dupes: the two articles are different,
but \begin{precog} most of the discussion will be about the product they
reference.\end{precog} Hence it is semantically reasonable to merge their
comment threads.)

So, as a oneliner: add a way to merge duplicate articles.

------
brett
Make urls in parens link right by ignoring the final paren in the href

see:

(<http://bugbear.com)>

~~~
pg
fixed: (<http://ycombinator.com>), and for that matter
<http://ycombinator.com>.

~~~
brett
and <http://ycombinator.com>"style="font-size:30px ?

~~~
pg
precisely

thanks for the tip, btw; let me know if you notice any other breakage

------
stonemetal
If someone has been hell banned could users with showdead on upvote them back
to life. It would cut down on the silly Hey so and so you are dead go make a
new account posts.

------
rms
Long URLS break the page.

[http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-
Computer/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-
Computer/dp/0596006624/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-8793765-6371045?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178757756&sr=8-1?p=sfdsfdsfljhewkfjwehfkwjehflwekjfhlwekjfhewlfkjhewlfkjewhfjgfjhgfjgfjhgfjhgfjhgfjhgfjhgf)

~~~
pg
fixed

------
jey
Meta-Feature Request: Release the interpreter and source to news.yc so that we
can implement Markdown, fix the &foo; conversion to not happen on the server-
side, and fix the multibyte encoding problems. :-)

------
corin_
I'd like the option to remove my downvoting abilities, as I find it hard to
control my urge to downvote in disagreement rather than for lack of quality in
a comment.

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.)

------
dpapathanasiou
For the "comments" page, how about putting each comment in context, by
indenting it underneath the submission to which it belongs?

I know you've got a "parent" link there already, but it's not something people
are going to click for each one (and the comment text alone is often not
enough to figure out what it's in reference to).

------
jganetsk
Ideally, I would always like to be able to up-vote a submission while reading
it. Since most submissions are of off-site content, I don't always have the
capability to do this. Instead, I have to come back to HN after reading,
search the list to find the submission again, and then click the up-arrow.

It would be ideal if a link to off-site content opened up a viewport page,
with the content in one iframe and various HN-related controls in another
iframe. Users could opt-in (or opt-out) of this behavior.

------
dylangs1030
pg, I humbly submit that it's time to make a "subreddit" of sorts for
politico-technical discussions, and moderate what is submitted to it. I know
this might sound distasteful, and I'm not suggesting we go down the slippery
slope of becoming like reddit, but I think the events of the past week have
shown that it's necessary for change.

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.

~~~
superasn
There should definitely be an algorithm to group stories by tags.. so NSA(7)
stories, Steve jobs(8).. kind of like how facebook groups stories ("aka 3 more
friends posted about this").

This way, the top stories or homepage will have more diversity and content.

------
lmkg
Strip Feedburner campaign parameters (and other campaign parameters) from
submitted URLs.

This doesn't have a functional impact on the website, since the link still
works, but as a web analyst I have OCD about keeping data clean. If people are
getting to the page from HN, then their visit shouldn't get credited to
feedburner. There's also a benefit to HN in doing this: In google analytics,
campaign data overwrites referrer data, which means Hacker News does not
receive credit for the traffic it directs to those sites, if there's a
campaign code stealing credit.

While the same applies to any sort of analytics campaign tracking query
parameters, Feedburner is the only culprit I've seen on hacker news, and they
generally have the Google Analytics tracking parameters, which all start with
UTM.

------
mahmud
Ability to escape stars (*);

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=864911>

[http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec...](http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec/Body/var_stcm_ststcm_ststst.html)

------
rsync
Just spent 15 minutes writing up a detailed submission. Hit submit, dead link.

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.

------
whackedspinach
A lot of the time I will go to hacker news and quickly scan article titles for
something interesting. While I know the mods try to change titles to be more
descriptive, some things are just ambiguous. Right now there is an article
called "A Rare Disagreement" on the front page. Now that could be about
anything, and I don't know if I really want to spend my time on it. Can we add
a little box on the submit form for an excerpt/summary that would appear on
hover? Or maybe a little down arrow that you could click to expand the
summary? Limit it to 150-300 characters and it could be a great improvement to
the front page.

------
Zenst
Relocation of down vote icon per post

\-------------------------------------

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.

------
rms
Mark completed features as dead

------
davidhollander
_Proposed Feature_

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.

------
psawaya
Implement login via Mozilla Persona. It's really easy to implement
(<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/persona>) and e-mail based, so it
should integrate into HN very easily.

~~~
andrewhavens
At least use HTTPS so that our passwords aren't passed in plain text across
the internet. Or, like you said, implement some sort of OAuth2 login so we can
log in with Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, Persona, etc.

(correction) looks like you can use HTTPS, but it is optional. It should be
required on login page at least.

------
nirs
It could be nice to have a way to change your password.

~~~
pg
Fixed (long ago).

------
staunch
Definitely search. I use reddit's search feature all the time to find old
articles.

~~~
akkartik
<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15041>

------
dood
Ability to read all the comments you've made - i.e. More link on user comments
page.

~~~
pg
We have this now.

~~~
dood
Thanks!

------
pygy_
In order to give an incentive for fruitful conversations, it would be nice if
the numbers of answers to a post, and their scores, were added to the karma of
its author. Something along these lines could work:

    
    
        (sum (map (fn (score) 
                     (if (< score 1) ; don't penalize users if answers are domnmedded
                         0
                         (+ 1 (floor (log (score))))))
                  children-scores))
    

This would only be granted to comments with a positive karma.

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.

------
DanBC
Please automatically convert very long unbroken strings into code markdown,
thus putting them in a scrolable box.

See this for an example:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7837247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7837247)

View it on mobile (chrome on iOS) to see how unusable that thread is now.

------
walterk
Copy and pasted from here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213943>

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.

------
Breath
SEARCH..PLEASE.. (not searchyc.com)

------
dfranke
Every once in a while I come across a post or comment that's been deaded or a
user who's been banned for no apparent reason, which usually turns out to be a
mistake by an admin. When I see these I email PG, but there ought to be a more
efficient way of going about this. How about a "contraflag" button for calling
them to admins' attention?

------
erik
I would like to see an rss feed of individual user's comments. An rss feed of
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg> etc.

------
rabidsnail
The culture of HN seems to be drifting slowly away from technical subjects and
towards more "5 easy ways to make your shit smell like roses" Business-
Insider-type posts. This has been going on for a long time. It's one of the
biggest sources of friction in the HN community in my opinion.

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.

------
blueblob
I would like the FAQ and search moved to the top navigation bar. I did not
know that there was a search and FAQ for a while and only found the FAQ
through google before finding the bottom navigation. The top navigation makes
you think that there is only that navigation.

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.

------
leoc
Please let users add a few words about themselves on their userpages. It's a
useful way to learn a little more about an interesting commentator. And isn't
that the main purpose of the site? Links to homepages can of course be useful
too.

------
danw
A similar users list. Show me all the users who like the same stories as me
and comment in all the same places. I've already noticed some users who are
similar to me and a nice system for making sure I don't overlook any would be
great.

~~~
pg
Now that is an interesting idea. I'll mull over ways to do it.

------
malandrew
It would be very useful if 500+ karma users could reply privately to comments.
The use case here would be to be able to tell a user why their comment is not
appropriate or lowers the quality of discourse.

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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115)

------
staunch
There's no good way to refer to a HN user by username and have it be obvious
who you mean.

There should be a way to write a username and have it linkified. If I write
@pg it should show up as simply "pg" and be a link to
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg>

Or something like that...

------
Elfan
\- Some way to mark as read/downvote/hide. I prefer to be able to go through
the "new" section and do this. \- Comment history in profile. \- "Best of"
history. \- This is a silly little thing, but make the X comments/discuss link
larger. I usually go down the page and open that page for any interesting
article in a new tab. \- Someway to format posts so ones like this don't look
silly and return to the main page thread after editing.

~~~
bluemoo
Definately return to the main page after editing a comment please. I think I
hit 'update' 3 times before even thinking about why I hadn't switched back.

------
tjpick
"Unknown or expired link":

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.

------
jcr
When a submission is new and has no comments, the link to the discussion page
reads "discuss".

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.

------
mattculbreth
1\. AJAX for the voting arrow(s); 2. RSS; 3. Search

~~~
acheung
search! Sometimes I want to ask a question but I feel like it's one of those
things that's already been posted, but it's kind of hard to find it.

------
wastedbrains
I would love a save feature... I someone already said this and I missed it, my
bad. I check sites like this often while I have a quick minute at work, but if
I notice a really good article I want to read I don't always have time. I
would like to save it so at the end of each evening I could log in just to
read over things I thought looked interesting. I do this in reddit all the
time, and expect that I would like doing the same here.

~~~
pg
We now have this, in the sense that you can see a list of links you've
upvoted.

------
mhartl
Add a password reminder, and also password confirmation during registration. I
mistyped one of my standard passwords when registering, and as a result I was
locked out of YC News until I noticed that the password was stored in the
Firefox on my laptop's Windows (blech!) partition.

~~~
jeremychase-2
No doubt.. I have an account that I can't access because I don't know the
password.. So.. now I'm jeremychase-2 .. sigh.

------
shmichael
I'd like to build a FF add-on that overlays HN comments at the bottom of every
page that's been discussed here.

I really need some sort of search API for that, otherwise the solution would
be to do a fake-post of the article, just to see if anyone submitted it
before, then delete it immediately if the submission succeeds.

------
ivankirigin
I often look to the comments of a particular user, like people I know or PG.

It would be nice when looking at a comment to immediately get the full context
with the submitted story and top level comment. I find myself hitting "parent"
many times, when a "root" button would be useful.

------
DanielRibeiro
This has been said already on very old posts, but an API would great. General
retrieving/posting/searching capabilities would be great. For authenticated
users, being able to list the user's own up votes and down votes. Would make
it easier to see what the user enjoyed/hated.

------
Goladus
I'd like a reference page for the markup syntax used in comments.

------
ivankirigin
Strip spaces from the username on login, especially at the end. Signing in
from iPhone, I got a few login errors before I realized that it wasn't a fat
fingered password but a login username of "ivankirigin "

------
saraid216
Could we please get username.github.io subdomain support on HN? Unlike the old
github.com, these are all user content so it makes sense to distinguish them
just like for wordpress.com.

From: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669707>

------
pjvandehaar
Assuming that placement on the front page is determined by points/age, allow
users to set the weight of age. If I were to set the weight to .3, I would end
up with the "/best" page. Users might set this based on how often they visit,
via a textbox in the upper-right of the news page.

------
edw519
Add 2 more columns to the leader board:

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.

------
mooism2
When someone important to the community dies, a thin black bar is added to the
top of HN as a mark of respect. (As I type this (4th July 2013) it is present
as a mark of respect to Doug Engelbart.)

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.

------
herdrick
Search - and it needs to have the reddit feature where if you search for an
URL, you get the submit page when nothing was found. That's how I submit all
my links in reddit. This site doesn't have that, so I wonder if I'm wasting my
time when thinking up or typing in a title for a submission - since it may
already have been submitted.

Also, I need the "save link" feature.

Good site so far.

------
aston
I think it'd be awesome to have a mode in news.yc where I can paste in a
quote, mark it off with like a "|" and have it turn into an indented
blockquote with some special styling.

As much as we copy and paste snippets from articles around here, I think it'd
really help readibility of posts and encouraging debating quoted points.

'cause feature requests go here.

------
ralph
Documentation on the mark-up allowed, e.g. _italic_ , some way to post normal
ASCII characters for code snippets, which in turn require line breaks.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13261>

~~~
benhoyt
Do you know if this is now documented anywhere? Even on a third party site?

Testing: _italic_ __bold __[link](<http://benhoyt.com/)> \-- hmmm, _can_ you
do named links?

------
brett
Bare bones API-like stuff could go a long way. Add a url parameter to the
submit page that prefills the url field and anyone can create a bookmarklet
for submitting. Add a status page that takes a url and returns whether or not
it is in the system, its current rating and the id to pass in for modding and
someone's on their way to a low rent firefox extension.

------
lostmsu
"Unknown or expired link." is still a problem for new submissions (not
comments).

I've spent under 5 minutes editing text only to get it upon clicking on
"Submit"

------
DanBC
FLAGGING:

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](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.

------
ValentineC
Could we please have a link to go straight to the parent topic? It's annoying
to have to keep clicking "parent" when the page is at a child reply.

------
maggit
Use `min-resolution: 2ddpx` media query for high-resolution graphics rather
than/in addition to `-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2`, to allow non-webkit
browsers to display high-resolution graphics.

I have tested this fiddle and found it to work in both Chrome and Firefox:
[http://jsfiddle.net/LRaJj/](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238956)

~~~
maggit
Another alternative, which doesn't need media queries, svg:
[http://jsfiddle.net/pJt4N/1/](http://jsfiddle.net/pJt4N/1/)

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>
    

As a data-URI:

    
    
        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%3E

~~~
DanBC
Please could you put a linebreak in that very long string, or put four spaces
in front of it?

Thank you!

------
SamanthaG
Looking at the all the positive responses to the Hacker News post "Are you a
UK- based hacker..." posted by "dood", it seems readers of this site might
well appreciate a forum area on the site for networking other YC readers or YC
seed companies. There is a huge amount of goodwill amongst YC readers and this
may be better accessed through a new part of the YC site rather than "Hacker
news", eg perhaps you can build something in to allow readers to describe
their skills/ideas and the type of YC readers they are either hoping to
contact or happy to help etc.Just a thought.

------
macrael
Reiterating a past request because I can't reply to it.

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.

~~~
bradsmith
Just requested pretty much the same thing for google-plus (as I didn't see
your earlier request) ... so ... +1

------
ciscoriordan
Please include subdomains in the domain section next to article titles.
(blogs.nytimes.com) has a much more accurate connotation than (nytimes.com)
for posts from blogs.nytimes.com.

------
ralph
More stats on the leaders page please. Karma breakdown by submissions and
comments. Number of submissions and comments. Mean, mode, median? A means of
entering a username and seeing the table +/- 15 around it.

~~~
willarson
I'd also love to see the stats. As ralph mentioned elsewhere, having an API
for accessing the entirety of the stats would be great. But something else
like a weekly dumping of the posts table from your db would be great too.

------
inklesspen
AJAX-based upvoting: I click on the up arrow for a comment, and the page
totally refreshes, and I'm at the top of the page. Then I have to scroll back
down and find where I left off. Annoying.

Link to the news.ycom page in the RSS feed, rather than the external link, or
in addition to the external link: If I want to comment on the external site,
or read what other people have made, I have to go to the main news.ycom page
and find the comment thread. This wastes maybe 30 seconds of my time, which
can be important when I'm still formulating what I want to say and don't need
the distraction.

~~~
Sam_Odio
Regarding links to the comments in the RSS feed, it would also be nice to
preview the comments in the rss reader as well.

------
makecheck
Implicit upvoting awarded to comments based on the length of "discussion" that
they produce.

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?

~~~
corin_
Skipping over the fact that you can only guess at one other people's comments
are voted to... no, you shouldn't get votes for that.

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.

------
sahilshah91
I bookmark a lot of links that I read on HN. Can there be a button next to
links with which I can bookmark them on the HN server on my account itself and
later revisit them chronologically or categorically. Maybe also specifically
'search' these personally bookmarked links while coming back to read them.

------
aston
I'd appreciate the page title including the caption for the news story you're
viewing. When I've got a bunch of tabs open, it would be nice to know which
story is on which tab beyond "Y Combinator Startup News."

~~~
pg
done

------
Kilimanjaro
Show only the first and second level comments for faster browsing, like:

    
    
        - this is cool
          - seconded
            + view 120 more uninteresting comments
        - not so cool
        - my point of view gets lost
    

This way we don't have to scroll a hundred subcomments to get to the next
comment in line.

------
nkurz
It would be nice if there was a 'log' or 'about' page for each submission to
show editorial changes and other administrative data. Often it would be easier
to make sense of earlier comments if the full history of moderator changes was
accessible.

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.

------
yaantc
Hi, it's not so much a feature request than a bug report (sorry if it's not
the right place). Since a few days ago the comments link in the RSS feed is
wrong, it contains extra spaces. Example:

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](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?

~~~
yaantc
Sorry for the spam, it seems client specific (RSSOwl). I tried another client
and it was fine, then looked at the RSS flux and it also looks fine.

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 "&#x2F;"
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.

------
martythemaniak
I have a mockup of a feature that might improve voting on articles:

<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.

------
bijon
Oldies - Music Time Radio
([http://www.musictimeradio.com/oldies/](http://www.musictimeradio.com/oldies/))
refers to the music from the 1950’s to early 1970’s.It’s a mixed music genre
consisting of R&B, pop and rock music. It also refers to the radio format that
specifically broadcast this particular genre.

------
Glimjaur
The ability to hide a story, to make it possible for me to just show what i
haven't read before.

------
presto10
Please consider making it possible to change your username.

------
far33d
Blank url posts are sometimes hard to follow because the order of the comments
is not chronological -- hence, It's hard to find the first comment, the actual
question.

It might be nice to have a chronological sort, or maybe, for just blank url
posts, to have the first comment always appear first.

~~~
motoko
Maybe self-ref posts could submit a text description that always stays at the
top?

------
rmack005
I know this is an early version and things are still a bit rough, but just for
the record: 1) The number beside my user name (top of the page) is a bit
confusing. At first I thought maybe it meant I had some sort of message
waiting to be read, or perhaps that I'd made one comment, which didn't make
sense because I'd just created the account. Perhaps a label before the number
would clear things up: (karma: 1). 2) I didn't realize at first that the
arrows were used for voting. The main page (http://news.ycombinator.com/) had
only "up" arrows. I figured they were used to collapse/expand additional
content, so I ended up inadvertently trying to vote for several arbitrary
items (I hadn't created an account yet, so the votes didn't count - I don't
think). Once I saw the "up" and "down" arrows together I got their purpose.
Perhaps, instead of removing one (or both) of the arrows you could simply
display a ghosted one? Or perhaps replace the arrows with thumb up/down icons?
3) "7 points by pg 1 hour ago | 7 comments" reads like you (pg) added 7 points
an hour ago. Is this meant instead: "7 points | by pg | 1 hour ago | 7
comments"? New feature: Why not combine the scoring with Flickr like tags.
Instead of just being limited to increasing/decreasing an items karma, give me
the

~~~
rmack005
4) Tell me there's a character limit, and what that limit is :) New feature:
Why not combine the scoring with Flickr like tags. Instead of just being
limited to increasing/decreasing an items karma, give me the option of
increasing/decreasing tags, and the ability to add a new tags of my own which
others could then vote on. This would probably be a good feature for Reddit as
well. They could do away with the handful of subreddits they have and use this
tagging scheme instead.

~~~
jwecker
I think this is a great idea. It would let things like slashdot's "funny" and
"insightful" happen organically. I've been toying with doing something similar
for a political blog for a while.

~~~
eli
Have you seen slashdot lately? They've got some sort of freeform tagging
feature and it ain't working so hot.

------
apotheon
I have a submission link to HN on a Website. I'd really like a way to show two
pieces of information in that link:

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).

------
gojomo
Re:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593249)
(software to formalize user better-URL recommendations)

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.

~~~
dang
I agree with your ideas in spirit but the implementation would be complicated.
Could you think about how to distill this down to the simplest, least invasive
thing we could possibly try first?

(Better to continue this conversation at hn@ycombinator.com.)

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Two feature requests, one question, one comment.

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.

------
sdrdis
I noticed that some blogs create a post, submit the link on HN, then add a
link at the end of the post toward their submission on HN for comments.

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,

~~~
cinquemb
Sounds pretty cool. I wish there was a general API for HN to see so we can
plot interesting data it collects in relation to topics/time/users.

------
nathan82
Simple usability suggestion -- add an orange footer line to comments pages.
There is no visual indicator that I'm at the bottom of a page; I frequently
find myself pressing page-down in futility.

------
logn
People create throwaway accounts all the time. Allow people a limited number
of posts per day to anonymize their screen name. I think you'll get much more
candor on some topics. And with this you can better sort comments and stories
since HN will still have access to karma and other signals. And perhaps on an
anon post, we could see an anonymized version of their karma (what range their
karma is in, say 0-49, 50-399, 400-999, 1000+). This might allow us to take
someone's anon comment more seriously.

------
jcr
At present, the only way to access all of my "saved stories" is to send in a
scraper to keep walking the 'more' link until it no longer exists. With the
"unknown or expired link" timer, one would have to repeatedly hit the site
quickly to get all of the saved stories. Similar is true for a user's comments
and submissions. Needless to say, HN already has enough trouble with
bots/scrapers, so it would be rather unfriendly to add to the load.

Is it possible to provide a 'download all' link for a user to get their own
comments, submissions, and saved stories?

------
rabidsnail
BUG: Periods get sliced off the end of links. For example:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_Network,_LP_v._CSC_Hold...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_Network,_LP_v._CSC_Holdings,_Inc).

------
dpapathanasiou
I'd like to see an "announcements/feedback" section where people can tell this
community about their projects and get comments back, i.e. similar to what
happens (less formally) at Joel Spolsky's "Business of Software" forum.

~~~
akkartik
Why not submit a blog post the normal way? Is this a separate kind of post?

~~~
dpapathanasiou
Well, people tend to dislike it if you submit your own blog posts (you're
biased, too wordy, trumpeting your own horn, etc.). So this would be a place
to hold virtual design reviews: ask people to look and provide objective
feedback; the comments thread would function as the Q&A; part between the
hacker and the community of reviewers.

~~~
phil
wouldn't it be simpler to just decide that it's ok to submit your own posts?
some people have done that already and it seems fine to me: they're among the
best links here.

------
reitzensteinm
Would an implicit +2 for every unique user that posts a comment in the thread
be a good idea? Or maybe number of characters in comments / 10, where only
those comments posted by people with Karma of >10 are counted? Or maybe there
should be a longetivity modifier, where a topic that was heavily voted up and
discussed at length should stay for, say, twice as long as a topic that was
just voted heavily up?

Or there could be a 'Top Discussions' side by side with 'Top' so there's a
different filter for people looking for news (which you want to be recent and
not obscured by long running threads) and people looking for discussions
(which I'd argue will be more valuable if the popular ones are kept around for
a while).

Open for abuse, most definitely, but if the purpose of this site is to build
community, I think those topics that get discussed should be more easily
accessed. Ideally people would appreciate some valuable discussion and upvote
the thread, but this thread here is a perfect example of one that should
probably stick around for a while, but has nearly 3x as many comments as
upvotes.

Just throwing ideas out - tell me if I'm crazy.

------
huhtenberg
This is probably a dupe, but still .. it's a widely accepted notation outside
of this site that enclosing the word in * implies 'bold' decoration, in / -
'italic' and in _ - 'underscore'. Seeing that here * italicizes the word
strikes me as odd.

I realize that bold and underscore decorations go against clean appearance of
the site, but it'd be nice to add standard slash notation for italic.

------
nearestneighbor
I don't know why I'm not allowed to vote up or down, but I do see both arrows.

If someone's not allowed to vote, how about a little courtesy of not wasting
their time on voting?

------
dougw
I'd like to see a list (RSS feed?) of my comments that have been replied to so
that discussion can continue.

------
ivankirigin
Interesting experiment to improve comments: only show a comment field or reply
button on threads if the user clicked the story.

------
jcr
If a text based submission gets above some threshold (points, user history,
replies, ...), parse the links in the submission. If the submission gets any
flags, then stop parsing the links.

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.

------
daniel-cussen
Bug report:

<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".

------
omarish
We'd like to see a geographic search so that founders can meet other founders
based on where they live. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=445

------
tehsirsakdepok
I do not know why I joined the contest seo, when I was a novice who do not
understand SEO it is really about being a contest I follow and this was the
theme. and these are some urls that are following the SEO contest "cari uang
lewat ekiosku.com" [http://tehsirsakdepok.blogspot.com/2013/06/cari-uang-
lewat-e...](http://tehsirsakdepok.blogspot.com/2013/06/cari-uang-lewat-
ekioskucom_18.html) [http://tehsirsakdepok.blogspot.com/2013/07/citra-indah-
dan-c...](http://tehsirsakdepok.blogspot.com/2013/07/citra-indah-dan-citra-
gran-perumahan.html) beg explanation of the seniors about good SEO and true
[http://masihakudisini.blogspot.com/2013/06/cari-uang-
lewat-e...](http://masihakudisini.blogspot.com/2013/06/cari-uang-lewat-
ekioskucom.html) [http://masihakudisini.blogspot.com/2013/07/perumahan-
citra-i...](http://masihakudisini.blogspot.com/2013/07/perumahan-citra-indah-
dan-citra-gran.html) beg explanation of the seniors about good SEO and true

------
readme
Show scores next to comments again...

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.

------
buro9
On the login form could you use just one HTML form on the page rather than
two.

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).

------
wheels
I'd like to have a setting on the users page to ignore all non-link
submissions. I enjoy more of the news / discussion aspect of news.yc than the
emerging message board aspect.

~~~
joshwa
Or shunt them to a separate silo, like Metafilter does with Ask Metafilter and
MetaTalk.

------
imsteve
"Add comment" page does not use the custom color.

Also, having the Y icon match the custom color would be great.

~~~
parenthesis
Also, the "submit" page has no custom color.

------
awakeasleep
I'd like a modification to the "get back to work" message.

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!

------
andywood
The 'unknown or expired link' embarrassment (that's different from both bug
and feature) continues to eat my carefully thought out posts, even to this
day. This of course, makes me furious at you, personally.

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.

------
nandemo
Please allow users to change their votes (as reddit does). "I downvoted you by
mistake" is a very common comment.

------
slater
How about a flagging option, like "flag this as spam". Lately, /newest is
being used more and more to flog whatever site (currently web design in
newcastle upon tyne, of all things)

~~~
pg
Ok, we have this now.

------
dougo
RSS is nice, but spammy. There should be a way to subscribe to an "N-point
feed" that only includes stories above a certain threshold.

~~~
LeBleu
I second the idea that the RSS needs a way to be more filtered to the quality
articles.

Also, having something more than just a title and link in the RSS feed would
be nice, but I suppose that you don't really have summaries anywhere yet
anyway.

Perhaps you could include the points in the title of the RSS feed entry?
Google Reader seems to allow RSS feeds to update already sent articles, I
dunno if other RSS readers support that well though.

------
gus_massa
Show the subdomains of stackexchange.com . The site is getting bigger and the
different subdomains have very different topics.

------
naquad
Informational noise reduction.

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.

------
rednum
Is it possible to stop new accounts from submitting new stories, maybe at
least until they are 24h old? It seems that amount of spam on new is
increasing and each of spammers is a newly created account.

------
Moto7451
Could a profile option be added to toggle on/off the availability of the
downvote button? I browse HN on my phone a lot and am always a little paranoid
that I'll hit the downvote arrow rather than the up-vote arrow due to the
inaccuracy of touches v.s. a mouse pointer.

I've been zooming in a ton before upvoting (which works fine) but it would be
nice to avoid that.

------
aaronblohowiak
Add an 'Ignore' link on a user's profile, and then hide or otherwise diminish
that user's contributions.

~~~
delackner
Seriously, it is becoming taxing to read through the comments when on certain
topics (global warming, for one) some users show a complete lack of civility.

I would rather just be able to say "this person is rude and unpleasant, never
show me their comments again".

------
dredmorbius
Can we please have a blockquote markup? And improve the code block markup so
that the line width is wider and doesn't require horizontal scrolling?

    
    
      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'.

------
pixelcort
<http://news.ycombinator.com/openid_merge> is coming back as Unknown. This is
apparently the point where one would presumably link an OpenID to an existing
HN username.

------
harb
Could we add a domain name that each post refers to. That way we could tell
blog posts, from PG essays, from e-zine articles.

~~~
pg
done

------
kashif
Collapse comment trees.

~~~
apotheon
. . . as an option, but not by default.

------
lucb1e
Allow the //uri scheme. Right now you can use <https://example.com> and
<http://example.com>, but //example.com is not allowed.

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.

------
nirs
Undo for voting, see reddit implementation.

~~~
palish
Not needed.

~~~
nirs
It is. When you make a mistake, you should be able to fix it, and there is no
reason to prevent this.

~~~
chaostheory
agreed - I periodically make mistakes like this, specifically like 5 seconds
ago

though if the reddit model is frowned upon; why not a one time undo instead?

------
de_Mundo
I know my HN experience is very, very short, but I have a proposition.

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.

------
DanBC
Have some marking on the text box on the submission page to give a clue about
where the 80 character limit is.

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.

------
makecheck
Make the up and down arrows slightly further apart, or make the up arrow
bigger. I still worry that I might accidentally down-vote someone, which is
made worse by the fact that the arrow disappears once it's done (and is thus
not undoable).

------
danielha
When submitting a link, sometimes I want to add a text in addition to the
title. Usually I just add a comment in the discuss/comments section, but it'd
be nice to have a field for that specifically.

This works especially well if you're submitting a link and want to add a
remark about why it might be relevant for others to check out.

~~~
ralph
Adding a comment doesn't work because it can easily drift down the page. There
needs to be a way to supply an initial comment with a URL that remains tied to
it at the top of the page. It doesn't need to be votable.

~~~
ralph
As I use news.yc more I think this is more and more vital. Not only so the
OP's comment stays with the URL, but that comment also needs to go into the
RSS feed, otherwise I just get a load of one line titles which give little
clue as to whether I want to read it or not. I end up wasting time on crap.

------
danw
I've heard many people give this wonderful piece of advice:

"Ignore your user's requests. They'll ask for every feature under the sun
apart from the one that they really need. You'll spend all your time adding
new features rather than making your site genuinely usefull"

Unfortunatly I cant find any citations. If only quotationsbook.com was ready!

~~~
sharpshoot
Dan thats probably jason fried of 37signals

~~~
danw
Aye, sounds like chapter five from Getting Real possibly, "Start with
No":http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Start_With_No.php

------
marcusbooster
rss feed for the "best" section would be nice.

------
rolux
Low-hanging fruit:

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".

------
djacobs
It would be awesome if HN kept track of new comments on a post. While I can
tell which articles I've read on HN because of the a:visited color, I can't
tell which comments I've read.

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.

------
huhtenberg
Add a link/flag to help bringing erroneously hell-banned users back. At the
very least, if automatically hell-banning people, kill their comments, _but
allow replying to them_.

Case in point - <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=slmt> \- nothing from
what he said justifies a hellban.

------
danielha
I believe I mentioned this in the other thread, but I'd like to see my comment
after submitting it instead of it just jumping to the top of the page.

An ajax implementation for the comment voting would be nice too. This was
mentioned along with some other great ideas, but it's something I'd personally
love to see.

------
akv
A way to export the list of articles in 'Saved Stories', either by way of an
export function or an RSS feed (public/private) of the page.

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...

------
ricardo
I'd love an iOS home screen icon.

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...](http://gigaom.com/apple/how-to-create-ios-
device-home-screen-icons-for-web-sites/)

------
Chingy
You should be able to vote down bad stories. I thought this wouldn't be needed
but we're starting to get off-topic submissions, so we need to be able to bury
them.

~~~
eli
Maybe the rules could even be tweaked to keep good stories with a minority
viewpoint from being buried. At the very least, maybe have down votes count as
only 1/2 a vote. (So there would have to be greater than 2:1 of people against
a story to bring it down below 0 points)

------
michaelkariv
Request: RSS feed to return "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" HTTP header set to *
to enable all sources, for both GET and OPTIONS requests.

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

------
adamzerner
There should be an app or something where we list 1) problems, and 2) startup
ideas. We also vote on them. * There's value in discovering good startup ideas
via the wisdom of the crowd.

* 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.

------
sravfeyn
HNSearch currently searches only for comments and link titles.Please add the
ability to search through the content, carried by the articles(may be by
duplicating the content in the links to search-base?).

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.

------
jakewolf
Please, please, please eliminate the ability to post duplicate links.

~~~
iamelgringo
It's already a feature. Problem is with companies that have multiple URL's for
the same page, like NYT.com

~~~
chaostheory
yes and no. www.yahoo.com and yahoo.com still isn't treated as a dupe even
though both URLs point to the same page (it's only a consistent 4 character
difference), and I don't know how the same URL was able to be re-submitted
without it becoming a dupe:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183903>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177270>

I'll probably start submitting links twice from now on

------
maxwell
A link to "top" (full thread) alongside "link," "parent," and "flat" on
comments. It's really annoying to click through generations of "parents" from
random individual comments.

Edit: I just realized SearchYC has this feature. An advantage over feeds and
Google.

------
yankeeracer73
A character counter for the title input box when submitting links since you're
limited to less than 80 chars.

------
vkd
This site seems restful, but the more link doesnt act so. My typical use case
on n.yc: rt click-open new tab on interesting posts on the main page, read
through each new tab, then return to n.yc, and click on more to get to the
next page (i visit irregularly, there're more'n one page of posts on some
days). its probably half an hour or so when i return to click that more link,
and its gone by then. irritating.

none of the other news sites have this problem. you're a news site, not an
application; act like one.let me flip my page without have to buy the paper
all over again.

ps: i see someone has raised the same concern wrt posting, but my use case is
even simpler and just shouldnt happen.

------
yters
I would like to access all my comments. I use this site like delicious to
store interesting links that I find, and share them with others.

~~~
iamelgringo
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yters>

------
vinchuco
I noticed two types of HN posts:

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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844565)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867232)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860611)

[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6866403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6866403)

[5]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563739)
(expired link)

------
ColdHawaiian
I would like it if HN could be divided into separate sub-topics, or have each
submission tagged with a few topical tags, like "web development",
"javascript", "compilers", "linux", "graphics", etc. For bonus points, allow
HN to be customized for each user so that they can subscribe to their favorite
topics, which then populate the front-page and /best page.

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.

------
coffeecodecouch
Display new posts on the front page of users with high karma.

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](https://i.imgur.com/ZNQTn7q.png)

~~~
dang
We're working on revising the new queue to reduce the amount of randomness in
what gets noticed. It's definitely a problem.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Are resubmissions allowed (or even encouraged) yet? For example, Mt. Gox
posted an update 3 days ago, but it only got one upvote (mine was the second,
and came three days late). It contained, among other things, news that the
company had been turned over to someone else (a Provisional Administrator):
[https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140416_002_announce_en.pdf](https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140416_002_announce_en.pdf)

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.

~~~
dang
How it works now is how it's worked for a long time. If a story hasn't had
significant attention on HN, and it's genuinely interesting by HN standards,
it's ok for people to repost it. That's why the duplicate detector is so
porous. We want to give the best stories multiple cracks at the bat.

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.

------
JoshTriplett
If I access the RSS feed as <https://news.ycombinator.com/rss> , the
"Comments" links in the RSS feed should point to the stories on
<https://news.ycombinator.com/> , not <http://news.ycombinator.com> .

------
nikatwork
Leave the upvote and downvote arrows accessible when a vote has been cast.
Nothing more frustrating than checking HN on mobile, then executing the
opposite of your intended vote action by accident.

Also good for those mea culpa moments when one realises a comment has been
misunderstood.

------
tronium
A separate "Show HN" area/link at the top. As it turns out many people would
love this separate area, allowing more organization with "Show HN" posts no
longer showing up in the "Ask HN" section.

------
ScottWhigham
Please implement a "collapse" button on all 1st-level comments. In big
conversations I want to skip to the next comment when I am not interested. I
don't want to scroll slowly down the page to find it.

See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982388>

------
charlief
A _best comments for a particular user_ page. Say I am looking at the profile
of a retired user. I open the old great user's profile, I click on comments
and I only see a list sorted by newest-first. I am looking at some of the old
greats, but I have no effective way to look at the comments that made them
great. Please allow sorting by karma or an alternative page for best-of
comments for that user.

------
llambda
It would be great if we could strip URLs of anchors (or rather just see them
as the same URL, no need to strip) to prevent people from submitting the same
article multiple times, e.g. <http://example.com/article> would be the same as
<http://example.com/article#anchor>

------
bitsai
The duplicate submission detector appears to be malfunctioning. For example,
please see the following:

<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.

------
muszek
Liferea (linux feed reader - <http://liferea.sourceforge.net/>) is unable to
parse your RSS feed. I posted a bug report
([https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=581684...](https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=581684&aid=1912774&group_id=87005))
and they started to take care of it. Apparently, it's something with new line
characters.

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...).

------
decavolt
Please consider adding item excerpts/descriptions to your Hacker News feed. I
love the feed and am subscribed to it, but without excerpts or descriptions
for items it is not as easy to skim.

------
ColdHawaiian
It would facilitate more convenient discussion if you had the option of
getting notifications that someone has replied to your submission or comment.
Along those lines, it would be cool to be able to "subscribe" to a thread and
receive notifications whenever someone posts a reply to anyone.

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).

~~~
mrcdima
I built a small chrome extension that provides this functionality. Next to
your name, the extension adds a mail icon that lights up whenever someone
replies to one of your messages. It then takes you to a 'cleaned up' threads
page that only shows new messages. Doesn't work for submissions though.
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notifications-
for-...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notifications-for-
hacker/ofcgjpiefkpbcnmibefndlnojkidoiag)

------
dfranke
Provide a reply indicator similar to Reddit's red envelope. Make it a #part
link to the most recent new reply on my threads page.

------
gbelote
It'd be nice to have an explicit "save" link for stories and comments. I know
that every story I upvote gets saved (and can be retrieved via my profile),
but I'd like to be able to save things I find interesting w/o giving it an
upvote/endorsement (and for users who aren't aware of upvotes getting saved in
this way).

------
jyunderwood
I would like to see the subdomain for entries. For example, github.com is used
for official blog posts (blog.github.com), blogs from random users
(username.github.com), project websites, and project repos (github.com).
Having the subdomain displayed would make the distinction easier to make.

------
vasudeva
RSS feed that sorts by age, not popularity. The current RSS feed is all sorts
of chatty, showing me a ton of repeats. Its annoyance factor is about to
eclipse its usefulness for me.

If what I'm looking for already exists, I can't find it.

~~~
wheels
Just submitted a patch for this:

<http://scotchi.net/2009/03/patch-to-fix-rss-feed-for-newsyc/>

------
chmike
Hacker news digests

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.

------
lisper
Email notifications when someone posts a response to one of your comments.
Having to poll and scan the threads link is annoying.

~~~
egor83
<http://hnnotify.com/>

Didn't get any responses to test it yet, but they promise exactly that.

~~~
lisper
Cool! Thanks!

~~~
egor83
_[HN Notify] lisper replied to you_

Okay, so it works :)

You're welcome!

------
corentin
1\. Change the color of the "comment" link please (or use a button). At first,
I wondered why all those messages had the word "comment" in them :) And then I
tried to respond to this message and searched for the "comment" button and I
was enlightened! 2\. Document before writing new features :) I'm really
curious to know what the "showdead" option is (I don't want to try it because
the name is so scary). 3\. A URL (or free text) field in the profile. 4\. Keep
it simple. I think it's nearly perfect as it is (the sign-in form is great).
5\. We want to see Arc and the source code of this app :)

~~~
litepost
Showdead (and related "new deletion feature") clarification from pg fyi:

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.

~~~
litepost
What's interesting is that I can only delete this, most recent comment/post.
(Older threads and comments I have made I am no longer able to delete.) This
is an FYI.

I wonder what the exact time-window is, because I am also unable to delete
previous posts (since pg made this mini-announcement).

I wonder when/if it's going to be possible to delete your YC account (and all
related information).

Digg promised this feature at "The Future of Web Apps" but it has yet to
materialize (on Digg), I believe.

Does anyone know what the situation at reddit is wrt control of "your own
personal information"? :)

I really am curious as to when the Web will evolve policies and products that
adequately address this concern/"feature request."

------
charlief
Comments are a really interesting part of news.ycombinator for many, but it is
still difficult to find the most interesting threads. The top-level _comments_
page has degraded given that the traffic has grown considerably, so the result
is many 1-upvote comments.

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.

------
nudded
Add an option to not show job listings on the front page.

People who are not looking for a job are just not interested

------
gibsonf1
Add Classifications:

With the speed that articles drop from the system, and the probable increase
in discussions that may have already happened, it sure would be nice if
articles could be classified (i.e.: Funding, Infrastructure, Programming,
Startups, etc etc), so that users could hit on the class their interested in
to see what was discussed in the past. The startup bar could get an added
heading like "categories" that would then let the user select. You could allow
user based classification at the article and comment level to feed the
categories. Maybe you could let the leaders add new categories (preferably a
hierarchical structure)

------
codezero
People often complain about mods changing the titles of stories.

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.

------
ismarc
BUG: I apologize if this is already posted somewhere here, or if I have failed
to find where the bug submissions should go. There is a bug when submitting a
post containing text (no URL). The form you are presenting when there is an
error with submission converts multiple newlines to <p> tags, which are
escaped on the next submission. To a naive user, it would appear that the
substitution of those tags would be "courtesy" formatting, not invalid
formatting that will be escaped and show up in the resultant post.

To reproduce: 1) Set title to "Ask HN: Attempting to confirm a bug...
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaa"

Set text to: "here is text

Enter pressed twice, I have not inserted any html tags

If this doesn't error and instead posts it, I apologize."

Click submit. Observe text in the box "text" has changed to: "here is
text<p>Enter pressed twice, I have not inserted any html tags<p>If this
doesn't error and instead posts it, I apologize."

------
stuntgoat
Allow users to subscribe to other HN users' synopses, such that I would only
see my favorite commenter's synopsis. Simply place it to the right of the
link, taking up all that space that is not being used yet; put the synopsis in
a more transparent color than the other text- like the <0 down-modded
comments.

We ( as synopsis authors ) would invent shortcuts for rating and summarizing
the content that would fit to the right or be truncated. And when a user
clicks on comments, the full synopsis is always at the top of the comments.

And maybe the descriptors that different users would implement ( like their
own tags/ratings for the content ) would become unique to that user,
eventually, and have contextual meaning to that author. Each synopsis author
would have their own tags that they could reuse. Only people who subscribed to
that author could see their synopsis so authors' silly or cryptic or worthless
synopsis descriptors would not clutter HN readers' experience unless they
subscribed to a particular s-author ( synopsis author ).

So each user could have a customized right-hand HN site by subscribing to
other synopsis authors and each synopsis author would have their own ways (
tags, most likely to start ) for communicating concise
summaries/likes/dislikes of the content posted on HN.

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.

------
Jtsummers
A thought on "pending comments". Use this mechanism as a way to community-
moderate [dead] posts. This may reduce or eliminate the need for a permanent
hellban on individuals. For instance, someone who posted something that got
them banned a year back, but has consistently posted good quality posts since,
could have their posts un-deaded by individuals with sufficiently high karma,
bringing them back into the conversation. If a sufficient number of their
posts are resuscitated, then remove the auto-dead from their future posts (or
queue them for review by moderators).

------
mindcrime
I'd like to see an official "HN Marketplace". Whether that means building a
new service (doubtful) or simply having pg endorse an existing site
(<http://www.hntrade.com>, perhaps) is an open question. If pg felt
comfortable endorsing, and linking to, an existing site, I think it would be a
win for everybody.

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.

------
metamemetics
Flesh out "flag" feature:

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.

------
Snail_Commando
Another social news aggregator (the one frequented by crustaceans and
disenfranchised Hacker News users) implemented a "story merge" feature
yesterday. It is a _really_ nice feature.

[https://github.com/jcs/lobsters/commit/73b8df5eb7d9cc0de3189...](https://github.com/jcs/lobsters/commit/73b8df5eb7d9cc0de318968e6474f6f7c59d7b72)

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.

------
mynameishere
Start this trend, please: TWO sets of arrows. The first set indicates: Yes, I
agree, or No, I don't agree. The second set is only ONE arrow, pointing down.
This means, "This comment is spam/offensive/offtopic."

~~~
ralph
So the second set, the down arrow, could really just be something like an
exclamation mark?

------
aaron-entropy
I noticed about a week or two ago, the HN RSS feed at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/rss> suddenly started responding with a 301
redirect to <http://news.ycombinator.com/> when the HTTP "Host" header in the
request is not capitalized. Node.js sends all request headers in lower case,
so this situation makes it impossible to access the HN RSS feed for those of
us using Node as part of an RSS client (without very kooky workarounds).

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.

------
metamemetics
Flag Reason Field:

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.

------
epall
I'd like to see an option to view all articles I've upmodded, downmodded, or
commented on. It makes a great place to go back to if I want to find something
I said or read a while back and can't quite put my finger on it.

------
aaroneous
It has been mentioned a few times below, but I'd love to see search
implemented. It'd be useful for knowing what has been submitted, as well as
make the wealth of information already on news.yc more accessible.

------
aurora72
The RSS feed must supply at least one day length of Hacker News. I live in
middle east and maybe because of the time difference, I can not get the RSS
feed of the night before, into my FeedReader and to see those missed news I
have to visit <http://news.ycombinator.com> just to browse those news that I
have missed in my FeedReader.

So the coverage of RSS Feed must be longer than currently it is. Preferably it
must be at least one day (24 hours) long.

Thanks a lot.

------
nkurz
Comments from people asking for or offering mirrors of inaccessible articles
are very frequent. Old articles disappear from the web, leaving discussions
that lack context. HN should offer a link to a cached version in the header of
the item page.

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).

------
anthonyb
How about not permanently hellbanning new users? Or at least allowing us to
upvote their [dead] posts to get them back over whatever threshold bans them?

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)?

------
13ren
a reddit-style toolbar (ie. so you can easily comment/vote _after_ reading).

Is there a way to do this already?

 _EDIT_ I just read that some use the bookmarklet for this: apparently, when
you submit a site that has already been submitted, it takes you to the
comments on it. Actually, that method is more general, because it also works
for article you found in non-hackernews ways. Thus, the hackernews comments
become _annotations_ of the article.

However, the bookmarklet requires that you submit the article. This is bad
because (1) it's an extra click (2) it will submit the article, in the case
where it has not been submitted already. I guess that second point is not so
bad, but it would be nice to have a _goto annotation_ bookmarklet, which went
directly to the comments. I hereby request this as a feature.

This requires an operator like:

    
    
      http://new.ycombinator.com/gotolink?u=[someURL]
    

that does a lookup to find the URL's id, and builds the following with it:

    
    
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=[URL's id]
    

(i.e. the code that is already present in the submitlink operator. It just
needs to be exposed as an operator in its own right).

And an _annotation bookmarklet_ like:

    
    
      javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/gotolink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22
    

_shamelessly editing Phil Kast's bookmarklet_

~~~
apotheon
The fact the standard bookmarklet takes you to the discussion for an already
submitted article when you click "submit" is not at all obvious from the
interface. There should really be some way to find out whether an article has
already been submitted without any more than one or two clicks and without
having to submit it yourself in the process.

What if I just want to see if it's on news.ycombinator to read any relevant
discussion, but don't want to submit it myself?

------
nkurz
Suggestion: Keep scoring duplicate submissions as +1 votes, but also add them
to the user's publicly visible "submissions" list.

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.

------
DanielBMarkham
I've got thousands of saved pages, and I was trying to find one I saved a year
or two ago. It's a disaster. Having to page dozens of times, trying to
physically spot the text.

Sure would be nice to have a single page with everything saved right there.
Then I could just search the one web page for what I'm looking for. I could
also put these in a spreadsheet or database for future reference.

------
robotron
Not a feature, but a bug. Trying to merge my Facebook account and my Hacker
News account results in "Unknown" during the merge, which never completes.

~~~
gap
Same here, with OpenID.

~~~
dashaff
What is the fix for merging OpenID with Hacker News account?

------
Zaheer
Comment Notifications. Many times I'll forget to check my past comments and
only a few days later will see people have replied to it. By the time I reply
to it I'm afraid the value is significantly diminished.

~~~
kmfrk
Use [http://hnnotify.com/](http://hnnotify.com/). It works pretty well, except
when you submit a popular link and get fifty e-mails.

------
asdfghjkl
__Security Issue __(Availability)

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.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam#Page_widening>

~~~
asdfghjkl
It looks like this item is a duplicate of a previous one

<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.

------
mogston
I'd like to see profiles display the owners' url/blog. It would give a great
insight into the mind of the poster.

------
chrischen
*

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.

------
dag
Inclusion of every new post or exclusion of every post from a particular
website at user's discretion. Regexp based? Just to prevent the site from
effectively becoming an RSS reader.

------
Sujan
There are lots of links like this one on HN:

<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.

------
SiVal
I sure wish I could get a front page with 300 articles instead of 30. Yes, I
can use bigrss if I want the awkward interface and restricted data about each
article that RSS readers provide. And, yes, I can just click the "more"
button...wait...again...wait...oh the heck with it. Even if I go through all
that and actually _read_ an article on page 3, the more button will die while
I'm reading and return its "too bad for you" timeout message if I try to get
to page 4.

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.

------
jcr
When all commenting is closed on a submission, all of the 'reply' links are
replaced with '----'.

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.

------
rdl
I wish there were an easy way to see things I'm not supposed to see:

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.

------
davidw
markdown enabled comments.

~~~
earthboundkid
#And a preview button couldn't hurt.

------
dded
Please relocate "delete" in new submission.

I just submitted a question. Under the entry in _new_ is this text:

    
    
      	1 point by dded 0 minutes ago | discuss | edit | delete
    

This puts "delete" where "discuss" usually is. I intended to click on
"discuss" to see what my entry looked like, but clicked "delete" instead.
Luckily there was a confirmation dialog. Could the text be made to look like
this:

    
    
      	1 point by dded 0 minutes ago | delete | edit | discuss

------
weakish
Better support for w3m

Currently hacker news answers w3m's post request with this error message:

    
    
      Post request without Content-Length.
    

This prevents w3m users to login into Hacker News.

This issue has also been reported on the arc forum:
<http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=4419>

------
kgermino
There's so many different HN pages (ie news.ycombinator.com/noobs,
news.ycombinator/ask etc.) that it would be helpful if there was one page that
listed all of them. It does't need to be nice, or accessible itself, but it
would help make it so users don't have to try and remember each one or
remember where links to the different pages are located.

------
edu
I would like to be able to put quotes (blockquotes) on comments.

------
ikarous
This has been suggested previously, but I would like to add my vote as well.
HN could enhance its readability by introducing a method of visually
identifying new comments in a thread. It is often very difficult to spot new
comments in an ongoing discussion even with comment re-ordering.

------
stbullard
Please adopt contrasting colors for header anchors when using custom
topcolors. (See problems with #000 and #fff, below)

[https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/456556/1653002/49d37416-5b...](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/456556/1653002/49d37416-5b27-11e3-9e28-4f681643cc3c.png)

[https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/456556/1653003/49d42960-5b...](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/456556/1653003/49d42960-5b27-11e3-9e5f-1d33eb720bed.png)

------
elangoc
I just had an idea: is it possible to move the voting arrow(s) down to the end
of the post, e.g. next to the "reply" link? From a user UI flow standpoint, it
would be nice to be able to read a long post and then think, "After reading
through such an insightful post, that deserves an up-vote" and not have to
break the-flow-of-scrolling-down to do so.

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).

------
eof
Name of post-killing moderator. Instead of just [dead] have [killed by flags]
if post is auto-killed due to users flagging. or [killed by _username_] if
killed by a user.

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.

------
malandrew
It should be possible to comment on posts in this thread indefinitely. I can
currently only comment on some of the posts in this thread, but I could
contribute to others.

------
heelhook
It has been pointed out several times that new items submitted to HN have
increasingly less chance of being picked up because of how fast the new items
page scrolls items out of sight. This problem will be growing as HN gets more
users. Maybe the approach of showing the list of new items in the "new" page
is not necessarily the best one [anymore]?

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.

------
petenixey
HN has an incredibly high number of good commenters but with the exception of
people I know in real life or a couple of high profile cross-referenced
commenters like patio11 I don't feel like I build up a mental profile of
anyone else.

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.

------
euccastro
Render text between asterisks as emphasized only if there is no space between
the asterisk and the contained text, and only for pairs of asterisks. If there
is any space, or for unmatched asterisks, assume the author really meant to
place a star there. This is to prevent things like the following

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137>

where the author meant to use the asterisk as a multiplication symbol.

------
johnrob
A place for people to share information about web hosting vendors would be
very useful. For many hackers, this is the only fiscal expense on route to a
first version.

------
blogytalky
It would be much easier to create services publishing news from ycombinator
feed if there was a way to easily get current news scores.

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.

------
adamzerner
I think that a feature that would allow for more rational discussion would be
good.

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.

[https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/bc340a52f6a4](https://medium.com/i-m-
h-o/bc340a52f6a4)

------
WiseWeasel
I often find it difficult to tell which posts are new when I load the main HN
front page, and I end up spending significant time and mental effort re-
parsing the same headlines. This problem is compounded by the fact that my
session often expires before I finish reading page 2 or 3 and try to go to the
next page, making me reload the front page again and work my way back, by
which point I have to scan all the headlines again so I don't miss any
stories.

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.

------
icey
In addition to a "flag" link on submissions, add a "spam" link so that we can
start differentiating flags for inappropriate content and outright spam. I
would imagine the algorithm could trust spam flags by users a little more
since it's almost universally understood when a submission is spam versus just
controversial.

------
nkurz
There should be a cap on the maximum number of points that can be earned per
submission. Karma scoring will never be perfect, but the current reward for
being the first to submit a popular story is excessive. Being the first to
click submit on an obviously popular story can earn more points in a day than
a patient user who spends years writing thoughtful expert answers in low-
traffic threads.

------
juwo
1) no way to tell which are new posts - I cant believe it didnt occur to you
to color old or unread posts differently! Idea - change the color of every
post title as it ages, from Yellow to black. (or light gray to black). 2)
poorly organized. I had to reply individually because I wasnt sure they would
see it. See here http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1890 3) what is
showdead? 4) there seems to be a clamor of links to articles.

------
dncrane
I frequently see users who don't realize that the email field on their profile
page is not visible (e.g.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6593160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6593160))
and that they have to put it in the "about" section. There should be a text
warning next to the email field saying that it will not be visible to other
users (or a checkbox to make it visible).

------
patrickk
Resource lists for Hackers. This would fit nicely next to "submit" above.

Over the last few days, I've looked for music/white noise that people listen
to while coding, and this kind of discussion pops up now and again. It pisses
off people who've commented on the older discussion, and possibly
disenfranchises newer readers who see all the negativity on the repeat thread.

Net result: it's difficult to get a nice, complete list.

What's needed is a list of books/music/white noise sources/software
tools/hardware/useful websites divided by topic/[insert stereotypical geeky
obsession here] that people can upvote and comment their favourite.

My suggestion would be to scrape the past discussions on these topics and let
the readers sort out the jumbled data, as a start. Crowdsourcing one of the
brainiest audiences on the web, bound to work out.

Bonus for Paul Graham's wallet: more book sales.

------
Hexstream
tl;dr: I'd very much like a "noprocrast front-page only" or "comment threads
ignore noprocrast" checkbox.

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.

------
dfranke
I notice the new 'avg' column on the leader board. Can you add a breakdown
into submission scores and comment scores?

~~~
riffer
Only recent comment scores are inputs into the average

------
Hexstream
Possibility of marking a story as "not interested".

Marking a story as "not interested" means it will never appear on your pages
anymore. It doesn't count as a downvote.

I tend to keep up with hacker news but I'm getting tired of eyeballing the
titles of all the old articles I already decided I didn't want to check out +
the old ones I already checked out and know I won't want to check out again
just to find the new ones.

------
rms
What happens to old posts? I would like a way to browse the archive.

Also, threads you comment on should show up in your profile so you can keep
track of ongoing conversations.

~~~
pg
There's now a "best ever" page: http://news.ycombinator.com/best

~~~
RichardPrice
I think an archive of all previous entries would be really helpful.

------
gustaf
I'm having issues with cookies, I have to keep logging everytime I visit, this
does not happen on reddit, anyone have an idea or experience similar
behaviour?

------
SonicSoul
The way i always browse HN, is by clicking comments, and than the article, so
that after finishing reading the article i can go back and view the comments.

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..

------
bootload
Couple of suggestions on urls

* 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

------
jbr
In the spirit of brainstorming:

    
    
      o Suggest users who upvote similar items.
      o Highlight items that have been upvoted by
        other users who upvote things that I upvote.
    

I'd love to write something like this, but would need the data. What are the
impediments to publishing or sharing upvote data?

------
lucb1e
Instead of:

    
    
        upvote.onclick=func(){ hideButton(); doRequest(); }
    

Please do:

    
    
        upvote.onclick=func(){ doRequest().onsuccess(func(){ hideButton(); } }
    

Upvotes, or downvotes for that matter, don't always go through, but this is in
no way made visible. Especially when pressing the back button, the browser
might load a cache with expired links. Or when using a mobile connection, the
connection often drops and you never know when it's safe to navigate away from
the page.

------
ralph
Originally at <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=19920>

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>

------
systems
sort: I want to be able to sort by date, by mod points, by poster and of
course if search is added, sort on my search result:

Views: count the number of time an news item was viewed and also allow me to
to sort on this number

views can complement mod points, if an item is viewed like 1000 times and got
55 mod points and another was viewed 55 times and got 55 mod points, well,
this is a nice indicator

------
cdmoyer
Man, I know there was an uproar when all PDFs were sent to scribd... but
having a feed reader link randomly link to a PDF is really obnoxious. For some
reason, those links in google reader decide to embed acrobat, rather than
opening in sumatraPDF like all my other PDFs.

Can the headline at least warn you? Or link to the comments, and include a PDF
link in the body?

------
yason
Please extend the submission form timeout. Would it crash the server if it was
at least a few hours? Half a day, 12 hours?

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.

------
releasedatez
One feature that I think will make a difference visually is to hide the items
you've saved so everything on the new or home page will only show items that I
haven't read before. I think it creates a better flow for screening through
the topics. So a reader doesn't need to stop for a microsecond to skip over a
saved item.

------
suyash
Location: It would be nice to divide posts based on locations. We have lot of
posts from SF Bay area, NYC, other metros, UK, Germany, India etc...and it's
all jumbled up.

Specially for jobs or networking purpose it would be really helpful to search
posts by location.

------
hornytoad
Trying to login with emacs-w3m, I get the error message: "Post request without
Content-Length."

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.

------
colanderman
[deleted] comments currently follow childless siblings without an intervening
line break, making for very confusing threads (it seems as if the [deleted]'s
children are children of the preceding childless sibling).

------
kmfrk
Can we split the ^ button into an upvote and save button? The stories I want
to save and upvote are not necessarily the same, and if I want to use ^ to
save stories, there's a disincentive to upvote them.

------
epi0Bauqu
Separate ask.yc from news posts. The questions often generate good
discussions, but die too quickly because they get pushed off too quickly.

------
alexanderRohde
So my user doesn't exist according to
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alexcr>

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

------
danford
Instead of a blanket filter for political (and other) terms, why not create a
way to check if certain terms already exist on the front page and only apply
penalties to posts that include these terms if the topic is already being
discussed on the front page. This way when big political news happens you can
still talk about it without it taking over the front page.

------
Sam_Odio
Comment URLS don't support the https protocol. https://DoesNotWork.com vs
<http://DoesWork.com>

~~~
pg
fixed

------
russellbeattie
Can you please add an item's publish date (<pubDate>) to the RSS feed? It's
seriously low-hanging fruit. Just whatever the date in the DB says is fine -
there must be a 'created' timestamp in there somewhere. Format it as RFC822
timestamp:

def _format_date(dt): """convert a datetime into an RFC 822 formatted date
Input date must be in GMT. """

    
    
        #   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)
    

-Russ

------
micheljansen
I guess this is more of a bug report than a feature request, but it's related
to several feature requests involving subdomains, so I figured I might as well
post it here:

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.

------
samcollins
One media query and one stylesheet for mobile browsing/commenting. I'm happy
to do it in an evening for you. Relevant post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152372>

------
morgandev
I like to scan HN during dead time. By the time I get to the bottom of the
page and click the 'More' link I run into the 'Unknown or expired link' error.

Can you just put the page number in the URL? Or redirect to the front page
after 5 seconds?

thanks!

------
k-mcgrady
Please allow account deletion. All activity could remain on the site with
username changed to 'deleted' or 'anon'. Alternatively allow users to change
their username.

------
kruk
Memorizing clicked links independent of browser's history.

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.

------
gojomo
A 'headline needs attention' flag-like button. It shouldn't imply a penalty,
like a normal 'flag', just an indication the headline may need tuning. (Some
headlines bury the lede, as with
<[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7562859>.](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7562859>.))

------
Hupo
It would be very nice if you could wrap the post time in a <time> element.
I've been toying with the idea of writing a userscript for HN, and it'd be
much nicer if I didn't have to parse the post times by hand. Not to mention
that right now it's impossible to know the exact time of older comments when
they might all say "300 days ago". You could also add a feature to the site
itself that would show the exact time and date of a post when you hover over
the post time.

------
BrandonM
A way to view comments to a submission by the time they were posted,
preferably as some kind of toggled option at the top of the page. One use case
is clearly in this thread, where finding new feature requests can be very
difficult. Another is just keeping up on the comments to my submissions; once
a submissions comment thread gets substantially long, it can be difficult to
keep up on reading the new comments.

I think the ideal way to reorder would be to consider a comment's post time to
be that of its most recent child. This means that when someone replies to a
thread, the entire thread will now be the first on the page, with each
sublevel ordered in the same manner. Of course, I knew reply to the submission
itself would show up at the very top.

This functionality could be extended to the threads page (which relates to a
suggestion I made a little while ago) and even to the Startup News page
itself, so that we could see which submission has been commented on most
recently (because as a parent, its child would have the most recent reply).

------
hajrice
I think that it'd be really cool to have email notifications when someone
replies to our post/comment.

------
phil
bookmarklet! I would submit more links if there was a bookmarklet that
submitted the page I was on.

~~~
danw
EDIT: I should have said this is a submit article bookmarklet. I'm working on
trying a like/dislike.

I've just made a realy quick and dirty bookmarklet. It's only tested in
firefox 2 and it's not quite how I would like it to work but it's a start.
I'll hopefully update it later to work better.

Just add the following URL as a bookmark:

javascript:(function(){var d=document;var b=d.body;var
c=b.insertBefore(d.createElement('center'),b.firstChild); var
dv=c.appendChild(d.createElement('iframe'));dv.id='ifrm';
dv.height='30%';dv.width='100%';dv.src='http://news.ycombinator.com/submit';
d.getElementById('ifrm').scrollIntoView(); })();

Let me know if it works.

~~~
eli
Which brings up another feature request: tweak the CSS so that really long
text in a comment (without any spaces) doesn't cause the whole page to expand
beyond 1024 pixels.

~~~
bluemoo
This problem is firefox specific. For whatever reason, IE does The Right
Thing. Actually, the whole site just looks better in IE, so maybe this should
be a request for better Firefox support :)

------
intellegacy
After reading an interesting discussion's comments, I'll often close the
window, do something else, and return to the discussion to read the new
comments.

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.

------
Nogwater
Add a points filter to the new stories page. This would allow people to find
potentially interesting stories (say, with 5 points) that haven't made it to
the front page yet.

------
riffer
Differentiate whether something was killed by flags or mods, instead of saying
'Dead'

It would cut down on the need for comments like this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815316>

------
nhebb
[dead] is currently used for both comments and new submissions. I often see
[dead] comments that are perfectly worthwhile, but new submissions that are
[dead] are completely useless. The link is removed, and they clutter up the
new page.

If there were two different categories of [dead] - comments and submissions -
we could show dead on one but not the other.

------
cjoh
I think it is nice that we get submissions from older articles that are a few
years old every once and awhile. They're healthy reminders of popular articles
of days gone by. At the same time, there seems to be a lot of recycling of
older posts going on lately in attempts to grab karma. I feel like this is a
too-cheap way to gain these points-- instead of sharing new useful information
with colleagues, the system can be gamed by sharing too much of yesterday's
useful information.

Flagging something as [old] would be useful -- perhaps some of the folks
who've been here for awhile can opt to ignore them a la a browsing interface
like /classic/ while still having the option of getting to these useful
artifacts if we want.

------
keven
Bug: not all comments by pg is shown

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

------
iamelgringo
As far as I can see, there are two tar pits that Digg and now Reddit are stuck
in:

1\. A lack of focus and quality in the content. 2\. No troll guards.

1\. Lack of focus and quality In my experience, users frequent a site because
it has quality content and they leave when the quality of the content
declines. Digg and more recently Reddit, are experiencing a loss of focus and
quality and as a result are losing their initial users. Diggs quality is so
bad it is now pointless to read and much to my chagrin, Reddit seems to be
following suit. Reddit seems to be drowning in a rising tide of noobs.
Apparently, there arent enough old users around to down-vote the crap posted
by the noobal hoard. From a quick read of comments, it seems many long-time
users are angry and feel disenfranchised. Its because of this that those
users whose content made Digg and Reddit popular in the first place are now
leaving those sites and taking their great ideas with them.

2\. No troll guards: Nothing poisons an online community quicker than a few
nasty trolls. Another one of the reasons that Im pulling away from Reddit is
because it is getting mean. Both the links that are posted and the article
forums are being destroyed by trolls stomping around unchecked. I hope Reddit
can fix this problem. If not, Im going to stop spending my time there.

The impression that I get, Paul, is that your goal is to make this YC News a
start-up news site and a community of potential founders; not simply another
social news site. The only way that I can see to maintain quality content and
to filter out the trolls is to institute some form of moderation. Straight
democracy leads to anarchy; thats why I think a news site needs to be a
republic. I dont think, by any stretch of the imagination, that Slashdot is
perfect, but they do have a system where moderators are selected from heavy
and moderate users on a rotating basis. The system filters out new and spam
accounts and gives preference to high karma users. It seems to keep the trolls
in check. It also encourages people to take more ownership and to participate
in the community.

Slashdots FAQ explains their moderation system here:
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520

There is also a brief discussion of their anti-troll rules here:
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm2000

Thanks for setting up the site. It scratches an itch that Ive had for a
while.

------
sprig
I would like to be able to delete an account

------
vy8vWJlco
How about some visual indicator (a line - ex, white/the same color as the
background; or pumpkin) on the left (under the arrow), so the eye can see the
nesting/tree structure more easily in really long conversations. Might be a
CSS-only tweak.

( For a visual example, see: <http://lists.debian.org/debian-
user/2010/09/msg01682.html> )

------
zach
I just saw another rehash on the front page (which I don't mind much at
current) which drew the inevitable responses:

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.

------
staunch
A "launch" tab at the top, where we can publicly launch projects without
having them compete with popular articles.

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?

------
Alex3917
I'd like a way to differentiate the startup tips from other discussion topics.
I am really interesting in participating in the community, but I don't want to
have to wade through stuff I've already read in my RSS reader. Already the
front page is filled with mostly stuff I've already read, which is drowning
out potentially interesting discussions.

------
malandrew
Leaderboard that also breaks down karma from posts and karma from comments.

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.

------
dowskitest
I guess hackers shouldn't fat-finger or forget their passwords once creating
an account, but I'm pretty sure some user named 'dowski' did just that. Maybe
he's not a real hacker, but he'd like to login again. So I'd like to request a
reset password feature or something.

------
danielha
I did a search and didn't see this mentioned.

In any case, a very useful feature would be a way to track your comments in
the different submissions and the stories that you voted up.

There are a lot of really great stories on here and sometimes I don't have the
time to finish reading some. I'd like to be able to find the stories again
quickly in my recent history.

------
IvyMike
When HN generates a "Unknown or expired link" it would be nice to have a
"Click here to return to homepage" link.

~~~
makecheck
Actually, my feature request is "don't show that incredibly aggravating page
at all" or "increase by 60 minutes the time it takes for things to expire".

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.

------
jraines
I would like to see a "collapse" button to hide a comment's children, like on
Reddit. With the new ranking algorithm, I do a lot more scrolling than I used
to (good thing in terms of giving everyone's comments more visibility, but [-]
would be handy)

------
cake
1) I would be curious to see an experiment concerning the karma system, a
downvote would cost you (2 karma) an upvote too (1 karma). You gain 1 karma
per day if you visited the site, this means as you get to know the community
and its codes more and more you get more control.

I think it could increase the value of the karma system, I am seeing a lot of
downvotes that I can't explain or that I find unfair. I am also seeing
excessive points on some comments.

2) Not related : if you browse someone's comments you may encounter truncated
posts titles :

 _12 points by pg 1 hour ago | link | parent | on: Announcement: YC alumni
will help us read applicat..._

It would be nice to include the full title in the "title" attribute of those
links.

~~~
jacquesm
That instantly limits you to 1 vote per day unless you yourself get upvoted.

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.

~~~
cake
Not exactly, you would have some capital to start. If you start with 50 points
you get 50 upvotes or 25 downvotes, plus it evolves every day from your visits
and the upvotes you received.

The main point is to force people to be more cautious with their upvotes and
downvotes. My theory is that if you have to pay from your reputation (your
karma), you'll mainly upvote/downvote what you're really convinced about.

------
wicked
Possibility to delete comments and submissions.

~~~
pg
you can now delete a comment if it has no children by editing it blank

~~~
pg
Now submissions and comments have a delete button, and you can delete comments
even if they have children.

------
akkartik
Please create a variant of 'dead' that indicates to the submitter that the
story has been killed. Killing stories without informing the submitter is for
spammers and trolls, not people who have demonstrated some value in the past.
It seems excessive to treat meta posts just like spammers. It is inhuman to
deny feedback to loyal regular users. To kill a story without feedback is to
suggest the submitter is beyond help, not worth engaging with.

------
trickjarrett
Simple url filtering:

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.

------
andyjdavis
I notice that a few others have complained about what is likely the same issue
in regard to form submissions.

I generally have hacker news open in the background throughout the day. If I
leave it for a while I inevitably get "Unknown or expired link" when next
clicking on the "more" link at the bottom.

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.

------
lelele
Besides replying, it would be nice to be able to send you a thank you note to
users who accept them. Acknowledgements do not add to discussions, but humans
are social, you know.

------
jey
Feature request: a way to escape an asterisk. Sometimes you do want to write a
literal asterisk. (E.g. to say "a times b")

~~~
ralph
How about &#42; yielding *.

Cheers, Ralph.

~~~
jey
This hack worked great until the recent change that stopped the evaluation of
sequences of &#42; and &amp;. Again there's no way to get a literal asterisk
that I know of.

~~~
rplevy
I second this, I can't find any way to display an asterisk.

------
therobotking
I am having a problem where a story has hundreds of comments. I click 'more'
once to go to the second page but by the time I've reached the bottom the
'more' link takes me to an expired page and the only way to reach the page I
wanted is to go back to the first page, reload it and then click 'more' on
each page quickly until I get to the comment page I wanted to be on.

Is this fixable?

------
arithewiz
This is not so a much of a feature request, I would simply like it if the
background color could be white, or a shade of white. I have been reading a
lot of news here over the past few days and I get the feeling my eyes have
been hurting due to the text and background color combination. Could be just
me.

------
hernan7
The "Hacker News |" part at the beginning of the page titles is redundant;
please remove it. 99% of the time, the Y-combinator icon is enough to identify
the tab as belonging to Hacker News.

On a tabbed browser, a sequence of HN tabs looks like this:

(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.

~~~
graywh
What if it was shortened to just "HN" or "News.YC"?

------
icey
Please ignore case when comparing submissions, as well as trailing slashes.

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.) 
    

I tested this by submitting the story a third time, and capitalizing a "T"
that wasn't capitalized in either submission and it made it through the dupe
check.

------
_jmar777
Make <http://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin> redirect to
<https://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin>. Not to be overly facetious, but
there's some irony to having an unsecured login form on a site called "Hacker
News". :p

On a related note... any chance we can get confirmation on passwords being
hashed/salted?

------
NaNaN
We may turn some HN submits into article-friendly places, and only thoughtful
articles are welcome from the replies. We can have a small homepage on HN to
attach our small articles about interesting news. Maybe the submitter can
choose which mode to use. It is like SubReddit but still has difference.

------
dredmorbius
Text formatting bug, _bold_ / _italic_ stuff.

<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.

~~~
dredmorbius
Oh. Re-read the rules. First star doesn't require whitespace around it.

I guess I can't be f*cked anymore ;-)

------
lucb1e
Bug: The title of pages gets double html-encoded when viewing a single
comment. Does not occur when viewing a thread like this one.

Example: single quote (') displays as &#x27; in the title bar, or &amp;#x27 in
the HTML data.

Example case:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838757)

------
edwintorok
Merge duplicate submissions and their votes for URL that are "the same", and
display only one submission:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903800)

Blogspot is a common problem for example, trailing slash, etc.

------
Confusion
Perhaps not really a feature, but: yesterday I submitted
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173147> It sank pretty quickly due to a
lack of upvotes. However, despite its low position, it did accumulate 9
upvotes over the last day, which I guess are due to seperate submissions of
the same story. From this, I propose the algorithm that decides what appears
on the frontpage can use tweaking to weigh submissions heavier than upvotes
(perhaps it does?). If this story was truly submitted 10 times, perhaps it
deserves a higher position?

~~~
rms
I think this has been discussed before, but as you propose it, weighting
submitting higher than voting is too subject to abuse. I also regularly submit
things instead of upvoting them. Commonly I'll click on a story, then use the
bookmarklet to submit it after reading so I don't have to go back and upvote
it.

------
ivankirigin
Do you have a way of tracking new comments on this thread?

It would be interesting if you have special tools that let you "follow"
stories or even people. If I had to choose, I'd rather see the recent comments
from a few select people than the front page.

------
idoh
Hello PG, when you reply to a comment, can you put the focus onto the text
box? that way you can start typing without having to click into the text box
first? It would take about 2-3 lines of javascript to make this happen.

------
msg
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277112>

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.

------
huhtenberg
An option of submitting a "better URL" would be nice. This is in the context
of the blogspam, i.e. when the original submission links to a page that merely
rehashes the content of another page.

One option is to allow users suggest alternative url and then have the
submission URL automatically changed to a suggested one once latter was
submitted N times. Perhaps add a "url" option next to the "flag", make it open
a page with an existing URL in the text input field and let the user change
and submit it.

I know this is being done by hand by mods at the moment, and I am suggesting
automating this process.

------
amorphid
A hacker/non-hacker toggle for each submission and a system for letting the
community decide what is truly hacker-ish. It is the only way to prevent
Hacker News from becoming Reddit with no sub-Reddts.

~~~
charlief
I'm upvoting for good intent, but what is and what isn't hacker-ish is decided
at least partially through up and down votes already. Hacker/non-hacker are
very ambiguous terms and will mean something different from one submitter to
another. The submission guidelines are clear whether people choose to follow
them or not, and whether people vote and flag in accordance. It isn't about
the inadequacy of the current ranking framework. The community is changing,
and with that, the ranking of topics. I think you're trying to solve a very
difficult problem here that a toggle and an additional ranking scheme may be
too simplistic and add too much complexity to the submission process.

------
huhtenberg
An option for having submissions of selected users to float to _my_ front page
even with a score of 1 (and perhaps staying there longer than under normal
circumstances).

Call it "tracking" or "following the user" if you will.

~~~
vollmond
Alternative: highlight all posts by followed users, similar to how fark.com
does it. I can quickly scan the page to see the people I'm interested in, and
still easily see the context for their discussions.

------
alanh
Please make usernames case-insensitive on login. My iPhone auto cases my
username as AlanH upon which event I get a "Bad Login" message. I believe most
users expect usernames to be case insensitive.

------
Hexstream
Three related feature requests for the comments section of articles:

1\. Give id's to comments so we can #reference them (I looked for it but
didn't find it, surprisingly).

2\. Add a "parent" link to each of a comment's children, referencing the
aforementioned id, so that it's much easier to locate the parent of a comment
when it's offscreen because there are lots of replies. To peek at the parent
we'd just have to click the link then hit the browser back button. Perhaps use
some javascript to make this parent link appear only when the parent is
offscreen.

3\. When we post a reply use the anchor in the obvious way so we don't have to
find our comment manually. Usually you want to continue reading the comments
after the one you just posted.

------
BHSPitMonkey
Please make discussion post text easier to read. Whenever I view one of these
posts, the submission's body text is in a light grey font that's annoyingly
difficult to read compared to comment text (which is black). It's almost as
difficult to read as comments which have been severely downvoted, which
signals that the submission itself is not worth reading.

------
aviraldg
Please add an option to switch the "comments" link and the title link.

(Many people read the commentary on HN before actually reading the linked
article)

~~~
jewel
Highly related, can you make the "visited" link be a different color for the
comments link on the main page? I often peruse the comments without clicking
on the link, and that isn't reflected in the comments color.

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.

------
prakash
Can we build a local community out of YC news? Currently YC is focus is the
US. For the RestOfWorld, can we have a country/city page that links to a local
startup website or a yahoo/google groups page?

This would to some extent help facilitating potential co-founders -- since
that's a constant them on this board.

------
iamelgringo
Tags.

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.

------
satishkota
Can't a link click open in a new tab??? since there are lots of external URLs,
whenever i click the link, it takes me out of HN... and i am still trying to
select the ones i want to read... so everytime i select one, i have to do
right click and open in new tab...

P.S: May be i am a new guy here...and there are other methods there which i
dont know

------
gus_massa
I have an idea to discourage deletion and resubmission. Apply a -1 penalty to
the deletion of a story. It's small enough to not penalize too much honest
mistakes, and it's a signal that deletions are bad. (If the user still
continues to delete and resubmit, use the current method.)

------
mcxx
A lot of people submit "rate my startup" links. There are two ways to do this
- either sumbit a link to the homepage with an appropriate title or submit a
question-like post with the homepage link in the title and additional
commentary in the text field. In the first case, the author must add a comment
the regular way which may not be at the top/visible the whole time. In the
second case, there's no direct link to the homepage, one has to copy it or
type it manually. I would appreciate if HN would improve the UX with these
kind of posts. I won't suggest a solution, I'm sure PG will come up with
something clever if he decides to implement this.

------
LeBleu
The ability to tell how you are logging in and request lost login information.

For example, I think I used OpenID to log in, but I might have used Google
instead. I don't know which. I tried to log in from home, and I got the
cryptic "Bad OpenID error". I don't know if this meant OpenID was down at the
time, or that I was using the wrong provider. There was no way to request an
email with my login credentials, not even to my already entered email address.

Even from my work machine, where it remembers I am logged in, I cannot tell if
I have a real account or if I have used one of the many OpenID providers. So I
still don't know if I'll be able to log in when I get home.

------
ramy_d
Why does this happen? <http://i.imgur.com/d4Occ.png>

There's a story in the RSS, it's not in the front page, and I can't search for
it.

------
create_account
Make urls in comments clickable, ie. automatically wrap markup around them, or
let us type the markup ourselves.

------
hollerith
I really appreciate the procrastination preventer, but would like one change.

It is not enough that the reader does not spend too much time reading and
commenting on Hacker News. Because willpower is a depletable resource, it is
also necessary that the reader does not expend too much willpower resisting
the impulse to spend too much time reading and commenting. When the "get back
to work" page comes up, I find that I have to expend real willpower not to
click on the override link (anchor) at the bottom of the page. To balance that
change, you might simultaneously put a link to the reader's user page, so if
he really needs to, he can go to his user page and turn the procrastination
preventer off. (A logout link on the "get back to work page'd be nice too.)

------
kmfrk
I would love a Hide feature that adds a "(-)" in the same place the name and
comment links are.

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.

------
jackowayed
add GitHub to the list of sites that have subdomains expanded. Some people
blog from theirusername.github.com, and it would be a lot more obvious that
it's a blog post, not code, if you showed the subdomain.

------
AbyCodes
A RSS feed for each of the Hacker News list:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/best>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/active>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments>

------
Tycho
To help people manage the time they spend on HN (given its slightly addictive
nature), what about a rolling series of front-page view counts beside your
username. Like it would show you how many times you'd clicked on the front
page today, and to the left it would have the counts for the prior days (going
back 5 days say). Users can strive to keep that down to a reasonable level.

------
iigs
When replying to a comment in a thread (the parent being a comment, as opposed
to a comment like this, where the parent is the article) it would be neat to
have the article link available above the reply box (as in the article-parent
case).

Several times in the past week I have clicked on a thread, read the thread for
comments, clicked the article link to read, clicked back, and then hit "reply"
on a comment. Half way through formulating a comment I think "oh, I wonder if
the article touched on $foo" and then have to either unwind the stack or open
a new tab to news.yc and retrace my steps. Being able to control-click from
the comment page would be ++handy.

Thanks for the site, really enjoy it.

------
mudge
Per the http standard header responses are terminated with \r\n\r\n, however
the headers on Hacker News are terminated with \n\n. See:
<http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec4.html>

------
daveog3
Could a tick box be implemented beside each title on the main page as I don't
alway have time to read the full article linked at a particular time, and if
its a couple of days before I get a chance to do so it is difficult to find
the article again. Then put an option for the user when they come back to the
page to have it display the articles they previously ticked.

------
frederickf
Move the search box to the top of the home page. Maybe in the header or just
below. Alternatively, add a "search" link to the header that takes visitors to
[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=)

------
gregwebs
Make users more like people (to make discussions better).

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?

------
frevd
Concerning better objectivity in voting, I'd like to see two separate counters
for up and down votes, rather than the aggregated sum which conceals the
actual number of votes and is sort of nontransparent since not all members are
allowed to down-vote.

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.

------
nabors
I would like updates from Hacker News by texting the word Hacker to 90210. And
then you all can send out personal messages to your fans! It would also be
nice if you allowed me to be your agent to sign you up :). I just think it
would be so cool to get Personal Updates from the DNA running Hacker News via
90210 :) Thank you so much for all of your support in the community!
www.danielnabors.com explains it all i felt this would be an Exciting Deep
Story and strong individuals like your selves would see the Vision :)

------
cdvonstinkpot
I think it would be interesting to have a page that detailed a list of which
websites were supplying the stories that have been currently submitted to HN.
Like a top 100 base URLs of stories that made it to HN.

So I can keep track of the most popular news sources for the demographic of HN
readers. & Keep up on these same sources myself.

------
robarago
It's a little anoying not to be able to read HN offline. I mean, I use my
Smartphone to download several RSS feeds. All of them includes a short summary
of the news so I can read them quickly. Unfortunatelly, HW DOES NOT include
such summary so I have to go online to and, even then, what I see is not the
new, but the comments.

Please, please, please, include summary in RSS.

------
lucb1e
Since I don't see a "feedback" button, I guess this is the place. It might
have been submitted before, though.

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.

------
ivankirigin
Privately expose the voting power on account profiles.

I think it would be bad for the community to know how powerful someone else's
votes are, as folks would bias voting according to whether the poster had high
or low voting power.

But I'm curious how much my votes influence hotness and match the oracles.

------
abstractbill
How about an area where we can submit startup advice and vote on it, for
example: "don't use bank of america for your business banking", "do
incorporate as a C corp in delaware", etc. I think the advice submitted and
comment threads generated could be quite valuable.

~~~
ecuzzillo
So, the community that talks a lot about startups is a good idea, but taking
community advice directly seems a little iffy. It may be that this group
happens to be mostly composed of people who could successfully run a startup,
but I doubt it, and if it were true, it certainly wouldn't last very long. If
you take any random set of people interested in startups, it's not likely that
a majority of them would vote up the right pieces of advice. I prefer the more
general submit-links-and-comment model, since the links tend to be more useful
data than pure advice.

------
ez77
It would be great to have a history export feature. By the way, I must admit I
sometimes upvote only to save the thread and read it later. A distinct Save
feature could result in more strict upvoting...

------
kunjaan
Delete Accounts Easily

------
lhnz
I would like the ability to follow users.

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.

------
huhtenberg
Please add an option for showing original submission titles.

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.

------
jerrya
I'd like to see an RSS feed that points first to the ycombinator comments, and
second to the original targeted link.

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.

------
axod
Fix unicode. (pi) shouldn't be replaced with an 'X' and other unicode
characters should work.

------
lordgilman
Google searches qualified with site:news.ycombinator.com often turn up the
permalink pages for individual comments rather than the original post itself.
Could you set rel="canonical" on comment permalink pages to point back to the
original post?

------
veyron
Allow articles/conversations to be grouped. case in point: there were many
articles essentially reporting that osama bin laden was dead. There are many
articles focusing on different angles, such as the social media influence on
the event, and i agree that they probably should be separate discussions.
However, people post different articles reporting the same exact news from NY
Times, BBC, and fox news, amongst other news outlets.

------
blueblob
I would like a "favorites" or "saved links" page. The front page changes
rapidly enough that if you don't bookmark pages that you want, a few hours
later they can be hard to find if you don't remember the exact title to use
with search.

------
keithfrost
A full-text search facility for postings would be nice.

------
DanBC
Some people love to provide grammar / spelling / etc fixes.

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

------
tokenadult
Based on an example that appears to have been removed from the front page just
now, I'd like to see an easy way to flag a user who is spamming up the site as
well as the current way of flagging particular submissions.

------
sho
Please add full titles to links in the "title" attribute, especially in
comment parents. Then, users can hover over the (often truncated) parent link
and see the full title without clicking.

Just to be super explicit, what I am asking for is for a link instance like
this:

    
    
      <a href="item?id=519555">Super last minute advice for startups applying for...</a>
    

to be changed sitewide to this:

    
    
      <a href="item?id=519555" title="Super last minute advice for startups applying for Y Combinator">Super last minute advice for startups applying for...</a>

------
brg
Allow resubmissions after XXX period of time.

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.

------
possibilistic
Hey pg et al., could you embed the post date and time as a timestamp in the
HTML source? (Perhaps using data attributes?) It would be great for HN
parsers/readers. Personally, I'd like to scrape a few comments and cache them
in a feed. As of right now I have to use the cheap heuristic of parsing "X
days ago", and I assume this could be +/- 23 hours in error.

Thanks!

------
muuh-gnu
I would like an option to completely hide downvoted comments and the
subthreads below them, slashdot-like, not merely grey them out. As HN becomes
more and more popular, the number of downvoted bullshit one-liner postings and
accompanying one-liner chat-like "discussions" IMO seems to grow. I dont want
to see people "chat". Based on that, I also would like an option to
hide/remove postings below a given number of words, again, to remove the one-
liner bullshit postings.

------
iworkforthem
To remove saved stories. Right now, we are able to save stories, but can't
unsaved it? Most stories have a timespan and validity to it. This will be
useful to keep one focus.

------
drp
Some comment threads are getting very long. Collapse children would help keep
these from hiding other worthy top level comments.

------
rabid-coder
In the news feed, there are topics for 'Ask HN' and 'Show HN', but one thing I
really enjoy are the books or other sorts of list-based suggestions people
provide. It would be really nice to have a more explicit way to pick these
out, like a 'List HN' type of comment as opposed to sorting through all the
'Ask HN' links for a good booklist.

------
simias
Allowing people to delete their comments when there are replies is annoying
since it removes the context.

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.

------
m_ram
Please add a title tag to the
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin](https://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin)
page. Password managers like KeePassX and KeePass use window titles to select
user names and passwords for the auto-fill feature.

------
TTRex
Just one, small, simple thing... why don't you consider changing the highlight
color of the texts/words in yor website to orange? The regular blue its just
regular (one thing that YCombinator isnt) and the orange would really add to
your website structure (everything is delimited in the textbox size) and its
and the company's logo color.

------
adammichaelc
Plesae add a feature that shows "Top ten articles" as in "Top Ten This Week"
and "Top Ten This Month" and "Top Ten This Year." Heck, maybe even a "Top Ten
of All Time."

LewRockwell.com does this and I really enjoy the feature. Especially if I
haven't had time to take a look this week, and I'd like to see what the best
submissions, discussions, etc have been lately.

There are some really good articles from years ago that new users would really
enjoy (like me, since I wasn't here a few years ago but have just heard that
those were the glory days). It would be cool to see those articles organized
into an easy to access format like the Top Ten approach.

------
acerimmer
When users downvote a comment, they should be required to give a reason. When
someone downvotes me, I wonder why that is: Am I too arrogant? Do they just
disagree? Is it because what I posted is obvious? This would also motivate
people to think about downvoting more and reduce the problem with interesting
comments being downvoted because people disagree with them.

------
mandeepj
It would be nice if HN had follow feature similar to twitter where you can see
what your favorite author\commentator just posted. With notification feature,
HN would lets us know when someone replies to one of our comments then HN
would be so user friendly.

------
akarambir
I saw some questions some days old and even answered well are still in top
list(front page). Please add a feature of "Yes, I got the answer." in hacker
news questions. if the asker get what he wanted to know, he would click on it
and the question will no longer be available for up-votes from other members.
This will allow other questions to eventually come on front page and get
noticed(and hence get answered).

------
devsda0
Hi, First off - really like your website. I check it out every day, several
times a day! Love it. One enhancement request - would it be possible for you
to have the links open in another window ... what i mean is
...target="_blank"? Many thanks Gerard L devsda0@gmail.com

------
danw
Can we get the ability to see what we've liked and where we've commented from
our profiles please? I keep forgetting where I've commented and what that
awsome article I liked was.

Also bug report. When I enter some characters in comments such as  and  it
goes a bit funny.

------
nilclass
It would be awesome, if the RSS feed would return CORS[1] headers. That way
pure client-side JavaScript apps can retrieve it without the need of a proxy.
All that is needed for this is a single static response header: "Access-
Control-Allow-Origin: *"

[1]: <http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/>

------
coffeecodecouch
I can't remember if this is in effect or not, but stories starting with "show
hn" (case insensitive) should get a ranking boost. That would help more user
created content get on the front page, which is a good thing IMO.

------
prakash
Gestation period for new users based on time/comments/karma:

A lot of spam/spammy submissions are submitted by new users, users that create
an account just to submit these links. I guess a lot of them do it to generate
google juice since google indexes the site in minutes.

In addition, the number of relevant submissions are not see on the new page
thereby reducing the quality of the content on the forum.

Can you introduce a gestation period for new users -- this could be based on
number of days since they created their registration or the number of comments
or their karma. Once they pass this threshold, these users can submit stories.

~~~
pg
There is already a rate limit for new accounts. Banning submission entirely
would discourage legit new users.

BTW, they don't get any Google juice, because links are all nofollow unless
they have a certain number of points.

------
EricBurnett
Up-voting breaks after you sign in in a different page.

The situation is this: sometimes I open a number of pages in tabs when I am
not signed in, then read and vote on them all. The first time I vote I get the
login page and everything works nicely, but if I later try to vote again on a
different tab that doesn't know I was logged in, I get redirected to a dead
page instead.

Repro: 1\. When signed out, open a couple pages in tabs. 2\. Sign in on one of
them. 3\. Try to use an up arrow in the other tab.

You should end up on a blank white page.

------
stephen_g
Hacker News should be available over IPv6 - it's pretty easy to set up (but
looking at Softlayer's blog it looks like you may have to pay a couple of
dollars a month for a subnet allocation, which is usually free. That
information could be outdated though).

It's a small price to pay to be future proof though.

------
metamemetics
Add downvoting to submissions as well as comments. Problems this will
alleviate:

-users will have a way express that they feel a submission is egregiously off-topic or extremely redundant rather than leaving the off-repeated comment "This is Hacker News?" or "Here is a script to hide links with the word iPad" etc.

-Will improve the quality of submissions and prevent people from karma-fishing with linkbait titles on articles of little value.

-reduce multiple copies of the same story from sitting on the front page

------
codezero
If you detect an antagonistic or uncivil comment or commenter (an exercise to
the reader), add an interstitial that displays the "In Comments" section of
the guidelines with the editable comment before they are finally allowed to
submit the comment.

------
kristianp
This is a bug. When I get to the older posts, around 200 or so, high-ranking
posts are displayed twice, one after the other. Here is a saved hacker news
page illustrating this bug, with two examples in it:

<http://pastie.org/pastes/1270964/download>

It has already been reported in: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630931>

------
frankydp
When you submit a link it would nice to have the similar link check list the
last 10 most recent post from the root domain. This would allow for slightly
different urls being submitted for the same articles or story.

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.

------
adamzerner
Unread replies to your comments. Like how the message thing on reddit is red
when you have unread comments. It's too annoying to click "threads" on the
navbar, and look through old threads to see if there were any new comments.

------
sf2007
Is there a separate holder for reporting bugs?

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?

------
ColdHawaiian
Open source Hacker News. I think the community can get together and talk about
new features (maybe on GitHub pull-requests and/or on HN itself, or maybe a
Discourse forum instance), and get those features implemented quickly.

------
chasingsparks
Karma is currently (roughly) calculated as the sum of a users submission and
comment votes. I would be interested in seeing an alternative implementation
that takes the sum of that users aggregate votes on each comment and article,
raised to x.

For example:

If x was 1.2 and I had posted 3 comments with vote scores of [1,20,-10] my
karma would be round(1^1.2+20^1.2-10^1.2)=22 as opposed to roughly 11 where it
would stand now. I think it would encourage comments that are very thoughtful
and discourage comments that are pure flaming.

------
makecheck
Subtract 1 karma from yourself each time up-vote or down-vote is used; this
effectively turns karma into "money" that can be spent on maintaining good
discussion and high quality submissions.

This would make people think twice before down-voting. It would also reduce
"knee-jerk" up-votes, as people would be more likely to reserve up-votes for
things that truly deserve it.

It would also mean that long-time users will naturally do more of the
moderation, as they have lots of points and may not be as afraid to use them.

~~~
rms
It's not a good idea to discourage voting, generally the more voting we have
the better.

------
lotharbot
pg once lamented "comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get
massively upvoted."

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.

------
brett
a list of all of a user's comments on their user page would be nice

~~~
pg
done

~~~
akkartik
And it's great too. As soon as I can see a list of my own comments it becomes
relatively easy to check recent ones for responses, and automatic notification
becomes less important. It's interesting how these features interact.

~~~
akkartik
I just noticed that the edit link on comments expires after a while. An
alternative that helps with notification: disallow editing when a comment gets
a response. That way I can scan recent comments on my user page to check for
responses.

------
BitPerfect
Please add item summary abstracts (or better yet complete text) to your RSS
feed. Publishing headlines only doesn't convey enough information to decide
whether the article is worth clicking through to.

------
Hexstream
I think it would be nice to have explicit support to mark groups of duplicates
as such... When a certain threshold of users agree that they're indeed
duplicates, the two or more submissions could be "glued" together so that they
always show up in a tight group on the page.

The different comment threads could be merged in a sensible way, possibly by
reallocating threads from comment sections with few comments. Any comment
sections that have no more comments or never had any would be disabled. This
would avoid having an unnecessarily split discussion of the same topic between
multiple comment sections.

------
Dall0oo
Can we have a rss feed from search ? Something like
[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=hacker&...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=hacker&sortby=score+desc&format=rss)
. If this feature exist, I can't find it.

------
jdueck
I'm enjoying using news.ycombinator.com, but I fear it will eventually suffer
the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. The problem on the internet is a
lack of scarcity. I'm beginning to think the only way to really solve the
problem is through submitter fees. Without fees, I fear it will turn into a
self-promoting free-for-all.

Think about the problem in terms of email spam. If email cost $0.25 to send,
the spam problem would be gone. If a submission to Digg cost $10, their spam
problem would mostly go away.

When everything is free, it's just one big race for the bottom. I hope I'm
wrong, but I don't think I am.

~~~
delackner
Think about the incentives you are creating. This fee would just get written
into the contracts of viral ad companies, while enthusiastic users would be
deterred by the psychological barrier of spending money to do something that
feels like just saying "hey guys look at this".

------
dredmorbius
I prefer higher-contrast sites. I've restyled HN swapping the border and body
background colors, and with slightly larger fonts. CSS and screenshot on
stylebot.me:

[http://stylebot.me/styles/2945](http://stylebot.me/styles/2945)

------
beagle3
Whenever an article has a title text that ends with a question mark,
automatically add a link to
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines> following it.

(Someone posts this on every such article anyway)

------
jorangreef
Let me see all articles that receive more than [threshold] votes.

------
crdunwel
I use the keyboard almost exclusively and it's annoying to have to tab through
everything just to get through the article list. It would be nice if I could
push the arrow keys to navigate the article list (similar to google search).
Thanks

------
j2d2
I'd like a link to any replies people make to my comments. Like the red
envelope in reddit. I sometimes make comments asking questions or simply
brain-vomiting and would like to know what people's reactions are.

------
corentin
1\. Change the color of the "comment" link please (or use a button). At first,
I wondered why all those messages had the word "comment" in them :) And then I
tried to respond to this message and searched for the "comment" button and I
was enlightened! 2\. Document before writing new features :) I'm really
curious to know what the "showdead" option is (I don't want to try it because
the name is so scary). 3\. A URL (or free text) field in the profile. 4\. Keep
it simple. I think it's nearly perfect as it is (the sign-in form is great).
5\. We want to see Arc and the source code of this app :)

------
JoelSutherland
In addition to 'flag' add 'meta' on comments. There is no need for a 1/3 of
each thread to be complaints about the title, whether it is HN worthy, etc.

------
willheim
I tried to submit a question and it came back "You're submitting too fast.
Please slow down." I am not submitting too fast. I only submitted once. It's
not clear to me what the issue is. Please fix this. If it's some sort of Fail
Whale then make it clear that that's the issue. If it's something else, please
make it clear. What I see is a puzzlement and an error on your side and that
just causes me frustration.

------
slim
BUG : the RSS feed is broken here :

<http://news.ycombinator.com/rss>

links to YC are like this :

<http://news.ycombinator.comitem/?id=101703>

must be a typo.

------
corentin
1\. Change the color of the "comment" link please (or use a button). At first,
I wondered why all those messages had the word "comment" in them :) And then I
tried to respond to this message and searched for the "comment" button and I
was enlightened! 2\. Document before writing new features :) I'm really
curious to know what the "showdead" option is (I don't want to try it because
the name is so scary). 3\. A URL (or free text) field in the profile. 4\. Keep
it simple. I think it's nearly perfect as it is (the sign-in form is great).
5\. We want to see Arc and the source code of this app :)

------
epi0Bauqu
Delete from saved page (when one is "done" with that item), or at least strike
out.

~~~
lojic
+1 I'm surprised this feature doesn't exist. I don't have many saved items
yet, but I would think it could clutter up rather quickly.

------
johnwatson11218
How about a way to see all the up votes and down votes for a comment. I would
be intrigued to see if there are any comments with low points but only because
they were somehow controversial. I'm not trying to be sensationalist but it
might be interesting to see the most controversial comments on a kind of
leader board format. Maybe themes would emerge to show big dividing lines in
the way that the audience here thinks about problems.

------
danw
A similar users list. Show me all the users who like the same stories as me
and comment in all the same places. I've already noticed some users who are
similar to me and a nice system for making sure I don't overlook any would be
great.

------
rauar
More spacing or different location for the flag link (as far away as possible
from commonly used links like submission title or comments).

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...

------
andywood
Whatever logic it is that makes stories enter free-fall from the #1 slot, to
page 10, in the course of 15 minutes...

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.

------
eli
After you edit a comment, it's very difficult to figure out how to get back to
the discussion. This is a problem with posting a comment or performing other
actions too, but it's particularly annoying when you edit a comment.

~~~
pg
This is now fixed: try the "parent" link.

~~~
danielha
The parent addition is helpful, but to find the origin of discussion, one
would have to keep following parent links. Having a link to the main
discussion would be nice.

------
mooism2
Please disallow submissions that link to private ip addresses.

For example, the submission at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015536>
links to a page on 192.168.0.1. In this case the link appears to be benign,
but a link could be crafted that changed security settings on a router, or
even routed the router.

It seems that links to private ip addresses on HN could be harmful and could
never be legitimate.

------
codezero
Is this still looked at?

It would be cool if resubmitted stories had links to the previous versions –
it's always nice to see the old comments, as well.

------
roryokane
Show a “saved comments” link in my profile, underneath the “saved stories”
link. This would show all comments that I upvoted, similar to “saved stories”.

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.

------
lucb1e
Bug:

    
    
        <font color=”red”>green text</font>
    

Is not allowed as title and will show up as "green text", which is a
completely different title, without warning. Is there a reason for not
allowing this?

------
edanm
There seems to be a small bug. When pasting links, HN removes apostrophes.
This is often problematic when copying-pasting links from Wikipedia.

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.

------
johnobrien1232
I often open a new tab to read an article off the homepage. After I've read
all the articles, then I'll click on "More", and receive a "Unknown or expired
link." message.

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.

------
chris_j
When flagging stories, please could we get asked for confirmation before the
story is flagged? Since I started using HN on a touchscreen phone, I have
found myself unable to precisely control where I click, meaning that I have
accidentally flagged a lot of stories. A simple "are you sure you want to
flag?" would save me from having to click unflag so often.

~~~
tomp
as usual, undo is better

------
neuroscr
Sometimes the article isn't that great but the comment threads are amazing. I
don't want to up vote the article but I do want people to read the threads. It
would be nice to be able to up vote just the comments of a link.

------
weaksauce
Maybe you might want to add a bit to the duplicate detection algorithm to
remove the "www." before checking if it is a dupe. I only say this because an
article was submitted by two different people with exactly the same title. The
only thing that differs is the "www." prefix on the url.

The two stories:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594605>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594525>

------
vhf
I suggest changing the way the karma works (I know : "no way") by making
up/downvotes ponderated by voter's karma (I know : "ELO blabla, no way").

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.

------
thunk
An unintrusive page-load timestamp would help us self-limit obsessive
reloading to decrease load on the server.

Edit: Also, it would give "n minutes ago" a reference point.

------
peterlada
I'd love to follow the news in my RSS feed reader. But the 30+ per hour makes
it impossible. I'd love a Top News RSS feed with 30-40 items per day.
Filtering can be vote count, throttling, etc.

------
tokenadult
Having the footer links found on the main page, especially "guidelines" and
"library," be visible when composing a reply to a previous reply would be
helpful for sharing those links when composing replies to users who don't know
of those helpful resources. In general, it helps me find stuff if the footers
are the same regardless of state, whether reading the main page, reading the
new submissions page, posting a new submission, or posting a reply to a
previous reply.

------
zaidf
When displaying list of stories, it would make readability much easier if
alternate rows were white. Current listing of stories requires too much mental
engagement for me personally.

Alternate row coloring would increase page scability for story listings.

-Zaid 

------
kgill
It would be great if the links on HN automatically open in new tabs. This
would clearly imply that the clicked link is on a different domain. In
addition, the user won't need to remember to go back to HN page, because it
would be always open in the first tab. (Similar to Google News)

------
reledi
Inline replies and comment folding.

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.

------
laxkin2
BTW, How to restore forgotten password? I didn't find that feature on the
site.

------
nirs
Use black text color for author comment text, the current gray is hard to
read.

------
vinchuco
I was wondering if something like this would be likeable by users.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005252)
<<<< A wiki/resource list.

------
shara
A search please.

------
jgamman
i like the 'friends' option. i unfortunately didn't use it enough at Reddit
when it was new and now i can't filter for the users that consistently matched
my tastes (or challenged them) - the noob tide has risen... i like reddit but
a filter that lets everything in isn't filtering anymore. i guess i'm looking
for a way that allows me to create my own 'recomendations' type algorithm. i
think if it's on and clear at the beginning, it might allow the system to
scale if/when it hits a major growth curve and allow that community vibe to
remain.

------
kennytiltontoo
Login password recovery. :)

~~~
clb22
A lot of times i couldn't login because I just forgot my password. Send
Password recovery email is a must!

------
BrandonM
This is a simple request. How about making the Y in the upper left corner of
the page be the shortcut icon? Nearly all of my bookmarked web pages have a
representative icon, and it couldn't hurt anything, right?

~~~
BrandonM
Thank you :).

------
tralfam
An RSS feed which takes me to the comment page of the submission.

Reason being that I like to use live bookmarks in Firefox, and the RSS feed
which goes directly to the submitted link means if I want to read the comments
left by HN users, I must go to HN's homepage to look for the article, and then
click on comments.

Which is a lot of work compared to clicking on the live bookmark entry, then
opening up the submitted webpage (in a new tab) from the submission's comment
page.

------
ayc
Can't locate a 'SEARCH in news' function.

------
mattheww
Display the H-index of users on the leaders board:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index>

------
shn
There should not be down voting for the comments. But number of votes should
be shown and moved up so that others can see which ones liked by community and
others "left behind". Removing down voting is essential if number of likes are
going to be shown to eliminate any emotional response and action
(=downvoting).

------
msg
The following thread didn't wrap text properly. It ran past the right edge and
required a horizontal scrollbar. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282844>

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.

------
imp
I would like to have the option of changing my vote on articles and comments.
There are times (on reddit) when I vote an article up and then read the
comments and find that the blogger was actually full of crap.

------
Sukotto
For polls, please auto-include "Number of respondents" at the bottom of the
poll.

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.

------
serf
Please add an 'after-dark' feature that allows those concerned with battery
usage , and those with already burned retinas from years of computer to view
Hacker News in a darkened theme. Please keep fonts on the new theme as high
contrast as the black on white.

------
dhs
Out of habit - most blog comment systems I know allow for it - I just used a
couple HTML tags in a comment, to no good effect. I think that changing the
little label I discovered afterwards on the profile page from "help" to
"formating options" could help prevent such mishaps, since "help = formating
options" in this case. Also, making the gray of said label a tad darker would
make it easier to see - it's a bit "hidden in plain sight" the way it's now,
to the right of everything else on the page.

------
bartonfink
In addition to the header coloring preference, it would be nice to either have
a preference to color the text ("new", "threads", "submit" etc) or, failing
that, to change the text from black to white for darker header colors.

Currently, with dark colors it's occasionally difficult to read the text.

------
rdl
I'd like SSL. Especially since Y Combinator uses the same site for various
internal things, it would be nice to be able to protect from passive
monitoring at cafes (I use a VPN but a lot of people don't).

Splitting news.yc from the YC app, hours, etc. system might also be nice, so
people can blackhole hackernews without losing YC functionality.

------
jsteel
I subscribe via RSS and it would be helpful if each topic had a brief
description (just a few lines from the first paragraph at least). If I want to
read the whole article I will then visit the specific website.

If the whole article was the description that would also be OK; so I could
read everything from my RSS reader.

------
DanBC
Please can I filter some people from /news and /newest? Or could I set a
minimum score for any of their submitted articles to appear for me? (Thus,
they submit twenty articles. One of them gets 6 upvotes, which is my limit,
and thus I only see that one submission.)

I guess this is a user-side configurable hellban / killfile.

------
makecheck
Automatically up-vote parent comments based on the number of replies in a
thread that they produce.

Sometimes, when a big discussion forms, comments deep in the thread gain 10 or
more points while the original parent has just 1 or 2 points. The parent
comment is usually "worthy" of the same points, but it's as if people forget
to up-vote the parent. The parent should share in the karma for spawning
interesting discussions.

~~~
bhousel
Don't you think that would encourage reddit-style pun and joke threads?

------
Bluem00
The exponential delay on the "reply" link's appearance means that sometimes
the link is sometimes not present on the page. I believe that this reduces the
ease with which someone can scan a thread, because it changes the layout and
spacing of comments later in the thread.

My suggestion is that rather than not displaying the reply link, display
greyed out text in its place that reads "reply", with hover text explaining
why you cannot currently click it.

------
dbrock
Please fix the bug where trying to connect my account to a Google account just
leads me to a completely blank page <http://news.ycombinator.com/openid_merge>
with the word "Unknown." (Sorry, didn't understand where to report bugs.)

------
larelli
A login box on the frontpage. When submitting a login-protected request like
an upvote, I get redirected. If there was a (potentially hidden) login box
somewhere on the page (connected via AJAX), then I could just hit the
SecureLogin extension's button on my firefox and be logged in.

(See: I typed this, clicked "add" and was redirected to the login page. :))

------
jey
Bug report: When I am logged in,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=evgen> shows that evgen has made no
comments, but <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=14943> is written by
evgen. The parent comment to this comment is one written by me. When I'm
logged out, <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=evgen> shows the thread
where evgen responded to a comment I made.

~~~
pg
Does this still happen?

~~~
jey
Appears to be fixed. Thanks.

------
yathern
I'm not sure if this will even be visible, but I'd love to have the site with
css/divs instead of tables/html styling. This is because I use plugings to
manually edit the css to make it look prettier, but I can only go so far when
all table are just <table> with no id or class.

------
tokenadult
A recent thread (currently near the top of the main page) suggests that it
might be useful to have an optional hat tip field on new submitted articles.
Sometimes the submitter learned about the article from another source, or
another HN participant, and just wants to get out of the starting block to
post the article, while also acknowledging the source of the suggestion that
the article is good.

------
coldpie
Please fix URL autodetection not to include the Greater Than character. For an
example and reference, see
<[http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.ht...](http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm>).

------
nopassrecover
1) Automatically resurface popular old articles after x days (or some other
metric). This will hopefully stop reposts and tie in previous discussion.

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.

------
icey
The hellbanning algorithm seems to be overly aggressive lately. If you showed
a link on dead items (where "flag" would be on a live comment) that said "Ok?"
or something similar, the users could flag items back in to existence.

I feel like there have been a lot of good comments lately that have been
autokilled because of a past transgression and we're missing interesting
conversation.

------
xd
It seems I just became worthy of judging bad karma .. any chance I can turn it
off in my settings? Mainly because I don't want to accidentally down vote
someone (this optical mouse has a habit of skipping a few pixels now and
then), also I really can't see myself ever using the feature .. an eye for an
eye and all that jazz.

~~~
xd
Also, I've noticed I have stopped up voting, on my HTC desire, as it is way to
easy to down vote by mistake.

------
Twisol
Echoing a lot of comments here, a following facility would be excellent. I
haven't needed to follow specific people much, but I'd _really_ like to be
able to follow specific threads. Some threads interest me a lot and I'd like
to keep track of the comments, but as the threads get longer it becomes a lot
harder to tell which comments were recently added.

------
roadnottaken
In the case of duplicate submissions (or submissions of multiple stories
reporting the same news), it would be good if high-karma users had the ability
to re-direct the post to the previous HN thread. This would be better than the
current situation where they get a few comments and then someone posts a link
to the previous HN thread.

------
scorxn
Contextual private messaging.

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.

------
snprbob86
There appears to be a caching bug when I access HN from work. Sometimes, when
I first browse to the page, the top right corner where my user name should be
shows another user name and karma score. I've dropped that name into the
global address list in Outlook and more than once it has come up as a valid
alias for someone in a totally different building. If I click a link, the
error corrects itself and I am logged in as myself.

------
cstejerean
RSS for the newest category, not for the front page. this way i can keep an
eye on what's new without having to constantly refresh the page. the current
RSS feed is pretty useless to me.

------
p6v53as
Change the functionality so that "Unknown or expired link." would not appear
any more.

------
roryokane
A bug: upvotes are swallowed when initiated while logged out.

Details: If I click up-vote while not logged in and then log in using the form
that is subsequently presented, I am returned to the original page. However,
every time I try this, the item has the same number of points as before I
upvoted it, though it no longer has an upvote arrow next to it, so I cannot
upvote it again.

------
adamzerner
An answer wiki.

[http://www.quora.com/Quora-Answer-Wikis-Feature/What-is-
an-A...](http://www.quora.com/Quora-Answer-Wikis-Feature/What-is-an-Answer-
Wiki-on-Quora)

------
nitrogen
Suggestion: make URLs in negative-voted posts light gray like the text (they
are still black and can make a -4 post stand out visually).

------
skrish
Suggesting an idea already implemented in StackOverflow - Moderation by users
with certain number of karmas.

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?

------
fnordfnordfnord
When someone posts a tweet, it shows "(twitter.com)". It would be more
informative to show the twitter "(@username)" or "(twitter.com
@twitterusername)".

------
joshfinnie
Would it be possible to have some sort of way of highlighting user comments
within an item? For example, if I wanted to read all of PG's comments on this
page, I could do something like:

    
    
        http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363&user=pg
    

This would give you some signification a comment was from pg; either a
highlight or a box?

------
dbeardsl
Add embedded chat rooms to discussion pages: <http://wompt.com> Or simply a
"chat" link next to the "discuss" link in each entry that points to something
like <http://wompt.com/chat/hackernews/363>

------
dredmorbius
I'm getting frequent Nginix errors posting or deleting comments at the moment,
though actions appear to complete. A comment posted twice showed as "dead". I
deleted the dupe and got the error again.

~~~
dredmorbius
Including the parent comment on the "Request Features" story. Quite likely
this reply as well.

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.

------
quizotic
The "more" link at the bottom of each page expires.

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.

------
kvh
Can I write a recommendation engine for HN?

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!

------
markup
The duplicate detection should be improved, I have posted
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830030> and it ended up being a duplicate
of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828992> (the only difference is my
entry pointed to the www cname)

------
ruliov
Add:

<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.

------
startupcomment
Thank you for expanding the volume of posts displayed. Previously, you only
displayed about 200, which meant that the user would probably miss some
postings unless he or she consulted the site twice a day or so. By displaying
many more "historic" posts, the user would have the assurance of not missing
posts if he or she did not consult the site for a couple of days. Thanks
again.

------
startupcomment
Thank you for expanding the volume of posts displayed. Previously, you only
displayed about 200, which meant that the user would probably miss some
postings unless he or she consulted the site twice a day or so. By displaying
many more "historic" posts, the user would have the assurance of not missing
posts if he or she did not consult the site for a couple of days. Thanks
again.

------
bretthoerner
It would be great if the "# comments" links had a different a:visited color.
Many times I can tell by the title of a link that I have no real interest in
reading it, but if it has "30 comments" I think "Hm, I bet someone said
something worthwhile in there." But if I read 10 comment threads like that and
come back later in the day, I have no visual feedback as to which are truly
"unread."

------
jwecker
Please, if I'm on this site for more than an hour or so a day, please pop up a
message that says "Get back to work, slacker!" and don't display the page for
the rest of the day. Thank you.

------
ComputerGuru
Get rid of Scribd.com integration.

------
bonaldi
A way to see what's new in a thread since I last visited it: with the
threading it's impossible to see what's new on a big thread.

------
KeepTalking
\- A respected users list; ie ability to track postings of a particular user.

\- Sorting posts. ie Say I want to view only posts from New york times.

~~~
falava
I proposed some days ago a Twitter-like follow button. Everyone could make his
favorite user list. This don't have to affect to the current site if the
follow button is only in the profile page of each user and your tracked user
page link is in your own profile.

The complexity of the new tracked users page may be similar to the current
threads page. If it's a private page is posible that don't waste too much
server CPU.

------
ralph
Not sure "[deleted]" posts are correctly indented from their parent. Also, the
lack of space above them means they don't stand out from their parent.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624964> is an example. It's not
immediately obvious from indentation or spacing that swolchok's two posts
aren't a reply to himself.

------
brlewis
When I submit a story early in the morning on the east coast, I sometimes kill
it. Hours later, long after it has rolled off the news page, California people
submit the same story, but it has no chance of hitting the front page because
it's "old". East-coast people should not be able to preemtively kill stories
this way.

------
lotharbot
A simple request: change the location for the up and down arrows, in order to
minimize misclick-voting (especially on mobile devices):

    
    
      [up] 3 points [down] by author n hours ago
    

This way, the up and down are unambiguously tied to the point value on the
post, but separated by much more distance than at present.

------
yatsyk
With new Christmas theme background title of site is unreadable. Would you
please use code like this [http://closure-
library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/closure/goog...](http://closure-
library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/closure/goog/demos/color-contrast.html) for
correct text color selection?

------
Shank
Pushover support. Notifo is basically the same thing, but Pushover supports
all platforms while Notifo has been "in development" with their other
platforms for the last several months.

<https://pushover.net/>

~~~
jcr
It seems you don't know, but Notifio shut down close to a year ago, almost to
the day September 8, 2011.

<http://blog.notifo.com/notifo>

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.

------
vlad
Bring back down arrows on story submissions, but instead of voting the story
down like before, enough down votes would show the community disagrees with
that type of submission.

~~~
palish
It doesn't seem like that's very useful. Anyone can read the story and form
their own opinion...

~~~
vlad
I didn't say the opinion, I said the type of submission. Also, the story and
points would continue to appear unaffected.

What's going on with the hostilities on this site for the past two days? You
could have easily said, "I have another idea about how this could work" with
your link.

~~~
palish
Hey, relax, I wasn't being hostile, just pointing out that the feature wasn't
useful. The only thing the feature would accomplish is adding bias to a
submission. If someone sees that the community disagrees with a submission,
they're more likely to think of the submission as "bad" before they read it
and not upvote it (and probably they're more likely to downvote it). That will
be directly reflected in the comments, causing someone who had nice things to
say about the submission to not comment lest his karma take a nosedive.

Unless you're talking about a whole "category" of submissions, in which case I
have no idea how to divide submissions into different types.

~~~
vlad
Oops! I'm sorry for the confusion. I originally wrote that only moderators
would see the flagging, but when I edited the post, I lost that part of it. No
wonder you hated the idea so much.

As for what I meant by "types of submissions", I had just seen an "ask YCNews"
article about republicans and democrats make the front page, that I hoped to
silently vote down. I came up with my idea and added this comment (correctly)
to the feature request thread, instead of below the parent, but the fact that
the idea lost its context escaped me at the time.

------
earle
0) API 1) obfuscate email addresses in comments 2) an effective way to enter
code in comments and submissions and have it render nicely (this is HACKER
news, right?)

------
Firstmate
It's kinda hard to read comments and to what they correspond to when it gets
extremely long. For example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773106>

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.

------
falava
I use my saved stories profile page (upvotes) as a great link archive and read
later tool.

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!

------
tmadsen
As far as I can see, no one has asked this before. It would be /really/ nice
if I could subscribe to an RSS feed of stories that has earned a certain
amount of points, for instance 30. That way I most probably wouldn't receive
pointless news about how facebook should look like.

Edit: Btw, what about including a point link in the feed, it's not like you're
earning money by ads anyway. Thanks for a nice service!

------
ralph
The /threads page doesn't show recent comments. I replied to an old comment of
mine on the Feature Requests thread to add more information. That new comment
should then have appear at the top of my /threads page, possibly with the
other one above it as context. It didn't appear at all, presumably because the
parent wasn't displayed. This is wrong. It's a problem that there's no pageing
on /threads so I can't view all my posts, but at least the recent ones should
be visible.

------
agrinshtein
I get so engrossed in this site and it is turning out to be a major time
waster. There are a lot of interesting articles but I really need to more
productive and reading HN isn't helping with that.

Perhaps a solution.

I would like to have the option of reading the highest rated article of the
day. Just one article on the page. The 'active' page has a lot of articles. I
just want one article. Period.

What do you think about that idea?

------
waldo
Bug report: This is actually in the 2012 winter application form* -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/w2012form>

Using a < silently truncates the remainder your text from the input field.

* But I couldn't find a better place to report this error.

------
gurgus
It's probably been suggested a million times but a ctrl+f couldn't find it so
I'll it.

Infinite scrolling on the main page. I'm not sure much more needs to be said.

------
TRManderson
Change/Add the/an RSS so that there is a feed with new items first, perhaps
with an optional parameter for a minimum point count before it appears on the
feed?

------
halostatue
Simply saying "tumblr.com" isn't useful; better to say
"startatspark.tumblr.com". Certain domains need more than just the primary
domain listed.

------
sunilkumarc
If i can see all the people who are online and discuss with them( basically
chatting ) about my ideas, my opinions about a particular post would be a
great feature.

------
gruseom
I wish there a way to tell when someone has added a new comment to one of the
threads I'm involved in. This would be especially useful for threads that are
more than a couple days old (too old to be worth checking specifically). Just
because activity has died down doesn't mean I don't care if somebody says
something. On the contrary, after-the-fact comments are often more thoughtful
because the writer really cares about the topic.

------
olepr01
I am pretty happy in my job. Could you make a feature so that I could filter
out all posts with the words "investor, investment, retirement, rich, killer
app" or any other story that concerns the adolescent wet dreams of lots of
money and the coolest private jet EVVAH!, and rather let me focus on storys on
technology?

------
euccastro
I found no place for bug reports, so I'll abuse this thread instead.

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: clich&eacute; - cliche. 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.

~~~
euccastro
Funny; when I edited the parent comment, the confirmation page showed the
correct characters. When I went back to the thread view, the chars were
garbled again.

A test of unescaped angle braces: Usage: foo

If you fix this and you want me to retest the funky chars after that, just let
me know: <my username here> at yahoo dot com.

~~~
euccastro
Oops.. sorry for the repost; I should have imagined that abusing a feature
request thread for bug reports was not much more original than the converse.
:P

------
adammichaelc
I'd like to see a search feature. There's so much useful information on this
site and I'd love to be able to find items that I can't quite recall the
details on.

------
ks
Perhaps there should be a separation between points for a comment and karma?

Now, a user's karma is the sum of all points, so it doesn't necessarily say
much about the average quality. What if the maximum limit a comment could
modify your karma was from -2 to +2?

I'm not sure how this should be calculated, but perhaps a score between 2 and
10 would add 1 karma point, and everything above would add 2?

------
tjr
Suggestion: It seems reasonable that some comments will be accurately valued
at 0, or -1... maybe even -5. But from time to time, comments get forced down
to -10, -15, -20... and that just seems to be taking it too far.

Perhaps have either a hard lower limit, beyond which it just doesn't make
sense to go, or, have a soft lower limit, beyond which moderator must have
some minimum karma score to be able to downvote further.

------
alpb
Collapse comments which has more than 2 comments or so. I don't care about a
particular comment and 50 people who replied that comment, my screen fills up.
If there would be a JavaScript collapse option, that would be cool.

------
csouth
Please add the domain name to the RSS feed. Much like the posts on the page it
would be Post Title(somedomain.com).

------
ancymon
It would be nice to be able to login using openid without being asked to give
away "contacts". I just tried to login using Google account and it seems to be
immposible without letting them see my contacts. Anyway, why would HN need
such data?

------
teach
What happened to the "More" link on saved stories? I can only see the first
page.

------
Sloven
Instead of open an original page with article I want to open the page prepared
by YC with a button for fast return to HN. It’s handy to walk around the site
and then turn back to HN. The BACK button doesn’t helps when you go deeper the
site. Or it could be the button that opens comments.

------
ZanderEarth32
Given the support and reaction of this post
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053427>) possibly a 'Show HN' tab at
the top of the page might be a useful feature.

------
icey
I'd like to suggest a new category for killfiled sites / submissions - ones
that get to stay live but don't gain karma when other people try to submit
them.

The recent submission flood of "37signals valuation tops $100 billion after
bold VC investment" shows how this kind of dreck ends up on the front page -
it's not from people agreeing, but people submitting blindly.

------
rythie
I'd like a link to my submissions on the top navigation bar (instead of under
my profile) or it should be combined with threads

------
stranger26
I would personally like news to come to my mail box. That would ease my
process to read the news as I'm checking my mail. A little like what techi.com
did.

------
bradsmith
When linking to a google plus page, please use something like
(plus.google.com) and not (google.com). Perhaps it's just me, but when I see a
story by (google.com) I tend to think it's an announcement/ info form google
themselves - and not just some guy with an opinion :-)

------
satanIsMyCpilot
All pages on this site available over HTTPS. I mean, this is a geek website
right?

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.

------
jey
Please add a wiki. news.yc has become a "community" and we need a way to store
stuff longer-term.

Or, if someone else sets up a wiki, could a link be added to it on the
navigation bar?

------
newobj
Almost every time when I go to post an "Ask HN" story, I submit and get
"deadlink". If there's some kind of CSRF token that's expiring, maybe you can
increase the timeout a bit? Or maybe I need to type faster in my "Ask HN"
posts...

------
bdickason
I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I would love to see
some sort of 'submitted' or 'updated' feedback indicator when editing your
comment.

I clicked edit, typed in my changes, and clicked submit. The page didn't
really update so I wasn't sure if my edit even worked. I clicked submit again
just for good measure.

------
domp
I have no idea if this has already been brought up (considering I just skimmed
over the responses in this discussion) but I'd like to see another tab on top
that maybe is for questions that people are curious about. I see that people
are posting in the news areas not links but a single question that they're
looking for people to respond to and create debate. They're not necessarily
news worthy contributions but important none the less in fueling
conversations.

------
najicalove
Is there anyway to separate stories based on technical competency? I love
Hacker News, but can't stand having to skim over 50+% of the stories because
they are beyond my comprehension- to get to the 40% of stories that I can
actually learn from/understand.

------
PaulMorgan
Sorry, I put this in as a submitted question.

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.

------
Tichy
It would be nice if all posts would still be linked to the main page somehow.
OK, it would be nice for people pondering to crawl Hacker News. Even better
would be a zipped download of all the posts...

Still, would crawling be OK? Since the old posts are not linked anymore, I
consider crawling by id (check all ids up to 150000 - ugh...). I would try to
minimize requests (one topic contains several ids in one go), but still...

------
lucb1e
Perhaps show vertical indentation lines? (Best would be in two or three
different styles). In the more popular threads with a lot of comments-on-
comments, it gets rather hard to see what that comment down there was actually
referring to.

------
juncode
Please add an RSS feed for the "new" section as well Turns out there's a lot
of interesting stuff that doesn't get upvoted and so doesn't get to my feed..

------
onedognight
I'd like to see an iphone favicon, so that when one "Add To Home Screen"s a
link to HN they would get a nice icon in the app list rather than an
unrecognizable screen shot. A quick

    
    
       convert -resize 57x57 favicon.ico apple-touch-icon.png
    

would be blurry but would suffice. Of course, scaling down your original would
be much better.

------
Murkin
A little far from news. But after a few days using the site I find it to have
an excellent community of users.

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

~~~
Murkin
A bit more browsing and I found that you CAN post a question for discussion
already.

So my new suggestion is to add an option to delete your own suggestions from
the suggestions threads :)

------
yycom
Can you link the RSS item to the HN page rather than the submitted story?
(e.g. see reddit)

By linking to the story and not the HN post, when following the link one has
lost access (like a dangling pointer) to the comments. Currently I must mouse-
click the "comments" link in the RSS item instead of using my RSS reader's
ability to follow the link, which is a PITA.

------
Keios
Can you put a page views number in front of each submission?

------
docgnome
It would be nice to know how the RSS works, and maybe have a way to select
articles over a certain threshold via RSS. I use Calibre to fetch HN articles
but when i see them through out the day, I can't be sure if I'll get that one
later or not.

------
ck2
I'd like to see all pages default to a list of 100 items.

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?

------
timburks
The comments links in your RSS feeds appear to be broken.

<http://news.ycombinator.comitem?id=101047>

------
YakiSauce
Make username on log in not case-sensitive. I just spent a while trying to log
in because I didnt realize I needed to capitalize my username. I don't think
its possible to create two usernames that differ only in capitalization, so Im
not sure why case is considered while logging in.

------
ScottWhigham
It would be nice if links you flagged would be removed from your view. It's
sort of strange to have flagged something, come back the next day, and see an
upvote arrow with the "Unflag" verb next to it.

------
ironlotus
Archived posts? Just as there is a news.ycombinator.com/newest, couldn't there
be a /oldest? or something along those lines. This website is just a goldmine
of information, it seems like it all kinda disappears into black whole

------
mojuba
Show the number of responses to my posts/comments next to my name, let's say:
mojuba (44/120), where 120 is the total number of messages in all threads I'm
involved in. This will give me a chance to know if someone replied in a thread
I started by just looking at the number. What I'm doing instead is I'm
checking my "comments" page regularly, from top to bottom to see if anyone
replied to me.

I saw this feature on other social sites, it works pretty well.

------
technoguyrob
When submitting a form (like editing a post), my reflex is to hit tab and then
enter, since this exits the textarea and then immediately submits. However,
where the help link is now, this causes me to be sent to the Help page each
time. This is a minor thing, but I think Hacker News should model usability
and move the help link to after the submit button (or set the tab index on the
submit button).

------
technoguyrob
When submitting a form (like editing a post), my reflex is to hit tab and then
enter, since this exits the textarea and then immediately submits. However,
where the help link is now, this causes me to be sent to the Help page each
time. This is a minor thing, but I think Hacker News should model usability
and move the help link to after the submit button (or set the tab index on the
submit button).

------
fenollp
Add "tabindex=1" to the title-link found in every /item pages. Now pressing
tab on the comments page selects the link at the top, press enter to follow
it.

------
jdamato
Is there a way to change my password? I don't see a form for it anywhere, but
maybe I missed it. If it doesn't exist, this would be a great feature to add
for sure.

------
pessimism
Please ban comments empty-linking to Wikipedia articles.

At the very least demand they contain, say, ten characters of contextual
wording to discourage this lazy kind of argument.

------
justlearning
"+/-" feature to show/hide threads.

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.

------
alex_c
Allow a different "showdead" setting on the "new" page.

I like to browse with showdead on, because it's interesting to see what
comments are being posted from dead accounts, or what frontpage stories are
killed.

The "new" page, however, is painful with showdead on, because of all the spam.

My ideal would be to browse with showdead on everywhere except the new page.

------
rotub
Please make the UPVOTE (and downvote?) button/s more obvious and usable. I
feel like people don't up-vote things simply because they forget that they
can!

~~~
rotub
Sometimes I go to "collapse" a comment or a post when actually i am up-voting
it! The arrow looks like a collapse link rather than an up-vote link.

------
DonGateley
I would so like to have all comment threads and sub-threads be collapsible
with controls on each entry to control the collapse and expansion of what
derives from it.

------
plusbryan
PG - i use news.yc on my cell phone from time to time. it seems that something
changed in the last few months that makes it quite unreadable at least on my
phone - all the text is centered, not left-aligned at all. Perhaps the mobile
browser doesn't support whatever CSS you're using to left-align things, and
taking the <center> tags literally. I don't know how much of this was my fault
either. :-)

------
moe
How about adding a rate-limited amount of "bigpoints" to the voting system?

E.g. each user would receive one "bigpoint" per week. The bigpoint could be
given out to any story/comment and would count like 5(?) normal votes. Unused
bigpoints should not accumulate (or only to a small backlog of maybe 2 or 3).

I imagine this might help to make the extra-ordinary content stand out more.

What do you think?

------
pjob
I was wondering if you could add a link to the hacker news homepage to the
"Unknown or Expired Link." response that you serve up. Often I'll click more
on an old page or hit back on an article I am reading and get this response.
My next action is almost always to navigate to the homepage.

------
aashaykumar92
Add a "hyperlink" option so that when people are discussing on a thread, they
can point to other sites more easily. Will make for a cleaner and more
efficient way of communicating thoughts.

------
indiejade
Glad I found this thread. Didn't realize it existed at the time of my original
suggestion

<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.

<http://userstyles.org/styles/6381>

------
antidoh
Mouse-over titles to show the original when the mods have edited the title.

Inspired by this comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580767>

------
yagibear
Link to <http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc> in the submit page & beside
the "add comment" button, as is done with "help" on the profile page.

This is claimed in the "Formatting fixes" entry in
<http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html> , but doesn't appear to me now.

------
joshfinnie
Is there a way to make the links in the submissions (like Ask HN) be clickable
after a certain threshold of upvotes? I understand why they shouldn't be links
immediately, but if the submission is getting vetted by upvotes I don't see
why we can't have clickable links.

------
gscott
When viewing messages on the Threads page often you have to click parent
multiple times to see what the thread was in it's entirety.

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.

------
dngrmouse
1\. Have it so you can be automatically logged in. I have to manually log in
every time I visit the site (using Safari here).

2\. Just like Reddit does, show the domain each link belongs to. Reddit has
this in brackets after the headline, which works fine. Since I don't have much
free time, there are some sites that have sub-par content which I avoid
reading, and it helps to know where I would end up without having to hover
over the link.

------
kirubakaran
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936109>

------
dogzilla
I am moving all my feeds from RSS to Twitter. Is there a Twitter feed with
links to all the new stories that are posted to the RSS feed? I don't see a
Twitter link on the web page.

Thx

------
bfe
One separate Hacker News page for Software Patents News, with every submission
that mentions "software patents" automatically diverted to it, and that allows
the remaining ten percent of articles to appear on the original Hacker News
page.

------
Abscissa
You've set the forground colors for this text entry box and the Submit button
to black. That causes the text to be invisible for those of us with light-on-
dark systems. Just leave the text color alone for those and it'll work fine
for everyone.

------
brlewis
Ability to check if one URL is submitted already, but then submit another.

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.

------
ralph
The page showing the comments of a user should only show each post once. At
the moment, if I have a conversation, me1 - you1 - me2 - you2 - me3, then m3
appears first as the most recent, then later me2 downwards, then later still
me1 downwards. It's redundant clutter. The only benefit of this arrangement is
my most recent posts are first instead of the most recent chain of my posts.
I'd prefer the latter.

Cheers, Ralph.

------
DonGateley
When I reply to a comment, please leave my browser at the point where I
replied (like everything else does) rather than moving me to the top of the
comments.

------
chm
I would like to be notified when someone replies to my comments.

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...

------
10smom
Categories of topics for hack news for easier discussion and discovery.

    
    
      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.
    

Lark

------
elwell
When on list view on articles, press tab to focus on first item, then up/down
to traverse, and enter to go to link (similar to Google search results)

------
southxpress
I'm getting error:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=AeXXkBwwjeuQUyWi8p6iWU>

Unknown or expired link.

------
sararob
Real-time updates so you can see articles moving up and down the home page
without refreshing, and automatically update the vote count when you vote on
an article

------
tintin
I'm not sure if you could call this a feature. But I see a lot of 'famous'
people getting upvoted because people think they are important and should be
upvoted. I think it would be interesting to have a feature that can turn of
usernames above comments.

------
iamelgringo
As far as I can see, there are two tar pits that Digg and now Reddit are stuck
in:

1\. Lack of focus and quality:

In my experience, users frequent a site because it has quality content and
they leave when the quality of the content declines. Digg and more recently
Reddit, are experiencing a loss of focus and quality and as a result are
losing their initial users. Diggs quality is so bad it is now pointless to
read and much to my chagrin, Reddit seems to be following suit. Reddit seems
to be drowning in a rising tide of noobs. Apparently, there arent enough old
users around to down-vote the crap posted by the noobal hoard. From a quick
read of comments, it seems many long-time users are angry and feel
disenfranchised. Its because of this that those users whose content made Digg
and Reddit popular in the first place are now leaving those sites and taking
their great ideas with them.

2\. No troll guards:

Nothing poisons an online community quicker than a few nasty trolls. Another
one of the reasons that Im pulling away from Reddit is because it is getting
mean. Both the links that are posted and the article forums are being
destroyed by trolls stomping around unchecked. I hope Reddit can fix this
problem. If not, Im going to stop spending my time there.

The impression that I get, Paul, is that your goal is to make this YC News a
start-up news site and a community of potential founders; not simply another
social news site. The only way that I can see to maintain quality content and
to filter out the trolls is to institute some form of moderation. Straight
democracy leads to anarchy; thats why I think a news site needs to be a
republic. I dont think, by any stretch of the imagination, that Slashdot is
perfect, but they do have a system where moderators are selected from heavy
and moderate users on a rotating basis. The system filters out new and spam
accounts and gives preference to high karma users. It seems to keep the trolls
in check. It also encourages people to take more ownership and to participate
in the community.

Slashdots FAQ explains their moderation system here:
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520

There is also a brief discussion of their anti-troll rules here:
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm2000

Thanks for setting up the site. It scratches an itch that Ive had for a
while.

------
jmcguckin
Can you test for browser type and make the upvote glyph larger if the browser
is on a mobile device (e.g.iPhone)?

------
zimpenfish
It would be handy if medium.com URLs could include the author somewhere -
otherwise it's a bit of a crapshoot as to the quality of what you're about to
read.

------
tashmahalic
There's a "more" link at the bottom of each page. It stops working after the
page sits for a few minutes.

If this is fixed, I will sigh one less time each day.

~~~
bobx11
I consider this a feature, not a bug. If you've gone that far into the pages
it is time to get off hackernews and get back to work.

------
solipsist
Allow clickable links in _Ask HN_ posts.

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"?

------
amichail
Automatically generated tag clouds for discussions would make it easier to
find interesting parts (if any).

~~~
hackworth
funny, i was thinking that auto-generated tag clouds for the day's hot topics
might help reduce duplicate stories, too.

------
TomGullen
There's a bug, if you write a title too long (please put a character limit on
the text field!) and then enter text in the message body too long, <p> tags
appear. When you fix the title length these are inserted as text.

------
vjandrea
Hello, i see that the Instapaper action disappeared. That's a pity, i used it
a lot, i hope you'll bring it back soon. Thanks!

~~~
vjandrea
I see today that the action is back :-) Thanks!

------
aarongough
The ability to downmod, or at least retract an upmod on a comment you have
upmodded.

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...

------
rdl
Somehow, hackernews handles certain transparent caches badly -- it's the only
site I use which has a problem. I'm in Kuwait, unlike 100% of the other
hackernews users, and can work around it using a proxy, but periodically I
show as logged out, or expired link, or wrong user.

------
soyelmango
I'd like to log in with my registered email address and be able to change my
username. And a long shot: Because I can't change my username, I've got a few
accounts here under the same email address - I'd like to be able to merge
those accounts to preserve my saved posts and points.

------
falava
Saved comments like saved stories in the profile?

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.

------
GabGoldenberg
Also, perhaps some site-initiated intros to other members would help with the
feeling of 'small community' that a lot of people seek.

------
falava
Delete stories button, or maybe downvote button equals this delete behaviour.

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 :)

------
kakaylor
Some items are displayed multiple times in the "ask" section. For example:

<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).

------
boucher
BUG, for the record: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105464>

------
papersmith
Maybe feature requests should be a subreddit of its own? There's so much going
on here, I can't tell if the feature on my mind is already mentioned.

------
DTrejo
Wikipedia style system for quality control.

Guidelines for comments shown beneath the "reply button."

Guidelines for submissions shown on the submit page.

------
moses175
Hi. I'm a student of UNN and here's the school's
website(www.unn.edu.ng).Please, I'll like to know more about your website and
how I could actually contribute. Thanks.

------
ebrink
Increase the number of saved stories one can save. For some reason I can only
save 75 stories on this account, all of the ones I have saved for the last
month or so never got recognized on my account.

------
Angostura
Allow a 2 sentence summary to be displayed below the headline. With cryptic
headlines it easy to click on headlines without really knowing whether the
story might interest you.

------
PeteBrighton
It would be great if the links I've already read either changed colour or
moved/were hidden - synchronized by my user account. I currently read HN on my
work machine, home machine and phone - so it's hard to know what's new at a
glance.

------
KedarMhaswade
When I search, I get: sort by: relevance | date | points and then separately
"ascending | descending" -- isn't it better if the relevance | date | points
are made "toggles"?

------
earnubs
Can I suggest changing the CSS units for fonts from points to pixels? That way
HN will look the same on both Chrome and Firefox for me :)

On Chrome 10pt HN type is 12px on Firefox it's 13.3333px (Mac OS X).

------
jwecker
Bug or undeveloped feature? Go to edit a comment- above the text box there is
a "comment" and "edit" link. The edit one just refreshes the page. The comment
link, though, shows... ??? It looks like I can comment on my comment- had a
nice "nil" sitting there. I didn't have any replies to the comment I was
editing, though, so maybe I would have seen something more?

------
parfe
The help link on the edit post page comes first in the tab order following the
TextField. I find myself hitting <tab> <enter> excepting to post the updated
comment, but instead I end up on the help page reading an explanation about
post formatting.

------
joshwa
For some reason, the submit page isn't doing dupe checking anymore-- it
doesn't take me directly to the discussion page of the article being
resubmitted. This means I have to go back to the homepage and find the article
I clicked to find the discussion page.

Also, there's no link to the homepage from the submit page-- clicking the icon
takes me to the YC main page, not the news.yc main page.

------
akkartik
Which page is this comment for? http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2028

Please add a link from a comment's permalink page to the page it was
commenting on.

~~~
pg
We now have this: the "parent" link.

~~~
ralph
I dislike clicking "parent" multiple times in a row. Can we have a "root" as
well to go straight to the top.

------
rob
Not sure if this has been asked before, but I'd like to see a feature that
alerts us whenever someone either 1) posts a reply to a submission we made
(should be optional) and 2) posts a reply to a comment we made on any
submission (again, optional). An "alert" can either be an email or a message
indicator on the site in the top right corner.

------
basdevries
Please add a html attribute to the submitted links so the articles displayed
in HN open an actual new tab instead of going back and forth between just one
page!

------
delackner
Without "mark all unread articles as read" (per-page, say) the flood of
articles is unmanageable without reverting back to an rss reader. Yet doing so
adds a level of indirection that removes any impulse to rank items, diluting
the quality of the article ranking .

Please, I love this UI. Just please add _Mark as read/ignore all unread
articles on this page_

------
yoha
Sorting poll results would increase readability. It should be done after vote
(or by clicking on some button) to avoid biasing the results.

------
icco
Could you put the code for Hacker News up on Github, so we could all help
towards a better code base?

~~~
jurjenh
The base code is available with the arc tarball (
<http://arclanguage.org/install> ) which will give you all you need to get
started. However, any recent changes done to the current live news.arc won't
be there, and I suspect there have been some.

The site seems to be working better, though this may be seasonal, so thumbs up
pg and rtm for recent changes.

------
mcxx
I submitted the Ubuntu 9.04 story today, but the first link I tried to submit
was already in the system, from when 7.04 came out. It will really be a
problem to submit a link when 9.10 will be available, because it seems all
'good links' were already added. Can there be a recyclation system for links?

------
julian
What about a help page with _current_ and _in progress_ and _rejected_
features? (give us a wiki and we'll write it)

I wish a way to sort|filter comments by points, date, etc. exists, but I don't
know if I'm the only one. I've tried to search in this thread but I've found
nothing looking for "filter" as searching by "points" is impossible (well,
possible but futile)

------
williamaadams
The service seems to expect a "Host" header, and if 'host' is used, it will
return a 301 redirect. Please accept 'host' (lowercase) or be case insensitive
as per http spec.

------
kovar
I'd like to see downvotes require a comment. Think of it as constructive
criticism. I get that someone didn't like what I said, but not why they didn't
like it, and thus it is hard to improve or change my style, content, tone,
etc.

------
tempodox
Give users the ability to filter out posts by their source. Case in point:
informationsecuritybuzz.com

We need a spam filter for crap like that.

------
byrneseyeview
On the 'submit' page, adding a note about the feature request thread would
save us lots of "Upvote this if you'd like news.yc to..." posts.

------
gruseom
It would be neat if there were a way to view the oldest comments that have
been upvoted recently. Sometimes I read old threads and upvote things I missed
the first time around. It would be nice to have a way, other than randomness,
to see the oldie-but-goodies other people have dug up.

------
comatose_kid
Hi,

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.

------
MikeW
Broken Links: There are many older links in the comments in the form of
[http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=<num>](http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=<num>);
which returns an error (like the many comments on this page).

Those old links really should be transparently re-mapped to /item?id=<num>
instead.

------
ebabchick
highlight the link i just came from briefly and fade the highlight out over a
few seconds when i return to the page via back button (or use some
approximating heuristic ) ... i like to scan the page multiple times a day and
i cant rely on the native highlighting to see the comment link on what i just
read because the top stories are re-ordered throughout the day. so i have to
scan the page visually for the title of the story. I'm going to make this a
browser plugin for myself if you don't do it, but I'd rather everyone have
this feature natively....

------
richardc12345
I'd like to be able to reset my password. The only option available appears to
be to create a new account, or email Paul Graham.

~~~
cbzink
[https://news.ycombinator.com/changepw](https://news.ycombinator.com/changepw)

------
dood
A hide option, to remove links from the frontpage.

Has been suggested a few time before, but not for a while.

With hiding users get to see more new content on each refresh, and get to
ignore their pet annoyances (for me Twitter, Gladwell, the latest tech-net
drama). A much nicer user experience all round. Works well on Reddit.

------
gaoshan
Re-enable displaying upvotes. It's a great way to see what others think of a
certain comment. Without it, considering topics I don't know much about, it's
more difficult to know if I'm looking at brilliant insight or FUD.

------
Jd
Images at the bottom for Green Certified Site, HN Sidebar, and Analytics by
Mixpanel take away from the simply lookfeel of the site.

Besides, it looks like all you need to get "Green" certification is to pay the
certifiers $10 / month...

------
dylangs1030
pg, is there any chance you could implement a basic tagging system for Hacker
News comments? Right now there is no way to know if someone has replied to a
comment without manually checking.

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.

------
apotheon
A quick search didn't find anyone else suggesting this, so:

I'd like a link on the page for a particular discussion thread that takes me
immediately to the top of the entire discussion (the initial submission, in
other words). That way, I don't have to click "parent" twelve times to get
there.

------
soundsop
Please use https links to story pages in the https version of the rss feed.

------
lelele
HN discarded my comment to a submission I made. It seems commenting your
submissions it's not possible anymore. Why? And then why the submission form
makes you write a comment just to discard it?

~~~
lelele
Actually, if you look at the submission from HN, its caption looks discarded:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3455054>

However, if you look at it from HNSearch instead, its caption is there:
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=doit](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=doit)

What's going on?

------
kwamenum86
When I add a comment the edit link expires after a certain amount of time but
I can still edit the comment (in a roundabout way). This is more of a bug than
a feature. There is a hole that allow people to edit comments even after the
link has expired and even thought the edit link no longer appears.

------
joshfinnie
I would like the ability to note certain profiles of people for future review.
Much like upvoting a story saves it for me, I would like to be able to do the
same with a person's profile. Call it a "watch this person" feature or
something.

------
audionerd
Possible way to catch dupes on user entry:

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.

------
woodall
It would be nice to have some buttons. One to report a comment if it does not
meet a certain level of discourse- lol I don't know why they down voted you-
and the other to collapse threads.

------
akkartik
How can I find pages that are in the no-mans-land between top and new? I saw a
submission for Trevor's article on languages: http://tlb.org/busywork.html but
now I have no way of finding the discussion about it. On reddit the submit
bookmarklet would find it with its dup-detection.

Dup detection seems brain dead to implement; is there a deliberate reason
news.yc doesn't have it?

~~~
akkartik
Ah, I just realized that it had already been in for a week before parent :}

This was one of those features I was reluctant to experiment on to check on
the status of. Perhaps news.yc needs a status page for new features or
responses to feature requests here?

I suppose an RSS feed for pg's comments would be one fix.

------
namlem
Add the ability to collapse comments without needing to install the threadify
greasemonkey script. It makes comments far easier to read and browse.

------
colinjack
RSS feeds would benefit from the inclusion of the number of points for each
article, even better if you also included the names of the commenters (making
it easy to look out for comments by particular individuals).

------
pphalen
Your RSS feed is broken. The comments field is empty. Please add abstracts or
(better) full posts to your feed!

------
jwdunne
I don't know about anyone else but when following an outbound link on HN, I
always open in a new tab. I was just wondering if it would be a good idea to
make this the default for all outbound links?

~~~
jeffool
I believe that the consensus had always been "clicking on a link, goes to that
link. If I wanted a new window, I'd open it myself."

(Just explaining what I've seen.)

------
rms
As a first implementation of the tagging/flagging system, can you turn on the
_meta_ tag?

------
makecheck
There are some abuses with new accounts posting self-serving links, e.g.
they've existed for 20 minutes and have 1 karma, and have already posted 2
links to exactly the same web site.

New users should be put on a waiting period, and/or need a minimum comment
karma level, before being allowed to post.

------
lixon
[http://codepen.io/lixonic/full/LwnKH](http://codepen.io/lixonic/full/LwnKH)

------
tokenadult
The duplicate detector works well, but it would work even better if its
string-matching were slightly less exact, so that printer-friendly URLs
submitted after canonical URLs would be caught, and if more of the variants of
Economist magazine URLs were caught as duplicates.

------
uberc
Reddit just added a feature that puts a dotted-line box around the headline
you just clicked on, to make it quicker to find the headline to either up or
downmod or comment on when you return to Reddit after reading the piece.

A nice feature which would encourage interaction after reading pieces.

------
KedarMhaswade
Please open the links in separate browser tab by default. To retain current
behavior (compatibility ;-)), provide a configuration option in user profile.

------
vinorathna
Option to search recent posts with points (200 to 300/ 300 to 400)..

------
adamzerner
[https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/bc340a52f6a4](https://medium.com/i-m-
h-o/bc340a52f6a4)

------
ryanbales
Please change the vote icon.. it looks just like the expand/collapse icon in
OSX.. The indented replies make it even more confusing. Either that or get
Apple to change theirs :p

------
rantav
Improve layout and font sizes for mobile experience. Currently it's pretty
rough, barely usable from iPhone or android phone. Or tell me how to send a
pull request... Thanks :)

------
joe
I think a formatting cheatsheet would be quite useful. I was just commenting a
few minutes ago, and I wanted to put some rather large URLs in my comment, but
I couldn't figure out the markup to link a text string to the URL. (It's just
occured to me that perhaps I should have just tried HTML. If that's the case,
I'm stupid.)

------
pja
Is there some reason why the text of a job ad in HN is greyed out? It makes
them hard to read.

Feature request: the text of a job ad should have the same contrast as a
standard HN post or comment.

------
nonrecursive
Can we add maxlength="80" to the "title" field for new submissions? It's
annoying to have to guess at how much I need to edit my title to make it fit

------
hackhn
Provide help on mouse over of each link

~~~
makecheck
In particular, simply adding the "title" attribute to the HTML "a" tag is
enough for many browsers to display a description on mouse-over (i.e. no
JavaScript magic required).

------
MerlinDE
Would be great, if you could include whole articles in the RSS feed. Making it
easier to read it offline, on the go.

Also a more flexible layout, better suiting devices with limited screen sizes
(read mobile, aka iPod/Pad/Phone) would be great.

------
smackfu
Use the same text color for comment links as comment text, so that a spam post
heavily downvoted doesn't have the spam links still in black and even more
visible.

------
gtirloni
Notifications when there is an update to a thread you replied to.

Tried to use Algolia's API and IFTTT without much success.

------
rbanffy
Perhaps karma should decrease with time unless it's "replenished" by upvotes.

The idea is valid because one can "game the moderation system" by having
multiple 100+ point accounts and use them do downvote comments they don't
agree with while upvoting their own comments.

------
rdl
Add a "/superclassic" which is like /classic but 24mo instead of 6mo. Or maybe
several levels of /classic all the way back to ancient times.

------
kogir
So, it might be my browser, but whenever someone uses a British pound or a
Euro currency symbol in a comment, it shows up as two ascii characters rather
than the desired unicode character.

You might wish to: 1) verify your database and code support unicode 2) use the
utf-8 charset for your pages instead of ISO-8859-1

:)

------
boilers2006
I would like to see the servce ingboo.com used on this site. Their tool allows
you to take rss updates to any channel you want like
facebook,twitter,email,igoogle,etc. Its a free tool and would make readers
lives easier.

------
jonsen
Somewhere (obvious) to report malfunctions.

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

~~~
thirdusername
I have the same problem although I think when you see the submissions vote go
up it's someone else since they get voted on a lot more than individual
comments. For me it's both in chrome and firefox (in Win 7) so I don't think
it's the browsers faulth and I noticed it for the first time maybe a 15-30
days ago. I'm guessing one of three things are happening:

1) We banned from voting as the moderators doesn't seem to tell people when
they moderate.

2) pg is running an experiment.

3) It's a bug.

I agree that there needs to be a place to report malfunctions. It would also
be nice to know when a moderator takes action against you.

~~~
netcan
Same had happened to me. My guess is that not informing you that you can't
vote is intentional. It's like making troll comments disappear but not letting
the troll know.

------
jwecker
These ideas need some refinement, but:

If an article you submit reaches the end of the "new" page with no up votes it
decreases your karma by a point. Yah, it would affect me too, but that's
irrelevant.

Related, submitting a new article by someone with negative karma not allowed-
or maybe the article is assigned that same negative karma that it must
overcome...

------
wheels
Just got my first down-vote bombing. It'd be nice if there was some sort of
detection so that one person could only down-vote another person a couple
times within a short period. I had somebody that down-voted everything that
I'd posted (in separate threads) that still had down-arrows.

------
makecheck
It may be nice to add scrollbars (with CSS, probably) to longer comments, so
that "popular" threads take up less space. Or, just have a collapse mechanism.

This makes it easier to scroll past the end of the indented thread to find the
next top-level comment.

------
thirdusername
Since the only way (from what I can tell) of retrieving your password is to
contact pg it would be nice with contact information somewhere. I'd like to
have the password reset for my account nop, to the email I put down in the
info of that account.

------
rbanffy
Could you please use "monospace" instead of "Courier" for inputs in
"<http://ycombinator.com/news.css>? It looks terrible on Windows.

And it would look just as nice on other platforms.

------
extension
Please convert newlines to <br/>s in posts/comments. This is nearly always
what is expected and there appears to be no other way to insert single line
breaks. It's been about a decade since I saw a browser that didn't line wrap
textareas.

------
queensnake
Ability to spawn a link in a frame, like reddit, so that you can vote up or
down, while or after you go read it.

------
a-priori
I'd like a way to see which of my comments have recently been upvoted or
commented on. There are times (like right now) that I see my karma jump, and I
get curious what got upvoted, but I don't see anything different on my
comments page.

------
Chirael
Have a background lookup of the URL and/or title, so that before you hit
Submit on an item, it can tell you in the submit page whether the item has
already been submitted (something with the same URL or same/almost-same
title).

------
lhnz
I'd like to be able to hide techpolitics. I don't care about piracy. I don't
care about the latest torrentfreak.com gossip piece. I cared about SOPA, but
not the gossip.

------
iamelgringo
I'd like it if a duplicate submission could be counted as a vote.

I often submit articles that have already been submitted. There's no vote
button on the "this has already been posted" page, and it's often hard to sift
through the "new" page to search for the article link to vote it up.

------
ComputerGuru
When editing a post, pressing <tab> from within the text-input box changes the
focus to the "Help" link instead of the "Submit" button. Can this please be
changed, because it's slightly disconcerting and not <strike>user</strike>
hacker-friendly?

------
trickjarrett
As posted in another thread: Please add a view of only startup / site review
threads.

Also please change the way 'threads' view is sorted to bring the most recent
thread to the top, meaning my most recent post in a thread of comments rather
than my most recent root comment.

------
downrightmike
Access to older stories? Past page 3 the url params usually expire before I
can get to p4. It sucks trying to find something from a bit ago.

------
imonkey
I want to see iPhone version of Hacker News. It's not hard to create, and most
of links that shares here already iPhone-friendly.

------
jrs235
Create and track separately "saved stories" and "upvoted stories" and also
allow unsaving and de-upvoting (sometimes we make mistakes).

------
dood
Add the on: [root_hn_url] link to comment metadata when viewing a single
comment.

Rational: when viewing a single commment for whatever reason, you often want
to see all comments. Currently you have to click through the chain of parents,
which is annoying.

------
sam_in_nyc
For verbatim text, please add an "overflow: hidden;" style attribute of the
"<code>" element. Non-breaking spaces break the entire page:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513183>

------
freakwit
List of comments I have upvoted - Similar to saved stories.

I may upvote comments which are valuable, but not the story itself, making it
hard to come back to those valuable comments later.

------
marze
On the submit page, have a way to enter the URL and see if it has already been
submitted, without having to devise a clever title. Once you are satisfied it
is new, you then think about a title.

------
alexdong
Make "saved links" page public.

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.

------
nopassword
Would really like to see a feature for forgot password! If there is one,
please let me know as I have misplaced my password to my only/favorite news
site.

Best Regards,

Sergio Stephano

------
jadams
Local subdomains, or groups, a-la craigslist. E.g. toronto.ycombinator.com, or
somesuch.

I understand YCombinator's rationale for having founders move to Boston, or
the Valley.

That said, it might be great for you guys to get local footholds, where people
can meet, organize, find co-founders, etc., before deciding to seek YC
funding.

------
dfranke
Ability to view my own comment history. When I click on someone else's user
id, I see their comments. When I click on my own, all I see are my
preferences.

Edit: correction, I guess the user pages show just submissions and not
comments, for any user. So I guess I'm requesting comment history.

~~~
dfranke
And there was much rejoicing! yaaaaaay. Thanks, Paul!

------
ajb
For link-bait titles, I look at the comments first to see if other people
considered the article worth reading. This information could be exposed by
displaying the ratio of clicks on the link vs clicks on the discuss link.

------
treyxturner
The ability to search by URL. This would make it easier to ensure that the
link you're about to submit hasn't already been posted and cut down on the
number of duplicate links on HN.

------
vegashacker
Better display of source code in comments

~~~
pg
You can now include code in comments:

    
    
     (def codetree (file)
       (trav + 1 (readall (infile file))))
    

Anything that appears after two newlines and a blank space is treated as code,
till there's a line that doesn't begin with a space. This is like the markdown
convention, but you don't have to use four spaces; one will do.

Incidentally, the code above tells me the number of nodes in the code tree of
a file. Not just leaves, which would be

    
    
     (len (flat (readall (infile file))))
    

but interior nodes as well. To me this is the best measure of how long a
program is. I used to go by lines of code

    
    
     (def codelines (file)
       (w/infile in file 
         (summing test
           (whilet line (readline in)
             (test (aand (find nonwhite line) (isnt it #\;)))))))
    

but I found this was encouraging me to do the wrong things.

(This kind of test matters because I'm constantly trying to make news.yc
shorter as a way of pushing functionality down into Arc.)

Here's trav, btw:

    
    
     (def trav (f base tree)
       (if (atom tree)
           (base tree)
           (f (trav f base (car tree)) (trav f base (cdr tree)))))
    

It traverses a tree, doing something at every node. So e.g. CL copy-tree would
be

    
    
     (def copy-tree (tree) (trav cons (fn (x) x) tree))
    

If you're wondering how the second argument to trav in codetree could be 1,
it's because a constant when called as a function simply returns itself. This
turns out to be quite handy.

~~~
emmett
I like the abbreviations you're using. "w/" in particular is extremely
readable. And who wouldn't love a function call (isnt it #\;) in real code.
#\; looks a little bit like Perl walked into the middle of your Arc program
though.

~~~
gms
#\x is a character literal in Common Lisp (in this case, the semi-colon
character).

~~~
emmett
I'm no lisp hacker, so that part stood out to me as particularly hard to
understand in comparison to the rest of the code which was perfectly clear to
me. I had to re-read it a number of times to figure out what it meant;
obviously, if I was at all familiar with lisp I would have had no trouble with
it.

------
rtomsmith
This is a complaint - I am _really_ really* tired of double and triple entries
in your Twitter feed for the same stories/articles. It really pollutes my
timeline. Please fix this. Thanks.

------
JamesMitchell
I find it totally confusing as to how to post a comment. You really need to
have some instructions, it is completely unobvious. I ended up posting the
same thing three times because the comment never seemed to show up and then
deleted the second and third ones.

------
iloveyouocean
Add a way to contact another user directly, not necessarily Personal Message,
maybe something along the lines of sending an email address from one user to
another privately.

The current method seems to be posting your email address in the comments with
something like, "Hey, email me about that . . ."

~~~
prakash
\------------------------------------------------------------- Can we build a
local community out of YC news? Currently YC is focus is the US. For the
RestOfWorld, can we have a country/city page that links to a local startup
website or a yahoo/google groups page?

This would to some extent help facilitating _potential_ co-founders -- since
that's a constant them on this board.

\-------------------------------------------------------------

------
WiseWeasel
After clicking on either the up-arrow or down-arrow on comments, only that
single arrow should disappear, not both. Then, you can always at least cancel
out your vote if you clicked the wrong one.

------
Jemm
Hi. I was just looking at my profile and noticed you have a notifo: field.
Curious, I google notifo and it would seem they are no longer extant.

------
nosklo
Automated reset password option please? One that automatically sends an email
to my registered email address, with the new password?

------
entangld
I'd like a recommended _book_ reading list.

It would also be good to separate _advice_ from _news_. Lots of popular
submissions are industry gossip, but others are useful tips.

~~~
tokenadult
_I'd like a recommended book reading list._

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?

~~~
entangld
That was a very tiny link at the bottom of the page ->"Lib". Thanks for the
link. I wonder what their UX person says about those links.

I'd really like a rolling reader submitted list on the main page, but this is
also good.

------
ivankirigin
Posterous.com and Tumblr.com should both have subdomains listed in the domain
details.

For example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446438> posterous.com ->
tom.posterous.com

------
abrs
Can you please add a link to the comments page to the RSS feed with each
Article. Then the article's link would go the the site and the content would
include a link to the comments. Also, the number of comments should be
displayed. This would integrate the RSS more tightly into the site.

------
grinich
Users often say "My email is in my profile" since they assume the email field
in their profile is visible by others. I would make the labels more specific
as to what is public/hidden.

------
psogle
Just an FYI your twitter account isn't spitting out the url to the articles
you post there

Example - Open Source Open World: http: Comments: http:

<http://twitter.com/YCHackerNews>

------
Alex63
Keyboard shortcuts (like Google Reader) that work in Chrome, Firefox, or IE.

------
wheels
I'd like to see the New York Times and some other major outlets blacklisted
from submission. At this point the front page is about 10% NYT most of the
time, which seems silly for something that's supposed to be a focused site.

------
lee
Not a feature request, more of a bug:

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?

------
zach
Bug report:

I somehow created a post which does not appear on my threads page:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053559>

------
akohekohe7
1\. Search function, so i can search for a story-- over time, not just on a
single page 2\. please explain how the point system works. do the points go
with the author or article,and how do some articles have more than others?

------
bhousel
Make the comment box bigger. It might inspire people to leave longer comments.

------
trailcable
Add subdomain mews.ycombinator.com(also possibly meows) to redirects to
news.ycombinator.com.

Lighting sucks at times and muscle memory might be a key off.

------
ecuzzillo
Undo-able votes, or an are-you-sure on votes-- accidentally downmodding random
comments is unhappy.

------
aquinn
Please add a submit button to the search box at the bottom of the site. I
can't use the search function on Android (Opera) and less importantly, w3m.

------
mhb
Profile karma average doesn't seem to work as I'd expect. Despite numerous
recent posts and comments with points well above my previous average, the
average has gone down.

------
johnmartin78
Add in URL based duplicate recognition.

~~~
danw
When you submit a duplicate URL it sends you to the original submissions page
instead

~~~
ch
It would be more interesting if news.ycombinator.com also checked if a URL was
directly linked from a previously submitted URL; the URL was from the same
site as the previously submitted URL.

Before you could commit a new submission news.ycombinator.com would present a
list of matches (in descending order by date) so that you could compare what
you are about to submit versus what is already submitted.

------
govindk
I could not find a place where I could provide feedback with respect to your
rss feedback. It returns text/html rather than text/xml which results in
chrome misbehaving (adding all elements to <head> tag)

Govind

------
dhimes
I'd like an explanation of what all the things on your profile page do. I
think it's mostly covered, but what does "delay" do? Measured in seconds,
minutes, or what? Even just a mouse-over would help.

~~~
zck
I agree that it could be more user friendly, but here's the function of
_delay_ (from <http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html>):

>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.

~~~
dhimes
Thanks! I thought I checked that page...

------
zalzane
remove the karma count in the upper right corner of the landing page.

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.

------
vjandrea
The instapaper action disappeared again. Will it be added again eventually?

------
rlm
Would it be possible to get a public RSS-feed of my saved posts (for
Friendfeed :) )?

------
jamiequint
It would be nice to see articles you have commented on as well as ones you
have posted in your profile

~~~
pg
we now have this

------
joshstaiger
I read Hacker News via the RSS feed in Google Reader.

Looks like the comments link disappeared yesterday.

Not sure if Hacker News changed or Google Reader changed, but I think this can
be fixed by putting the comments link inside a <description> element in the HN
RSS feed.

------
bobstobener
I'm addicted to HN. One little gripe ... can you have the links from the news
list open into new tabs or windows? Makes it easy to return to the HN menu.
Thanks!!!

------
yumraj
One great feature would be the ability to mark/bookmark threads as favorites
and then to view them listed under my avatar. I can use browser bookmarks for
this, but this would really help IMHO.

------
DTrejo
I recently tried to reset my password on the account D_T . I mistyped the
password, making it impossible for me to log back in.

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).

------
cweiske
RSS/Atom feed for <http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100>

------
parenthesis
Fix srv.arc to recognise "Content-Length:" case-insensitively (in (def
parseheader ...)).

Lynx says "Content-length:" in the POST requests it sends, which are thus
rejected.

------
jcr
Add a profile option to allow people to make their "saved stories" list
public.

------
NonEUCitizen
Is there a way to subtract points from a post? Or at least to undo an addition
by mistake?

------
mad_with_power
It would be nice if child comments were foldable.

------
s-phi-nl
I would like some way to "flag" a dead post for revival. Every so often I see
a dead link that in my opinion should not be dead. You could use the flag link
on dead posts for this.

------
zacharydanger
I'd like to be able to login from my G1. It seems like it works, but the
session doesn't want to stay active. When I upvote something it calls for a
login, and then upvotes the item, but then I'm no longer logged in.

------
lotharbot
Request: please make the black memorial bar clickable (linked either to the
memorial thread on HN, or to the official source of the announcement.)

------
jlgosse
Why not do a Y Combinator feature similar to Kiva? Members of the community
can post information about their startup idea, and then people can give out
micro-loans or micro-investments.

I think that would be super cool.

------
KedarMhaswade
Add a simple title attribute to the upvote up-arrow. That way mouse-hover
tells you what clicking it would result in.

------
Raplh
"showdead" should allow me to follow links in killed submissions. Right now I
can see the title of the dead links, but there is nothing I can click on to
actually go to the page which was originally linked.

------
wendyp
I would really like ycombinator to be supported by the Sociable plugin - I
don't think it takes too much to get it added, and the plugin is automatically
updated every week on WordPress blogs.

I hear it is easy to do:

<http://push.cx/sociable>

------
ralph
Using character entities, e.g. &amp; to give an &, works on submitting the
comment, but editing the comment populates the form's area with an unescaped
ampersand causing corruption on submitting the form. Encoding and decoding
needs to be symmetrical.

Cheers, Ralph.

------
stretchwithme
I think it'd be cool if the procrastination cutoff didn't work until after
you've had a chance to edit a comment. maybe a "but at least let me edit
existing comments" checkbox.

------
malandrew
double post prevention.

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.

------
staunch
Allow users to choose to either add a comment or add a sub-link to the primary
link. It's amazingly common to have great links burried in the comments. It
would be great if there was a way to have them show up near the top, under the
primary link.

------
fsniper
please use some kind of user distinction feature like auto generated distinct
picture boxes for every user. I'm a person who does not give much attention to
the posters' identity while reading over net. And with small in-distinctive
user names used over HN makes me think every post or comment is anonymous.
This makes my HN experience less valued.

------
mark-t
1\. Make it clear that feature requests are not welcome as threads on the
submit page. Provide a link to this thread.

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.

------
marquis
Bug: Posting a trailing slash on an URL gives &#x2F;.

Remove the trailing slash and the link works.

Not sure when this started happening.

------
ralph
The HTML produced has errors, e.g.
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fthreads%3Fid%3Dralph>

~~~
palish
They use the <center> tag which, as far as I know, isn't valid HTML. So they'd
have to restructure the page, which is more trouble than it's worth.

------
ph0rque
Fix links with parantheses in comments. Example:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_>(1999%E2%80%932002)

------
ilmare
Add link to YC comments in RSS feed, right now RSS entry contains just a
single link.

~~~
lojic
Now that a comments link exists. It would be nice to have points displayed
also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118589>

------
kwhitefoot
Increased contrast. light grey text on a grey background is tiring and
irritating to read.

------
usablecontent
Ability to find out if the new article that I am posting has already been
posted in the past or not. I wanted to post a few articles from venture blog
but before posting I searched on Google using "title of article +
news.ycombinator" as a query.

------
untangle
The ability to collapse the nested replies.

This would aid in keeping page formatting within bounds, and also in scanning
the scope of the threads.

------
pengsu
Can I have the RSS version of <http://www.hackerne.ws/over?points=100>

------
xirium
Search box in top right corner like
<http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/browse.cgi> with user
selectable back-end.

------
yters
Karma should be a function of whether highly rated posts (either submissions
or comments) also have highly rated responses. This would encourage good
dialogue and minimize the influence of anonymous knee jerk voting.

------
champion
I really wish the RSS feed had a link to the news.yc post about the link and
not only to the link itself.

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.

------
IanJ323
how about a site formatted for the iPhone?

------
d0mine
Please move the comment form to the bottom of the page.

It frees up space at the top of the page for already posted comments and It
would encourage reading or at least skimming through previous comments before
adding a new one.

------
falava
I've just submitted an idea for HN:

Twitter-like Follow button + new threads-like page

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1298352>

------
mduerksen
Downvoted comments are greyed out, but possibly contained links stay black.
This gives them (unwanted) attention, so they should be greyed out, too.

------
lupin_sansei
Please delete/collapse threads on here for features that have already been
implemented.

~~~
pg
One of the features that is (I hope) coming soon is an actual feature request
list, rather than a comment thread used for one.

~~~
greendestiny
Why? I don't think it helps the site to segment it like that especially when
its not that high traffic.

~~~
rms
At this point it's really difficult to sift through the noise on the feature
request thread.

------
skorgu
Some indication that a comment of yours has been replied to. Reddit's little
orange envelope is the obvious example.

Alternatively, an RSS feed of your "threads" page might work but I'd prefer an
icon personally.

------
btbuilder
Force SSL for the login page. Yes sessions could still be stolen but at least
passwords would not be revealed.

------
ralph
The article's domain displayed in parenthesis afterwards has an occasional
leading period, e.g. <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=24263> and
.brainspl.at.

------
dctoedt
Tag and vote for articles as suggested founder reading - see
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923920>

------
rms
One thing I like on reddit _is_ the arbitrarily long title names, because it
is easier to come up with a good long title than a short title.

Regardless, you can get around the 100 character limit on news.yc by editing
the title after you submit.

------
kmfrk
Please make SSL/HTTPS the only way to browse HN.

I see that SSL is now supported on the site, so please make this the default.

------
davidw
It would be nice to be able to have a 'more' button on our own comments pages.

~~~
xirium
As a stopgap measure, try [http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-
bin/search.cgi?...](http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-
bin/search.cgi?p=0&q=author:davidw)

------
gosuri
Search dude..

~~~
davi
<http://searchyc.com/>

------
abukres
Please add some text in the body of the RSS feed. All I see is a subject line
and an empty body. Sometimes that's not enough to determine if the post is
interesting enough.

------
mcritz
3\. It’s tougher to monetize on Android

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!?

------
afshinmeh
Accept __Markdown __in comments. I think it's really necessary to have a style
in comments.

------
hollerith
RSS feeds for individual stories. (The feed would notify me of any new
comments on the story.)

Better yet, RSS feeds for every item, story or comment.

------
philjackson
Please give us a syntax which allows for quoting a parent comment. I would
vote for a '>' at the beginning of a line.

~~~
pg
_Please give us a syntax which allows for quoting a parent comment._

Italic seems to work fine for that.

------
mike-cardwell
More of a bug report than a feature request. When logging in with OpenID, it
doesn't seem to like HTTPS urls. I tail my Apache access logs and see no
requests...

------
pmjordan
Better dupe filtering. There's only so much that can be done, but it would
have helped in this case:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214046>

------
samofny
New visitor. Login page has no option to register for an account. Doesn't say
anything about how to signup.

------
mhartl
Over the years, I've noticed a lot of people on Hacker News using underscores
for emphasis, like _this_, instead of asterisks, like _this_. How about
supporting both?

------
stevederico
Podcast/Justin.tv covering top articles and ask HNs of the week, Showcases new
developments or ideas from the community, interviews past/present YC founders.

------
pfisch
A search function....or maye i just don't see it....

If one exists it should be more visible

------
fizx
I'd like to see the comment ordering algorithm reflect the interestingness of
the replies subtree. I'd like to see a 1 point comment with a 20 point reply
above a 3 point comment.

------
alanthonyc
Can you please increase the size of the 'Comments' links under each posting? I
often click on the comments first to determine if I want to proceed to the
actual article.

------
tvon
Is anyone ever going to fix the Facebook Connect login setup? Is there
anywhere to report bugs where they are actually see or do we just rely on
someone finding it here?

------
staunch
Would be very nice if a users's profile page said when their account was
created.

------
duds
Please use a link rel="alternate" to let us know faster that you have a feed
:)))

------
rw
Enable word-wrapping on code snippets, and other weird "stretch out the page"
behavior. Example:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214975>

------
babul
search.

~~~
aggieben
here it is: google "site:news.ycombinator.com <insert terms here>"

------
teeja
When I click the "More" link and the page is expired, I'd rather have it go to
the latest next page than have to backup and refresh the page. Could be a
pref.

------
replayzero
It would be great if yo could move the search bar from the bottom of the page
to the op of the page ;)

------
GabGoldenberg
Categories so that I can find the specific topics that I'm interested in.

------
akrymski
Ability to:

\- 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!)

------
Shamiq
A setting in my profile which specifies the maximum width a line of text can
be. Reading the long lines is annoying, but i like to keep my browser
maximized for other purposes.

------
LogicHoleFlaw
When posting a reply to a comment, have the page center on your new post via
an #anchor. This refreshes the other reply links on the page and makes it
easier to find your place again on the page.

------
jacoblyles
I would like to be able to delete or lock my Hacker News account in order to
cut back on the number of time-wasting websites for which I have logins.

------
hoschi
Give us an API which has also the points for a headline included (the RSS feed
does not :( ), so I can build a more customizable feed.

------
orky7
the interface of the comment page should be more friendlier/organised. the
reply comments should be folded/hidden so that if we like the comment and want
to see what other people reply to this awesome/crappy comment i can do that by
clicking a button and all the reply will be shown, everything should not be
visible since it is very time consuming if there are more comments on a topic.

------
nphase
I'd love a point threshold thats configurable on the RSS, so that I can put
hacker news back into my rss reader without worrying about massive amounts of
pollution.

------
veyron
clickable links when people choose to post text. It's annoying to have to read
a description of a site, where they put the blah.com, and then have to go and
copy-paste the link to see the page. It's common for the "Ask HN" pages to
have questions pertaining to a startup. Then, the person is forced to make a
comment with a clickable link.

------
falsestprophet
I would like the ability to save stories in situ. But, most of all I would
like for all of our comments to be saved. Unless I missed the next button, I
noticed that only relatively recent comments are stored.

~~~
pg
They're all stored. More button for comments coming soon.

------
bprater
Search.

------
v0cab
Ability to edit or delete comments more than a day old. At least let us
'delete' our username on a comment.

------
mikecupcake
Please add an option for the RSS feed's links to point to the HN comments
page.

------
kirubakaran
Mention in the profile page that "email" field is not visible to the public
and that the users have to type it in the "about" section if they want to
publish it.

------
epfleckl
Two words: mobile-friendly. Seriously, ten lines of CSS would make a world of
difference.

------
htoniv_1712
Please make the upvote button in some bit large size and change the color too.

------
cliffano
Please embed Hacker News RSS feed to the page HTML using link tag, this will
make feed discovery easier using tools like Firefox.

------
ralph
A taller text area box for entering comments. Say double the current height.

~~~
nirs
10-15 lines would be nice.

------
Jach
We have the ability to save topics. (I'm still not sure how this works, or how
I can un-save.) It would be great to also be able to save comments.

------
greenvaio
My submission not showing in new section after submit :( Anyone can tell me
why it is so?

------
corysama
I just spent two hours writing a comment, only to get "unknown or expired
link" when I hit reply. Grrrrrrr.....

------
kirubakaran
Upvotes given to a story on front page should have lesser weight than ones
given elsewhere (new page, post's comments page etc)

------
TomK32
HN is case sensitive when linking urls.

<http://works.example.com> HTTP://does.not.work.example.com

------
tinman
Can you open source the code for news.ycombinator? Then all of us can supply
changes and you can approve as you wish.

------
rpgmaker
Mobile site could be a heck of a lot better. So far it's the same desktop site
to me.

------
karanbhangui
Can the stylesheet be tweaked to say font-family:Verdana, sans-serif; instead
of font-family:Verdana;

Otherwise, systems without Verdana installed show a serif font.

Thanks.

------
kirubakaran
When a user flags a post, please immediately hide the story from them. This
will help lower their blood pressure. They can see it again by turning on
ShowDead.

------
LockedOutOfHN
Bring back OpenID/Google auth for a little? Just so I can get access back to
my account please? :(

------
Hexstream
A way to find all your comments that are above or below (> >= < <=) a certain
karma value. Or at least, a way to see all your posts that have less than 0
karma.

------
nadim
Unflag feature, after flagging. Alternatively, an undo flag link.

------
nivi
I commissioned a Firefox extension to add a "Mark as read" button to news.yc:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=19816>

------
MicahWedemeyer
Top-level menu item for "Ask HN" posts. I like to help people spitball on
ideas, review new apps, and the like. That's become my favorite use for HN.

------
utx00
\+ collapse threads \+ passwd recovery \+ search \+ ability to bookmark
interesting articles/posts \+ rss/per user subscriptions \+ rss subscriptions
for the different lists

------
dfranke
On 'self' posts, have the submitter's own comments always be listed first.

------
jcla1
How about an api for all the posts including archives? The ihackernews.com API
is always down and buggy

------
Nierengarten
Quick Dapper Feed for the front page:
<http://www.dapper.net/services/HackerNews>

------
brudgers
Make this thread strictly ordered by most recent top-level comment.

------
randomwalker
The RSS feeds are pretty primitive -- they have only the title! This makes
them almost useless. It would also be nice to have a lower volume feed of only
the highly ranked posts.

------
xtho
Allow users to add tags to posts. Make it possible to restrict the posts on
the frontpage (when logged in) to a list of tags.

------
whacked_new
My karma shot up mysteriously sometime in the past few days. I thought people
were replying to my posts but no, my posts were still lonely.

If this isn't a bug, the request is for a more transparent karma system.

------
lupin_sansei
A Podcast channel on YC News so we can submit and upvote good podcasts. See
here for more info:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29039>

------
dougo
I want a way to change my password. Or is there one and I'm just blind?

------
ck2
I'd like alternate lines in the list to be slightly lighter, like (very) old-
school computer paper, so it's easier to see the grouping.

------
agentcurry
Have a "widget" that allows users to display their submissions (or recent
number of submissions) on another site.

------
elteto
Please remove the requirement to obtain access to my email contacts when using
OpenID to sign in.

------
xd
Would be nice to see a users up/down voting preference on their profile page.
Maybe something as simple as a ratio?

------
asah
Please allow us to comment on (Cheer for!) YC companies posting job ads.

------
pmarin
Cache the list pages. They are vey slow lately compared with the rest of HN (5
seconds for the leaders list).

------
cperciva
Bug testing, please ignore.

Text with _asterisk

    
    
      Code with *asterisk
    

Failure to close italics tag?

------
damir
When browsing with mobile it's annoying to scroll all the way to the top to be
able to click on 'New' link.

Could you put 'up' or 'top' link at the bottom, next to 'More'?

------
alpb
Please fix tabindex of that comment box, it focuses to Search box instead of
"add comment" button.

------
pollux
It would be great to have a RSS for the saved items. Just to aggregate them in
FriendFeed. If it is already possible, I'm sorry, I don't have found it.

------
willarson
Recently I have seen the proportion of weak submissions become very high, high
enough that I think a down vote arrow for submissions to help weed out content
would be beneficial.

------
brlewis
Subcategories for the feature request page would help me see if my suggestion
is already here for me to simply vote up.

------
pmarin
Limit the number of articles that can be in the frontpage at the same time for
sites like Techcrunch.com.

------
linuxtrek
Atom/RSS feed for the best <http://news.ycombinator.com/best>

------
Datasta1
I'd like to see a password recovery option. I have been randomly locked out of
my account and can't get back in.

------
jmtame
A Digg feature that checks if you've already submitted a link twice, or one
similar to it (base it off the title of the article, or base it off the
description entered by the user).

------
jmcgough
Can we have some proper HTML and CSS rather than tables in tables in tables
indented by GIFs?

------
epi0Bauqu
On the profile page, break out the components of a user's karma.

------
ptm
Can the RSS feed have a link to the yc comment thread as well as to the
submitted story ? Often I find the comment threads a lot more useful than the
story itself.

------
theantidote
Can you make the read links darker? I'm having some issues seeing them on my
new laptop because the screen is glossy and the contrast isn't as good.

------
chriseidhof
I would like a mobile stylesheet (also for iPad) that has larger buttons.
Especially the upvote button and meta-links.

------
zabazup
Please change your RSS feed http -> header -> content-type from 'text/html' to
'text/xml'.

------
ianl
Add a note, or a link to which formatting syntax you use for posts. For
example, is it markdown or similar.

------
th0ma5
i dunno why but the duplicate check seems to be working less well, see:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510757>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2511398>

~~~
corin_
Same issue it's always had, that most websites are configured to accept more
than one unique URL, with minor alterations. Often it's something like
"?source=twitter" on the end, or "#top". In the case you linked to, one has a
trailing slash and the other doesn't.

------
joe24pack
when creating an account, please have a second password field for
confirmation. Without that, it is far too easy to fat finger the password when
creating an account.

------
orlandu63
Make threads more readable in elinks. Currently no thread depth is shown in
elinks, making it hard to follow discussions.

------
chacham15
This is going to sound very twitterish of me, but I'd like to be able to
follow certain people.

------
stonemetal
A different story ranking algorithm idea: You can't vote stories at all. A
story's count is determined by the sum of the comments made.

------
pjvandehaar
Do a bit of a merger between paulgraham.com and HN by moving comments for
those articles over to each essay's page and inter-linking.

------
vikram
Though restricting the site to invitation only isn't a good idea. Letting
people invite friends that they know would be interested from inside the site
would be convenient.

------
hackhn
Your site is not having any ajax enabled features... very poor site in term of
it's UI. Include ajax enabled tabs in the top navigation atleast.

------
staunch
Ban RT.com. They're a trashy linkbait tabloid like the dailymail.

------
molecule
RSS Feed for Classic:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/classic>

------
jakecarpenter
Can we get a mute button? For those discussions that stay at the top for hours
and usually degenerate into name calling anyway?

------
ecuzzillo
Feature request: remember me being logged in with this browser.

------
nearestneighbor
STOP bugging me about my email address! When I signed up, it wasn't part of
the deal. The same goes for you, Reddit.

------
tokenadult
It would be good to see the "classic" view of the main page listed on the
"lists" link available from the bottom of several pages.

------
joshwa
option to open articles/comments in a new tab by default?

bookmarklet set (I often use my "reddit this" bookmarklet to get back to the
comments page for an article I've clicked)

~~~
nilobject
I second this. I have this option turned on in reddit, and it keeps me from
accidentally navigating away from reddit. I keep clicking on links here and by
the time I read the article, I forget to press back instead of close, causing
some frustration.

------
pj
Disable submit buttons after clicking once to prevent accidental double posts
or do it with code on the backend either way or maybe both.

------
cperciva
Testing a HN bug, please ignore this comment.

~~~
cperciva
bar

 _<http://www.example.com/> _

baz

 _<http://www.example.com/*>

fizzle

~~~
cperciva
When the ending asterisk of an italics block is at the end of a URL, the first
asterisk gets converted to <i> but the ending asterisk is included in the URL
rather than being converted to </i>, resulting in the rest of the comment
being italicized.

~~~
davidmurphy
_test_

<http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7688415363>

test

------
geuis
Sometimes you downvote by accident. Make it so a downvote can be upvoted once.
Cannot downvote after upvoting

------
ajsharp
I would _love_ a "Save to Instapaper" link next to each story link, without
having to click into it.

------
breck
The Leaderboard should exclude points from url submissions (does it do this
already?).

Only upvotes on comments and non-url submissions should count.

~~~
parenthesis
Why?

~~~
breck
I find reading the comment feeds of users with high karma to be very useful.

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.

------
mmackh
Could you possibly include Points/Number of Comments in your bigrss feed?

(maybe even time of submission?)

------
organisedminds
A _bear hug_ -button for everyone. Getting hugged is sometimes very important.

------
chmike
A way to signal offending comments. See
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58389>

~~~
falsestprophet
or this one: "tu es betes comme tes pieds"

See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59074>

~~~
chmike
The comment I was referring to is called racism. Now you write that I am
stupid.

What's the point ? What is this suppose to demonstrate ?

------
st3fan
iPhone-friendly css

------
latch
I'd like to be able to change my name.

------
eposts
Spell check. Its always nice to posts with less mistakes.

~~~
palish
If you use Firefox, you'll enjoy the benefit of a spell checker built into all
<textarea> boxes.

------
boxofjunk
An option to ignore submissions for certain domain names.

(Personally, I'd be happy if I never have to see another Techcrunch link
again.)

------
reitzensteinm
I think this was mentioned by pg earlier (I'm putting it here so it doesn't
get forgotten), but auto generating a link when an URL is posted would be very
handy.

------
highCs
I would like the links to open on a blank tab by default.

------
johnyzee
Make new comments stand out (comments made since you last read the post).
Makes it easier to revisit a discussion and see what's been added.

------
gsivil
A list- on the right side of the page- with the 10 most popular words
discussed on HN the last day.

------
windsurfer
Can we get rid of the direct URL to log out?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/logout>

------
271828183
Please add a meta description. The snippets on Google and Bing aren't very
good

------
lachyg
Would love to see faces / avatars added like in the Facebook Group, that's a
killer feature I think.

------
sidcool
When a reply is given to my post, something tells me so.

------
christopherolah
LaTeX/TeX style math, syntax highlighting.

------
nirs
Vote down for any user, because it more useful to vote down, and for ranking
it does not matter how a link count is reached, by voting down or up.

~~~
palish
Not sure I've parsed your grammar correctly, but rewarding the community for
participation by letting them downvote only when they reach 20 karma is a good
thing.

Also, downvoting past 1 karma in general is a bad thing. It adds bias to the
comment for future readers.

It really seems like downvoting in its current form is fine, and if any
changes need to be made then capping downvoting at 1 karma might be a good
idea.

~~~
nirs
You mean down-voting past 1 points? Why it add bias for future readers?

I also don't see why you need to reward the community. The right to down vote
is not different from the right to up vote, and any user should have it. Up
vote is simply "I want more of this", and down vote "I want less of this".

The same machinery used for up-votes of bad links can be applied to down-votes
of good links, so you can protect the site from general stupidity.

~~~
palish
Well, when you downvote, you're really saying "The community should have less
of this", not "I want less of this". Karma is global, not different depending
on which user looks at it.

Therefore, if the community has deemed a comment as stupid (karma < 1), any
future readers will read the comment through tinted glasses. But wait a
minute, the community really hasn't said that. It was only one or two users
that did.

Let's reexamine the purpose of karma on a comment. The purpose is not simply
to punish the poster of a comment if it gets downvoted. It's to move the noise
down to the bottom of the thread, where it can be ignored.

So I propose an alternative: Let silly comments stay at the bottom with one
karma point, and encourage users to upvote more interesting comments higher.
This way, users won't be biased against any comments (They won't know if a
comment has been downvoted because it might simply be that no one has upvoted
it) and the noise can still stay at the bottom.

~~~
nirs
The problem is that each vote change the number of points, so if you happen to
be the first down-voter, it will become zero. But if another user up-voted the
same item just before you, then your vote change nothing.

I seems that reddit solved this problem by not showing the number of points
for new messages.

There could be a "new" status, marked in a special way, which explain why you
vote it not showing. After enough users voted, and using the editor vote to
change the weight of other votes, move the item to voted status, and show its
point count.

------
schneiker
Bug: The "More" link (at bottom of page) ususally gives this error message on
most days (in Firefox 2.0.0.11): "Unknown or expired link".

------
ctyrider
Another vote for "best" RSS feed. The unfliltered RSS feed is way too noisy to
be useful.

------
umangjaipuria
I'd like to change my user id. Is that possible?

------
amichail
newcomments would benefit from better context (e.g., showing the parent).

Also, real-time updates in newcomments would be nice.

------
tfleish
I'd like to be able to hide links I've already read, so only new links would
appear on the homepage.

------
BrandonM
Right now, the threads page is sorted by the creation time of the leftmost
comment (I think). Could it instead be sorted by the creation time of the most
recent comment in the thread?

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

------
davidw
YC.news idea - category/tab for "our sites/startups"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29606>

------
anescient
Set the global/outtermost background color. I've got F6F6EF only in the
innermost content area; it's all framed by my default bg color.

------
giulivo
I would like to get an RSS feed for the user's upvoted/submitted links
(questions).

------
jay-pinkman
RSS: please add to each <item> a reference to the user that posted it.

------
kristianp
Bug:

I've just started using the noprocrast function. I find the 'retry' link
expires well before the 180 minutes of wait is up.

------
MarkTraceur
When I click an 'up' arrow, it disappears and doesn't seem to do anything.
Why?

------
rms
Bug report, see this story:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317983>

------
LarryMade2
Some method to recover or change your password would be helpful.

------
gumbo72
A way to "save" threads, so that I don't have to comment on them to keep them.

------
awayand
can I filter out all articles with aaron schwartz in them please?

------
ralph
The HTML header's title should have more page context in it so the browser's
Back menu isn't a list of identical titles making selection difficult.

Cheers, Ralph.

------
ivankirigin
to fight the lowering quality of comments, maybe you could make a meta-comment
feature to describe what is wrong with the way they commented (as opposed to
the content itself)

maybe making it public would stop people from making repeatedly bad comments.

------
onuryavuz
Please let article links to be opened in a new tab.

~~~
bru
Just Ctrl+click or Middle click...

------
wtf1
disappointed that HN doesn't have some way to reset or recover forgotten
passwords. (that I can find.)

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.

------
henning
I think this is a bug.

My browser keeps caching the "get back to work" maxvisit screen, resulting in
"expired link" when you click on "override".

------
danielha
I am very much in favor of having a "top discussions" section. I tend to be
more interested in active discussion than just popular submissions.

~~~
pg
prototype at news.ycombinator.com/active

------
mslate
A list of all-time highest voted links--let me know if I'm mistaken and that
it exists already

------
StartupBuilder
Forgot password/username support. This is my 50th account, no joke.

------
tokenadult
It looks like the duplicate detector still needs more work. There are lots of
duplicate submissions again.

------
vincyjoseph
The post are not easy to read. It would be better if they are highlighted

------
andrewhillman
It would be nice to have "Tell" and "Show" next to "Ask" at the top of HN.

------
ralph
Is the order of comments stable? Sometimes it seems they change without the
number of points altering. A stable ordering would be good.

~~~
ralph
I'm now sure it isn't stable, which makes re-finding your place and making
sure you've read everything more awkward than it need be.

------
samcreate
nodb.js is the fastest scalable, high-performance, open source NoSQL database.
nodb.js features: auto-sharding and data integrity anaylsis

<http://nodbjs.com/>

------
dmoney
The "saved" page is slow and doesn't always load. Sometimes it just returns a
blank white page.

------
brett
a good way to put chunks of code in comments. ideally some wrapper notation
around the code that does all or some of the following for its contents:

-uses a monospaced font

-newlines get turned into <br> so that lines show up next to eachother

\- < and > get html escaped

\- extra spaces and tabs get turned into &nbsp;s to preserve indentation

------
brett
Prevent this kind of nonsense: <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15630>

~~~
brett
here's a more interesting example:

[http://google.com"style="display:block;background-
image:url(http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif);height:110px;width:276px;font-
size:0.000001px"](http://google.com)

~~~
pg
fixed

------
bestest
More cats please. Everyone knows the internet is for cats.

------
odna3ra
Please include more useful info in the rss feed. Currently, it only displays
the submission title.

------
cbthiess
I'd just like visited links to be more different from unvisited links. Right
now I have to look closely to distinguish between the two.

------
tss93
Make so that the end of news auto-loads next page.

------
sbt
Is there a way to filter out certain links, e.g. based on domain name?

------
gegidoni
Apple, yahoo, microsoft, google, thats "hacker news" ???? WTF!!

------
TJJones
I can no longer submit stories to y-combinator, it just takes me to a blank
page-anybody else have this problem??

------
nickb
Request: More meningful tag text. Paul, could you copy the text from the title
of the article and palce it in between title tags?

------
Zev
Could the title of items in RSS get updated to have "[dead] title here"
whenever a story is killed?

------
mrpollo
Google Cache link besides the (flag | comments) links for all articles

------
elidourado
Please include the URL or domain of the linked item somewhere in the content
field of the RSS feed.

------
rms
There are a lot more posts on the front and new pages now... can I have the
option of viewing 60 or more posts at a time?

------
johnyzee
Please cull this list. New suggestions are drowned in stuff that's already
been implemented (sometimes years ago!).

------
ochekurishvili
RSS Feed for the Best submissions would be a nice addon.

------
nirs
100% font size for body text, relative size for other text. A user should get
his preferred font size set in the browser.

------
xtrimsky_
Please put a date in your rss feeds. At least a "last_updated" field!

------
aquateen
There are quite a few "Ask YC" posts. How about creating a forum, or list a
separate 'ask yc' section at the top?

------
elwell
"Read Later" button for every article

------
g3orge
I'd like to see keyboard shortcuts to upvote, follow or flag a link.

------
pmarin
Add a new list: The top 10 recent articles voted by the top 10 leaders.

------
johndavid
I need php related topics like php, mysql..

------
nerdynapster
Include a button showing "Trends"

------
jmcguckin
Get rid of timeouts! This is an immense PITA.

------
xenoterracide
Categories. HN is getting a little out of hand on my rss and I'd like to be
able to seperate content more.

------
yters
Split the main screen so external links are on the left and internal links
(polls, posts) are on the right.

~~~
akkartik
FWIW, this is how I separate out the two. Only internal links:
<http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?ask>

Only external links: <http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?-ask>

~~~
yters
A little greasemonkey and it'd probably be equivalent to what I said. Hmm...

------
ravensley14
a way to follow post that you like,so you can go back on them to post or
follow the discussion under the post.

------
staunch
Detect and prevent someone from running through a user's threads down voting a
lot of them in quick secession.

------
wise_young_man
Can we get the ability to change our usernames?

------
stevederico
Comment Ranking filter. Rank by most upvotes, date ascending or date
descending.

------
tim2
Bug:

Steps to reproduce:

go to your comment page -> edit comment page -> delete comment

Directs you to "No such item" after the comment is deleted.

------
juwo
I cannot see when someone has added a new comment to my question or link.
Please color unread posts differently.

------
papersmith
I'd be nice to have permalinks of comments in the profile page, and ideally a
notification when there's a reply.

------
BASANT45
now i will know this news,it is vary famous in world and populer,i like this
news,and all pupile in this like.

------
karlzt
put <http://searchyc.com/> as a search feature and ban google and other
popular search engines from indexing HN. Please tell me why this is a bad
idea.

------
thorax
Avoid having links expire all the time, or redirect to a relevant page. I see
these 3-4 times a day.

------
jebblue
I'd like to have filters so I can ignore people I choose.

------
mojuba
For consistency of the interface I think "threads" could be renamed to "my
threads" in the top bar.

------
akrymski
Categories or Tags (Python, JavaScript, Physics, etc...) so I can refine by
them.

------
volida
Bug: I think there is a bug when you edit one of your comments. Instead
updating seems there is a new entry?

~~~
volida
BUG: If you submit a comment, you are returned to the page you were
commenting. But if you refresh that page, the comment is re-submitted. A "no-
cache" and an expire header of the submit request page would avoid this
problem.

------
brimstedt
could we please get the css adapting to screen size (i.e. make HN readable on
mobile without zooming and scrolling)?

------
thomasreggi
I would really like a rss feed of my "saved" links and "thread" comments.

------
mlLK
Paginate by value, if not the main page, at least include this feature in our
profile.

------
jshap
HOW DO I POST A JOB TO HACKERNEWS?

------
thorax
Turn links in a user's profile into real links. (I thought it used to be this
way?)

------
Sym3tri
Would like to optionally not show stories I have already read.

------
nivi
1\. Mark all items as read. 2\. Avatars.

------
sidcool
Allow collapsing/expanding of comments (like reddit)

------
Giorgi
Could you disable double posting? I mean not to allow duplicate content to be
submitted.

------
simon_vetter
ipv6 support (it's been mentioned multiple times in comments, thought I had to
share it here)

------
yread
a way to distinguish seen and new comments - HN is _awesome_ especially
because of the informative discussions that are going on so I often end up
returning to a particular discussion over and over again.

------
mmt
A simple title word exclusion filter would be nice.

This week, it would be "erlang" and "_why"

------
DougBTX
Fuzzy dates for times > 30 days. For example, instead of "126 days", say: "4
months".

------
jey
Bug report: deleting a comment from a thread does not decrement that thread's
comment count by one.

------
xenithorb
I would like it if clicking a link opened a new tab.

------
wiillw2
copy google reader....except don't delete things I haven't read that are 2
weeks old, and allow me to mark all items unread in a feed I just subscribed
to...so I can read old posts when I have time....

------
breck
It would be nice to see your current rank on the leaderboard(if you're not in
the top 30).

------
Steggles
[Invalid Date] is shown on each item in the RSS feed (using a tabbed gadget in
iGoogle)

------
TryAndTry
a "subscribe to feed by email" option will help !

Hardly takes any time to plug the feed to FeedBlitz/FeedBurner.

------
puneetht
How about a keyword based search.

------
rms
Submissions and saved don't work for anyone beyond a certain number of items.

------
Alex3917
I noticed that news.YC isn't letting me log in using opera 9.1 on OS X. I
can't figure it out.

------
Alex3917
Can you change the CSS so that the links that have already been visited turn a
different color?

~~~
Alex3917
Also, in Firefox on OS X some of the comments are gray and others are black.
Why is this?

~~~
joshwa
it corresponds to comment score

------
pastullo
target="_blank" in all website links

I always have to cmd+click the open them in a new tab :(

------
joshwa
On the user pages it'd be useful to see their comments as well as their
submitted articles...

~~~
pg
done

------
epi0Bauqu
View/search YC users by location.

~~~
aggieben
Yup. For us hackers that don't live in the Valley or the Alley, it can be hard
to find peers.

------
mak2
External links must be open in new window

------
Xichekolas
The flag link is appearing on [deleted] posts. Just thought you'd want to
know.

------
sagmartindia
Its Presentation very clear. easy to used.

Thanks

------
xenoterracide
Have links to Poll and Search on the front page, they were painful to find.

~~~
d0mine

      google: create poll site:news.ycombinator.com

First link leads to the post with <http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll>

    
    
      google: search ycombinator

First link is <http://www.searchyc.com/>

------
genieyclo
Ability to change email address on HN and delete own account.

------
lwhi
I'd like to be able to grab a list of all the articles I've upvoted.

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.

~~~
michael_nielsen
Try: <http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=lwhi> Note that it seems you can't
see others' upvoted articles this way, but you can see your own.

~~~
lwhi
Thanks, but I think these are all the articles that I've commented on .. not
the articles that I've upvoted.

------
matin
Adding infinite scroll would be a nice touch.

------
mastensg
Make sans-serif a fallback for Verdana in CSS.

------
oshai
rss to the 'best' page links. since the regular rss has too many items for
mee, I would like an rss with only high rated links.

------
yangyang42
I would like to see an option for opening links in new windows (or tabs)!

------
rms
Tagging

------
Cyapow
working upvote's. never work for me when logged in (firefox 11 if that helps,
and firebug shows no ajax request)

------
gv0tch0
that's more of a bug (or a misunderstanding on my part..) - if I try to upvote
an entry without being logged in, HackerNews thinks that I already voted for
it once I log in.

------
kirubakaran
Can we have a way to sort by karma the links currently in the front page?

------
ivankirigin
j.mp is a url shortener that should be removed - or whatever your policy is
for url shorteners. You could just follow the link in the post submission
process.

------
rms
Collision detection for www. _.com and_.com in the dupe checker.

------
dejb
SEARCH

------
jey
Bug/Misfeature: When I type the pound sign, it gets replaced with "GBP".

------
na
etag header for rss?

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.

------
slim
a better CSS that highlights the person name in the thread.

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.

------
grinich
Use &amp; to escape ampersands on a story list.

------
malandrew
Tags + filtering would be sooooo useful

------
lagenar
Add a carriage return before the line feed in http responses

------
ahalam
HTTPS everywhere!

------
jwecker
This might be a pain, but could you make this topic sticky for a while?

~~~
jwecker
linked at the bottom of the main page. n/m

------
davykestens
Please make the upvote-button a tad bigger

------
KeroseneKid
I would like to be able to sort new by points.

------
bloch
Remove override option from anti-procrastination feature.

------
hrasyid
Daily emails of top threads

------
ralph
news.yc doesn't validate its parameters properly, e.g.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479)foo>

------
T_S_
Ability to filter out Groupon stories.

------
staunch
Create a syntax for referencing "items" within the site.

[item://363|Feature Requests] or similar.

------
amhnews
this good for me and for all netizen, i recomended for this site and will
invite all my friend's!

------
ravintpillai
I want to be able to delete old posts

------
metysj
Is there a way to remove our own comments?

------
replayzero
commented upvotes? give people the chance to say why they upvoted something?

------
dreur
Have the name of the sneder in RSS and the Karma.

------
bfrs
Ability to fold comment threads.

------
shawndrost
Put a link to the markup syntax next to all text boxes.

------
sbuk
Delete account button please.

------
tewks
shorten plus.google.com/x to plus.google.com rather than google.com, as is the
status quo

------
grinich
Disable auto-capitalization for iProducts.

------
nyliferocks
A TOP Ten Page of Submissions

------
pixelphantom
Mobile site with readable font size!

------
irrationalfab
Official API or mobile interface

------
rms
Javascript buttons to collapse comment threads.

------
cgs1019
keyboard shortcut: '/' to focus search textbox

------
dhimes
Consider killing dead links in the RSS feed.

------
pmarin
Keep It Simple¡ it's the feature that I want.

------
soundsop
Allow users to make their story upvotes public.

------
thumbarger
tags and tag clouds

------
frosty
get rss feed with minimum points threshold lets say 10 or 20. currently too
many entries get pushed to rss feed :(

------
HugoMelo
WHY THE HELL DIDNT I FIND THIS THREAD SOONER? THESE PEOPLE KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I
WANT

------
subbu88
Make all links open in new tab.

------
llz
Editing or deleting old posts

------
wushupork
I'd like to be able to search submissions

------
adamd
Atom or RSS support.

------
manuel
maybe allow people to add a short, one-line description for each submission,
so one has more more info to decide whether to check it out or not.

~~~
danw
Quick and dirty solution is to add a quick description to the end of the title

------
smackaysmith
A way to 'share' stories like I can on Google Reader.

~~~
wendyp
Yes, yes! Me too!!

------
leecho0
section for start-up related submissions -- must read articles for people that
are just starting up start-ups

------
jmcguckin
is there a way to 'save' articles (like on reddit)? Articles tend to scroll
off the bottom pretty quickly.

~~~
tokenadult
Any thread that you either upvote or comment on becomes a saved thread on your
profile page.

------
pjharrin
Ability to save links, just like on reddit

------
plntxt
Responsive design.

------
mitchm
check for duplicate URLs when submitting or a confirmation page showing
similar stories already submitted.

------
kasunh
A feature to search for submissions.

------
binaryorganic
Responsive Web Design?

~~~
KalobT
As far as design goes: HN has a very simple design and I find it a lot less
distracting than more responsive designs.

------
sidcool
Expand collapse comments.

------
amoshaviv
A read it later feature.

------
dewiz
please make comments and upvote links easier to click on ipad.

------
dottertrotter
pg, can you add a page that simply lists out the members that are currently
logged in to the site?

------
danw
Oooo, a new shiny update with RSS. Thank you!

------
vajorie
allow reader to upvote while reading the item in the same window the item is
opened...

------
mattmcknight
Feeds with summaries or whole articles.

------
vemv
RSS feed of /best please.

------
Sohum
All links open in a new tab.

------
rms
Allow duplicate stories after 365 days.

------
xenoterracide
bold usernames. I have trouble noticing who is saying what sometimes. colors
or something could also work.

------
fezzl
Filter by unanswered threads.

------
gmichnikov
A new/ask intersection page.

------
darksim905
Sort by oldest!

------
Fando
Nothing, it's perfect!

------
Jasitis
source of hackerstream.com on github open ot be forked and embedded

------
dopp
Mobile compatible site.

------
breck
I want to see what posts I upvoted.

------
presto10
RSS of best list, not only new. Thanks.

------
boksiora
Non expiring paging

------
Ninjamonk
another one for rss here. I love this its just what I have been searching for.

maybe the stories to open in another window also.

------
stuntgoat
Sort comments by hours or days ago.

Thank you!

------
hmpurwar
is Google current version of Hacker-News is down,

~~~
rvijapurapu
Having the same issue.

------
lixon
redesign and update the <table> layout :)

------
breily
collapsible commenting, ala reddit

------
aryounce2
Password recovery. Please?

------
niico
Search and similar posts

------
mel_llaguno
How do you delete an account?

------
noodle
RSS feed of stories i upvote.

------
summereyes
on front page, clicking on "more" reports "expired link"

------
stuntgoat
Hi.

Can you please make the comment textarea larger?

Thank you.

------
pinakipillai
Keep it simple

------
pashle
A "change your password" feature.

------
gimlids
Mobile version!

------
yearsinrock
private messages to other users

------
rms
Community voting on titles

------
veyron
Lynx compatibility!

------
ack
rss/atom. really, I'm sure there's a good reason there isn't one...

------
temporary_user
fix the forgot password emailer, doesn't work.

------
dmfdmf
search tab to go with header new/threads/comments/leaders/jobs/submit

------
bleakgadfly
Hacker News swag.

------
jorangreef
"Best of Hacker News"

------
Nimeshpatel
Computer enginear

------
alanh
Syntax support for

\- Lists and

\- Quotations

would be quite useful.

> Example quotation

------
karlzt
a neutral button to undo upvotes would be nice.

------
naveen99
downloadable archives of user comments

------
brlewis
a tool for admins to move feature-request submissions to comments here

------
groby_b
password recovery? Pretty please? With sugar on top?

------
ilaksh
I should be able to fucking downvote things by now. This is bullshit.

------
yeahyeahs
an IRC server. I think it'd be awesome.

------
ez77
Browsable archives.

------
ondiekijunior
private message/ping

------
Jerrysmartchris
Paris

------
MykalM
Password Recovery

------
osi
indicate the number of comments on a post in the rss feed

------
lethal
Sort by points

------
rms
asterisk support

starstar __maybe?

------
Fuca
save threads and a most voted links section by month

Great site anyway

------
jimsc
for the love of all things.

Forgot. Password.

------
brigadier
please create "Report Spam" button.

------
pavansrinivas
password recovery option...

------
PeterWhittaker
Tags/Categories, and filter-by-tag/category

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.)

------
DabData
Thanks CIA from heart Europe DC

------
h1ro
an rss feed for saved stories please

------
chaostheory
mark www.website.com and website.com as dupes

------
needsomehelp
Password reset

------
prat
all time best stories please.

------
joem
Search.

------
ch101
Dos Hacks

------
dag
A kill file.

------
whotemp
smallrss: 10x less

------
hackworth
mobile stylesheet, plz!

------
justplay
mobile app.

------
liliseby
just a half ...

------
wumi
ability to follow users

------
suliali
please add FORUMS!

------
mmaaxx
ajax commenting.

------
h4ck3rr
H...k...R

------
forther
iphone client

------
mike463
a hide button.

------
akrymski
google search

------
slyrus
https!

------
Devils-Avacado
search

------
thinq4yourself
rss feed just for jobs

;-)

------
zeantsoi
tongans. lots of them.

------
thepanister
I am not sure if someone asked for this before...

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!

~~~
d0mine
This functionality is already present.

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>

------
thepanister
I want to be notified when someone replies to one of my comments - not
stories!

Just a message box that would appear on the page that someone replied to one
of my comments.. and this message box should appear only when there are new
replies... along with links to the specified comments!

What do you think? :)

~~~
tptacek
I think it's a bad idea. Threads basically "die" for me when they fall off the
bottom of my "Comments" link --- or, at most, when they get one or two "More"
clicks past that page.

This is helpful, because after a few days of participating in a thread, the
quality of my responses degrades, and the number of people reading it
declines.

I feel like time-limited discussions are part of the culture here.

(I'm aware of the irony. I just saw the timestamp.)

------
throwawaycoder
Less punishment for controversial comments in controversial topics.

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.

------
giles_bowkett
API

------
nether
I can't reply to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689212)
so I'm posting this as a separate comment. A real quote tag implementation
would make entire subdiscussions on quoting syntax moot, like this one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6483366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6483366).

------
sparknlaunch
1- When logged in comments and submissions (by logged in user) should be
highlighted in a distinctive colour.

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.

------
stefantalpalaru
Please implement proper pagination. The "Unknown or expired link." message
when clicking "More" after being on the page for a few minutes is frustrating.

------
thepanister
There is something funny that I really wish to see here... but it's not
essential.

I want to see kind of analytical tool for my karma.. and see how I am doing!

Let me explain: Can you program a tool that would draw charts of your karma
history... so you can see if your karma is raising or not? And it would be
great if you can let the users choose to display their karma in specific
dates!

There is something more advanced also... Can you analyze the topics that user
is writing about that helped him in increasing his karma? Also recommend a
stories for the user to comment on... that's related to the user's interested
topics based on his/her previous comments.

I think this is hard somehow... because it needs so much of analyzing, data
mining... and some logical factors to work with!

What do you think? :D

------
mroman
I would like to see a search feature pg, I have seen searchyc, however I would
like to see search integrated. Today for example, I used Google to search (I
learned of searchyc while searching for "search" :) in this discussion - after
trying Google) and it brought up what I was looking for (discussion of your
History of T essay) in the results, however, Google did not provide a link to
the discussion, apparently only a link to the main page was indexed. It was
only after using searchyc that I found it . . . and a link to the essay as
well, as I did not see it under essays on your site. I was looking for both
because I saw them yesterday or the day before yet was in a hurry . . .

------
FredBrach
1) For fairness and effectiveness concerns, on the top news pages, please
display a number of news according to _energy_ thresholds, _energy_ being the
same variable used to determine the position of a news.

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.

~~~
FredBrach
EDIT 1): the right term must not be _energy_ but _odds_. Please display on a
page a news amount according to an odds threshold (and maybe a minimum of 30
news, it's not a problem in this way for us, maybe it is for you). Anyway,
thx.

------
avlesh
Well this is NOT a feature request. I wanted to report a bug and couldn't find
a place to do so.

Hacker new site doesn't open in Firefox 3.5.9. Is this a known issue? The HTTP
response headers seem to be the reason behind this bug. This is what the
headers look like -

TTP/1.1 200 OK

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Cache-Control: private

Connection: close

Cache-Control: max-age=0

Notice the missing "H" in the first line. Firefox fails to understand this
response and dumps the entire HTML as Text. I saw this bug 3 weeks ago and am
surprised that it hasn't been fixed yet.

\- Avlesh (<http://webklipper.com>)

------
nilved
Set a background color on textareas and inputs. You set a dark text color but
not a background and it makes the site unusable for people with dark-coloured
themes: your dark text is rendered atop my black background.

------
dakimov
Annotations for submissions. Just a couple sentences telling what the
submission is about. Titles are often obscure, so you cannot determine whether
a submission is even worth your attention without opening and reading it.
Given the rate of submissions on HN this may be really time wasting.

------
yamada
A phoenix-like quality where ongoing arguments are pushed up according to
popularity ... or at least featured on the side in a box somewhere, like,
"most active discussions".

------
citizenkeys
Allow a url AND descriptive text on new submissions. Otherwise, the submitter
must also write a comment immediately after posting a url simply to elaborate
on the url and/or why the url was posted.

------
maeon3
When adding comments via Android to the textbox, it is a nightmare, I have to
resort to writing my post in a NotePad and copy pasting. An Android app. I can
write one up for you if you need to. Im alost ready to write one myself and ad
it up.

------
jeberle
Gray text on a light gray background is very hard to read. See for yourself:
<http://www.fastnlight.com/contrast.html> Black text on a white background
please, or make the gray text/gray background style something I can turn off.
Thanks.

------
thepanister
I am not sure if someone asked for this 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?

------
J3L2404
It would be great on long comment threads if I could tell which comments are
new, possibly by changing the alpha slightly for newer comments (relative to
the age of the post). If the change in alpha was very subtle it wouldn't be
distracting and I could easily scan for new comments.

------
thepanister
Hey, This story has more than 660 comments on it, it takes many seconds to
load, and it does not load completely!

I can't see the whole comments...the page stops loading!

Why don't you devide the comments to several pages? So you would display
something like 100 comments per page.. and you click next to display the next
100, if any!

That would be better... page would load faster... and things would be fine!

------
rbanffy3
There should be a way to cancel/delete an account. I am pretty disappointed
with HN and no longer want to be part of it.

~~~
unalone
You're entirely responsible for your own actions. Don't blame the community
for your deciding to be an arse.

~~~
bhousel
He should still be allowed to cancel his account.

------
AltIvan
Hi, i created a Google Chrome extention that does what this person:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430542> was asking (The title is now
"$TITLE | Hacker News")

~~~
AltIvan
ups, forgot the link:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bldhjkmbdomhijjjnm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bldhjkmbdomhijjjnmckgchocnfhkpnd)

------
sabat
Search! Search!

~~~
jey
<http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/>

------
galawa
i am new to the feature about y combinator but i think you should correct
something. what is that? when you log out and you click the arrow on the left
side point left you log in again. that shows if you log out you have not yet
log out completely. At gmail when you log out no matter what arrow you use you
will not log in till you decide to follow log in process such as your username
and password.

------
DavidAbrams
How about fixing the log-in system? It claims "bad login" for valid
credentials, doesn't say what's bad about it, and doesn't provide any way to
reset supposedly bad passwords.

------
DavidAbrams
A "forgot password" or password-reset function. It's not letting me log in,
and I'm mystified because I know what password I used. I had to use an
alternate ID to post this.

------
jorsh
It'd be cool if you guys would figure out how to properly implement RSS

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.

------
ticktock
lets be real, this site is all about the quality of the submitted links and
the quality of the comment system.

I think you should focus on COMMENT system 100% and the quality of the links
will improve as a result. For instance, i continue to be downmodded basically
because i offer an opposing view to the whatever the current topic is. I try
to not insult, and I try to back-up everything i write with facts, or state
them as opinion if it is only such. If I was posting off-topic spam, I expect
to get downmodded, or if I am shock-jocking just to get noticed (I don't see
the point of that one) I would expect to get downmodded, but your 'Point'
system is seriously broke.

------
doc-film
Feature Request: PG pls consider making the submitted urls which are listed to
the right of the submissions as links which would take you to a page where all
submissions from that site were listed desc.

------
hackermom
Couldn't find any better place... Bug report: when voting someone's entry
down, the score stops at -4, but the poster's karma actually continues down
beyond that point. This seems err to me.

------
naughtysriram
I accidentally up-voted a post. I was wondering if there is a way to cancel
that. I guess it is different from down-voting for which I must have some
amount of karma.

------
thepanister
I want a feature that would allow me to ping a user, so I would get his
attention [ to me or to a post].

You can make a karma threshold, to prevent/reduce abuse. Also you can let
users have the option to enable/disable this feature.

------
paulleviss
There should be feature to add friends so that it becomes more social

------
mroman
I would like to see the following recurring problem fixed: when adding a
comment, once one hits the submit button, the app just hangs, then displays a
blank screen

------
yamada
A phoenix-like quality where ongoing arguments are pushed up according to
popularity ... or at least featured on the side in a box somewhere, like,
"most active discussions".

------
xlnt
Rate limit down (and up) voting, so you can't vote on a bunch of stuff very
fast, but you won't notice the rate limit if you are reading the stuff you
vote on.

------
strey
Upvotes should save comments too, in a separate section.

------
rajeshvaya
Is it possible to send emails to the user when there is a reply to one of the
users comments?

------
DabAsteroid
Charge money for voting. For example: every 2 votes costs 1 Karma point.

------
Coronado
I am needing to Update my domiAn

------
wfgfg
Wfgfg 238 points by bg 1877

------
hungdaddy
Is there a saved section like reddit has?

------
DabAsteroid
Negative Karma-points for each duplicate post.

------
celwell
ability to sort by Top this Day/Week/Month

------
321abc
Please allow anonymous comments.

------
xlnt
make it so comments can't be modded below -5 (or -10). there's no value after
that.

------
Alistra
more significant difference between seen and unseen link

------
imsrk
Follow questions on HN. update notification on any question of interest.

------
Olacoded
nigeria news and many more news!

------
wfgfg
Wfgfg

------
sscheper
search

------
Olacoded
entertainment!

------
mdnajim859
hi friend....

------
mdnajim859
hiiii/.....

------
Arpad
hacker news

