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 find myself marking up comments of the same 2 or 3 users more often than others. They don't have ultra-high karma or anything- they just are interested in the same articles and discussions I am. It would be nice to learn more about them.
More important, I think, than displaying the number of new comments is making it possible to /find/ them. The reordering of comments is usually a great thing, but in a relatively involved discussion, it can become quite a chore to find that new comment.
I'm not sure what the best way to implement it would be, from either an algorithmic or HCI standpoint, but it certainly would be nice if you could come up with a way to make new comments stand out in threads. (Preferably with new defined by when the user last viewed the page, rather than being a static global definition.)
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.
'... Nobody at a social news site has yet figured out how to do the RSS feed right, IMO ...'
How about RSS feeds for individual users comments? Who likes checking into 'roach motels'? I don't. The number of sites I've added content /., use.perl, perlmonks, reddit only a few allow you to extract *your* insight.
'... RSS feeds are low-priority. ...'
possibly true, but why should you have to go back to a site/page when you can just grab the data & use it as you like?
I read reddit almost exclusively through their RSS feed. Its a critical function for any site... what site owner wouldn't want to broadcast to an Opt-In audience of passionate users?
RSS was actually the first feature i looked for - so very glad to see it working. I use netvibes to scan around 50 feeds every morning and afternoon, so the availability of the feed is critical if i am to monitor what's posted. Thanks!
Half-done, at best. Just getting a title is not much use: RSS feeds are supposed to save you time, and give you all the content where you want it (ie in your reader) not just give you a bunch of links that are no different than the HN "new" page.
Or is there a third-party technology that I'm missing that will solve that flaw?
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.
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.
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.
In my mind, however, what would be more useful for us budding founders is a place where we can share our ideas and projects in their early embarrassing states. It would be nice the be able to get feedback right at the beginning when I have only the the vaguest idea, and then to be guided by feedback as the project develops and matures. I would not be comfortable to share my pre-pre alpha project on reddit. And people would not be interested.
I believe that the search-space is too great that we should ever worry about other people stealing our precious idea. Starting from one point, different people would diverge and develop in different ways.
I don't know. But I would really welcome more openness. I think when an idea is interesting, and new, people would rather cooperate, and help along. Competition only happens (I hope) when people are chasing after the roughly same fad.
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.
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.
For the time being, I'd settle for just converting newlines to br's. Adding hyperlinks before there's solid infrastructure for dealing with spam would be a mistake. I'll be surprised if more than few days go by before spam shows up, even without hyperlinks.
title: How to make a demo that people will truly consider
description: Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.
This would result in --
<a href="http://howtowriteagoodemo.com/consider.html" title="Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.">How to make a demo that people will truly consider</a>
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.
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.
that doesn't solve the problem that I (and I assume others) habitually press the back button when I'm done perusing comments in order to get to the main page. At this point when I press the back button it goes to a slightly older version of the comments page- and various other oddities.
I run into this problem all the time--not good for diminishing by reload-addiction! It would be nice if pages included some js to rewrite history[1] via dom, so that we could always see the freshest versions of pages.
[1] It pains me to advocate breaking the "show me exactly what I was just seeing" semantics of the back button, but I think in this case the user clearly conceives the back button as "show me the abstract resource I was just seeing."
I agree with this suggestion, but for another reason. There have been a few times when I'm writing a reply and I stop to think for a moment. Occasionally, during this pause, I will glance up and notice that I haven't voted the article up yet. Unfortunately, when I do vote the article up, everything I have written up to that point gets cleared. I have tried pressing the back button, but it tends to take me back to where I was before I started writing my comment.
I understand that this is an error on my part, but that doesn't alter how frustrating it can be.
What about a separate feature requests page for those that already have been accepted and implemented like this one? And maybe another for formal rejections.
I think it can get confusing reading suggestions for features that have been implemented since the request was made for less obvious features than ajax voting. And they're not particularly relevant anymore. Of course I wouldn't simply delete them so a separate page would be a good compromise.
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.
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.
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 :)
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 :)
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 :)
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
Here's one: get newlines working. Either allow <br /> elements or translate the newline before applying the comment. It'll make the comments a lot more readable. I know it can be abused, but I don't think that's really a worry in this forum. You can always turn it back off later, right?
Nitpick. I noticed this is working now when you type two newlines, but when it's just one newline it translates into a space. I'm probably the only one who cares though...
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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(); })();
The main functionality I would want out of a submit bookmarklet is prepopulating the url field so I don't have to copy and paste it. Showing the submit page in context of the page I am on does not help as much.
Prepopulation is what I wanted too. If someone could update the submit page so that it accepts something like ?url=site.com&title=foobar in the url it would be great.
At least now its easy to drag and drop from the page the url and title. Any one know a way to get prepopulation to work?
As I said before, I don't think it can work (in Firefox) without a change in the code. Firefox's default security settings won't let you modify the content of html from another domain (I don't think...)
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.
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 :)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
1,707 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 2851 ms ] threadI'm not sure what the best way to implement it would be, from either an algorithmic or HCI standpoint, but it certainly would be nice if you could come up with a way to make new comments stand out in threads. (Preferably with new defined by when the user last viewed the page, rather than being a static global definition.)
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.
Or is there a third-party technology that I'm missing that will solve that flaw?
In my mind, however, what would be more useful for us budding founders is a place where we can share our ideas and projects in their early embarrassing states. It would be nice the be able to get feedback right at the beginning when I have only the the vaguest idea, and then to be guided by feedback as the project develops and matures. I would not be comfortable to share my pre-pre alpha project on reddit. And people would not be interested.
I believe that the search-space is too great that we should ever worry about other people stealing our precious idea. Starting from one point, different people would diverge and develop in different ways.
I don't know. But I would really welcome more openness. I think when an idea is interesting, and new, people would rather cooperate, and help along. Competition only happens (I hope) when people are chasing after the roughly same fad.
e.g.
url: http://howtowriteagoodemo.com/consider.html
title: How to make a demo that people will truly consider
description: Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.
This would result in --
<a href="http://howtowriteagoodemo.com/consider.html" title="Gives good tips on the small things that keep people interested in your demo.">How to make a demo that people will truly consider</a>
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.
[1] It pains me to advocate breaking the "show me exactly what I was just seeing" semantics of the back button, but I think in this case the user clearly conceives the back button as "show me the abstract resource I was just seeing."
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.
I understand that this is an error on my part, but that doesn't alter how frustrating it can be.
I think it can get confusing reading suggestions for features that have been implemented since the request was made for less obvious features than ajax voting. And they're not particularly relevant anymore. Of course I wouldn't simply delete them so a separate page would be a good compromise.
Most relevant excerpt (MRE): "You can still see dead stuff if you set showdead to yes."
The rest of the comment for context: Your comment is still alive
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969
even though the post you commented on was deleted.
I just added deletion. When something is deleted, it really goes away. This is different from marking something as dead. You can still see dead stuff if you set showdead to yes.
Deletion is for submitters who change their mind; marking stuff as dead is for editors to do to spams and offtopic submissions.
I wonder what the exact time-window is, because I am also unable to delete previous posts (since pg made this mini-announcement).
I wonder when/if it's going to be possible to delete your YC account (and all related information).
Digg promised this feature at "The Future of Web Apps" but it has yet to materialize (on Digg), I believe.
Does anyone know what the situation at reddit is wrt control of "your own personal information"? :)
I really am curious as to when the Web will evolve policies and products that adequately address this concern/"feature request."
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.
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.
As it stands, there's no real way to do it in a bookmarklet. Firefox's XSS security policies won't allow it.
At least now its easy to drag and drop from the page the url and title. Any one know a way to get prepopulation to work?