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.
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.
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.
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.
I edit posts extensively before submitting, so I frequently see "Unknown or expired link."
This error is a minor tax on carefully worded, carefully considered posts. I've lost posts following this error due to back button/refresh mishaps. I could post, then edit, but then people are voting and replying to content that is changing.
PG recently suggested that just going back recovers the composed comment. However, here's a reasonable sequence of events which, in Firefox, causes unrecoverable loss of a submitted reply:
(1) open the 'reply' link in a new tab
(2) compose the reply
(3) submit, getting the 'unknown of expired link' error
(4) go back -- you still have your comment, but...
(5) hit reload, figuring that will refresh your reply form's fnid validity -- after all, this works when commenting at an article's top level
(6) get the "unknown or expired link" error now on the reload, with no place to go further "back" to, and "forward" just leading to the same error. Your comment is unrecoverably lost.
I'm now in the habit of a textarea "select-all, copy" before ever hitting a submit button at News.YC. Thus, I can reclick a path from a fnid-less URL to a new reply box if necessary. But that's a pretty user-hostile workaround to expect of people.
Also a nice (although minor) feature would be to add a link back to news.yc when the expired link error occurs.
It's not that important but it would be nice not to have to delete the url parameters in order to get back (or find the bookmark again)
What was changed recently in this department ? I know the timeout was increased, but I used to be able to work around the "expired link" message by going back to the "Add Comment" form and refreshing the page. Now this also yields "expired link" and destroys the post text in the process ! I just lost good 30+ minutes of typing, and I ain't going to re-type it, so it is everyone loss .. :)
Please do something about this, it was a minor annoyance before, but now it turned into a pretty major headache.
Also, the 'Preview' button would be very nice to have. I know there's a delay setting, but that's not it. I want an ability to privately preview what I've wrote, before posting anything.
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!
I've noticed that sometimes the domain name shown in parens next to the link is kind of useless. Take, for example, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449670. "tumblr.com" is not useful in this case, but "titocosta.tumblr.com" would be more helpful--"oh, it's someone's personal blog named Tito Costa." Interestingly, it looks like sometimes you already do show more than just "domain.com", as in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449221.
That's been bugging me too, primarily with google.com.
To prevent wasted space you could ignore certain prefixes (www), or you could have a whitelist for hosts to show the prefix for (tumblr.com, google.com, etc).
I noticed a several people suggesting features in other threads, so I'm starting one explicitly for that. I know there's a lot that needs improving; the site is pretty bare-bones at this stage. So propose whatever new features you think we need, and vote for the ones that you want most.
This is more a content issue but to really build the community is have more fully fledged profiles - with location, bio - make it one or two lines max and a website or blog link. If we are what we think/read then it would be a great starting point in finding cofounders or people who are on the same wavelength.
I would also agree on seeing the latest comments - and maybe highlighting posts which you've commented on/ or submitted showing if there were new comments that you haven't read. So show "7 comments | 3 new" so it would be easy to come back to your home page and see how the discussion has evolved.
I'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'.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Every time someone asks for a search function here, someone answers with http://searchyc.com. This is a perfectly valid answer, but you should rather ask yourselves, why are people constantly asking for that? Because you don't have a "search" link in the HN header, e.g. right next to "new". It'd be fine if it'd just point to searchyc.com.
Please, 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).
Make it possible to lose karma by submitting garbage stories, either via downmods or (IMHO the better option) by making submitting a story "cost" a certain number of points of karma (which of course will be regained if the story gets voted up).
Recently I've seen two trends, both of which significantly diminish the value of Hacker News:
1. Some users are flooding Hacker News with submissions (in one case I counted 18 submissions in one day), and even though most of their submissions aren't being voted up, enough submissions are to make them accumulate lots of karma (which I assume is why this is happening).
2. The same stories are being posted many times by different users. I'm sure this is partly the result of #1 -- with the floods of submissions users might not realize that a story was submitted before -- but the fact that there's no "penalty" for useless submissions probably contributes as well.
I like the idea of submitting "costing" karma, but maybe you get a couple freebies a day. Maybe an escalating cost schedule so it penalizes people who submit their 15th story as opposed to their 5th.
Re #2, I always thought there was a unique url filter on submissions, but I've seen a couple repeats recently.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grillermo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drp|16 years ago|reply
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|17 years ago|reply
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|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taw|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpg...
[+] [-] iamelgringo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericb|18 years ago|reply
This error is a minor tax on carefully worded, carefully considered posts. I've lost posts following this error due to back button/refresh mishaps. I could post, then edit, but then people are voting and replying to content that is changing.
[+] [-] pg|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|18 years ago|reply
(1) open the 'reply' link in a new tab
(2) compose the reply
(3) submit, getting the 'unknown of expired link' error
(4) go back -- you still have your comment, but...
(5) hit reload, figuring that will refresh your reply form's fnid validity -- after all, this works when commenting at an article's top level
(6) get the "unknown or expired link" error now on the reload, with no place to go further "back" to, and "forward" just leading to the same error. Your comment is unrecoverably lost.
I'm now in the habit of a textarea "select-all, copy" before ever hitting a submit button at News.YC. Thus, I can reclick a path from a fnid-less URL to a new reply box if necessary. But that's a pretty user-hostile workaround to expect of people.
[+] [-] mpardasu|18 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huhtenberg|17 years ago|reply
Please do something about this, it was a minor annoyance before, but now it turned into a pretty major headache.
Also, the 'Preview' button would be very nice to have. I know there's a delay setting, but that's not it. I want an ability to privately preview what I've wrote, before posting anything.
[+] [-] LPTS|18 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkurz|15 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] vegashacker|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tvon|17 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] andrethegiant|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|19 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharpshoot|19 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanI-S|15 years ago|reply
It would also work for 'if you think this person is clever, you might like to read things posted by these others'.
[+] [-] Tycho|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] juanjose|18 years ago|reply
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|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hexstream|18 years ago|reply
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|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonhohle|15 years ago|reply
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
There doesn't seem to be a need to add the postfix length to the check. This should suffice:[+] [-] jonhohle|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fharper1961|17 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
https://github.com/nex3/arc/commit/0efaa1b189c4ed54c4f91a7ec...
It only adds a viewport meta tag and some styling which applies to small screens only by using a media query.
Please use it! Afterwards the site will look like this on the iphone: http://minus.com/lGBmQmM4CrdHE
Sidenote: Why can I commit directly to the github repository? I thought that by clicking edit, I would create a fork and work on that and create a pull request later. Strange. Or is this some kind of open-to-all repository?
[+] [-] bigfoot|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BearOfNH|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tzs|14 years ago|reply
Also, there is an oddity in the way comments are organized. They go like this:
(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).
[+] [-] cperciva|18 years ago|reply
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|18 years ago|reply
Re #2, I always thought there was a unique url filter on submissions, but I've seen a couple repeats recently.