
Show HN: Submit your ideas for improving HN - sgdesign
http://hnwishlist.com/
======
phillmv
[http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893f...](http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893fe7f7)

("Implement a real name policy")

Seriously? Why does anyone think this is a good idea? Can't we just stomp this
one out for good?

I really miss noms de guerre. It saddens me that we moved away from handles
and pseudoanonymity being a default.

Says the guy using his real name.

~~~
Par_Avion
I think Hacker News' name policy is just about right. Its public enough that
we don't have things going on like 4chan, but its not public to the point
people are afraid to comment their opinions.

~~~
DeepDuh
> Hacker News' name policy..

Did I miss something? I can't find any username policy in HN's guidelines.

~~~
tikhonj
Well, it _has_ usernames. That's a policy in and of itself!

The policy, then, is completely implicit: you can have any valid username
which may or may not reflect your own name.

Oh, and you can't change them after the fact. As far as I know. That would be
a nice feature...

------
edw519
The greatest opportunity for improving HN lies with _us_ , not with the site.

Here's a good place to start:

<http://edweissman.com/how-to-participate-in-hacker-news>

~~~
Domenic_S
That's quite a statement. On a scale from "terrible" to "ideal", the
discussion on HN is a lot, lot closer to ideal than the UI/experience is:

UNKNOWN OR EXPIRED LINK

C'mon, this is 2013... paging dynamic results shouldn't be an issue.

What makes HN great _does_ lie with us, but I strongly disagree that it's also
the _greatest opportunity for improvement_.

~~~
alaskamiller
Maybe you weren't around awhile so you don't know the backstory. Link
expiration is partly because the servers back then wasn't able to keep up with
datascraping, for example when we made the only useable search engine for a
few years.

------
JoshTriplett
Nice idea. A couple of bugs I noticed while poking around on the site:

The sign in box seems to break Firefox's ability to save the username and
password.

When signed in, the "Change password", "My Account", and "Sign out" buttons
have three different clashing visual styles.

Please consider adding downvotes; for instance, I'd like to downvote ideas
like
[http://hnwishlist.com/posts/ae15555a-f3c1-43f3-8a80-cef2a22e...](http://hnwishlist.com/posts/ae15555a-f3c1-43f3-8a80-cef2a22e8dad)
or
[http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893f...](http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893fe7f7)

Also, a little more far-fetched: if you don't mind doing a bit of page-
scraping, you might consider letting people link hnwishlist accounts to their
HN account. Just have a profile field for an HN account, and let people prove
their ownership of an account by putting something like "hnwishlist username:
$NAME" in their profile temporarily. Then you could do things like offering
upvotes and downvotes using the same karma thresholds as HN.

~~~
sgdesign
Thanks for the feedback! And until I implement downvotes, maybe you could add
quick comments to explain why you think those are bad ideas?

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KurtMueller
Mobile friendly site. I can never view this site while on my cell phone
without having to pinch zoom.

~~~
przemoc
Well, I often zoom it on the desktop computers too (depending on OS/Browser
settings). :)

It could be like killing two birds with one stone actually, because making it
mobile friendly quite likely would make it friendlier for non-mobile uses too.

------
tsm
I don't have an account there, but it's worth pointing out that alternative
sites like <https://lobste.rs> do exist.

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djloche
Is there any interest in a 'RES' styled enhancement suite for HN? I'd like to
think that many of these (and other previously proposed) suggestions/wish
lists, someone has already created something to deal with the issues on a
client side level rather than trying to get PG to try and change something
that works good enough for him.

------
tsm
This is all fantasy. PG runs this in his spare time off a single server. Every
feature I saw on the list has viable workarounds. Yes, it'd be nice if they
were supported out of the box. But I don't think the lack of native features
is negatively impacting the _content_ of HN, which is the most important part.

So what's the argument of the site? "Hey PG, we know you're busy funding
startups and stuff, but we're mildly inconvenienced by some UX decisions
you've made with that experimental site you run on the side, and were hoping
that you could take the time to implement these seemingly-minor features
that've been discussed on HN for years. In exchange our happiness while using
the site will be somewhat increased, and we will instead whine about HN's lack
of modern CSS and Twitter Bootstrappiness and what have you."?

~~~
jmduke
Yes, PG would have to do all of this himself, because there's no way a hundred
developers would leap at the chance to contribute to the HN source and make
fellow developers happy.

~~~
alaskamiller
You actually described the reality very well despite your condescending
sarcastic tone.

~~~
jglovier
I would leap at the chance to contribute freely to the HN site to make fellow
developers happy, yes.

------
j45
Nice implementation of a suggestion/voting site.

My suggestion is singular: Let posts be tagged for startups, and
bootstrapping, so I can filter everything else out.

I'm happy to geek on my own time but what I come here is for startup content
and less interesting/novelty stuff.

~~~
gnosis
Tagging has been requested here multiple times, is controversial, and has
never been implemented.

I, for one, am very much in favor of it. I'd love to be able to filter out
topics I don't find interesting. It would also effectively address a lot of
griping about supposedly off-topic submissions.

~~~
j45
I wonder what is so controversial

------
DanBC
I really like the fact that your site seems to work well even with my reduced
window width.

If you're looking to seed your site with other ideas there are many existing
add-ons and clients and etc.

Searching Github for ["hacker news"] returns something like 700 hits.
Obviously, most of those are not relevant, but different searches for ["hacker
news" client] or ["hacker news" extensions] return over 100 projects where
people have implemented features that they feel improve HN.

The Chrome webstore, and the Firefox add-ons page, also have many projects
that people feel improve HN.

There's also the userscripts site, and userstyles site, also having many
changes to HN.

------
ctruman
Love the positive thinking. The full screen comment feature alone allows for
such a better experience when getting into discussion. Looking forward to a
lot of great ideas coming out of this!

------
polemic
There _is_ a feature requests link at the bottom of the page...

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miguelrochefort
You know what? Improving HN is a waste of time. Why can't we just migrate to a
better link aggregator, such as Reddit? It would basically fix everything
(including design, mobile friendliness, lack of good apps, lack of API, etc),
at no cost.

I'm sure it would be easier to convince Reddit to let subreddits behave like
HN than trying to keep HN up to date with the modern world.

Just my two cents.

~~~
tsm
Having PG as a commenter, mod, and admin is a tremendous asset. HN also
benefits from the close ties to YC in general--it'd be a bit tricky to tell
all the YC folks that they need to post not on news.ycombinator.com but over
at reddit.com/r/therealhackernews or whatever.

~~~
phillmv
HN doesn't benefit from close ties to YC. YC benefits from close ties to HN.

YC folks will post to whatever is considered the de rigeur nerd/startup news
site, which over the last couple of years has become HN - having migrated from
reddit (and slashdot, before).

There will be another one, in due time.

------
tsm
>I use hnnotify, which works really well but relies on scraping. I'd love to
see official functionality that works pretty much identically to hnnotify.

If it's working "really well", why do you care about the fact that its
implementation is a kludge? It seems like we already have a good-enough
solution.

~~~
sgdesign
Maybe at some point whoever is behind hnnotify will decide they don't want to
pay a huge Sendgrid/Mailgun/whatever bill anymore and shut it down.

There's also the simple problem of discoverability. I never knew about
hnnotify until now, since it's not part of the main site.

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rglover
I'm sure most people will dismiss this with "just use email," but I'd love to
have an inbox where people could message me. In situations where a comment
thread is better suited for a one on one convo, it'd be great. Also a nice way
to keep your email private unless necessary.

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KevinMS
I'd like to see, if not both the up votes and down votes of a particular
comment, a score of how "diverging" the ups and downs are. I think it would be
very interesting to see when a particular comment is "divisive", (borrowing a
common political buzzword)

------
codefoe
If there will ever come a day when I can ditch the Chrome's HN+ plugin to make
HN look good, it will probably be with that. So I'm all for it. Great idea.

------
rahilsondhi
Sacha you are a beast! You're always putting our new projects. I'm starting to
notice your designs even before I see your signature too.

~~~
sgdesign
Thank you, that's quite a compliment!

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welder
#1 Following users after liking a user's post or comment. (not publicly)

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trxblazr
sub HN, like subredit.

