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:-/

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.

nice one! Really like the incremental site updates

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.)

'... 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?

As a stopgap measure, access http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?... and then subscribe to the RSS feed.

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?

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.

Probably they dislike the content and not the posting itself.

I would second this.

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.

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?

What type of spam do you get and how do you handle it?

done; we now have all three of these

Quick and dirty solution is to add a quick description to the end of the title

I'm considering doing this for questions (i.e. submissions with blank urls). I think it would be a bad idea for stories.

This could be possible with a mouseover description, simply throw the description into the "title" property of the <a> element.

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>

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."

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

I'm just going to point out that this really makes me only vote on topics I really care about. It doesn't really bother me.

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.

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 :)

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."

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

Oh! I always thought it was a deliberate filter against lists of items taking too much vertical space.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...)

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 :)

done (by you, in fact)

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

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

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

(he finished this)

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.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15041

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

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.

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.

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

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

This is utterly nonsense. I'm even a basecamp subscriber (used in small side projects). Many have requested GANTT charts be added to basecamp, but jason et al. don't use them in their pm process so they refuse to ever add them no matter how many people request them. I know several companies that have been unable to use it due to this lack of a feature. It's not that we like GANTT charts, but there is a BIG difference in project management between a small design shop (ie 37 signals, most yc type companies, etc.) and a large regulated proprietary engineering company (like my current employer).

done

Atom or RSS support.

hey, look at that... line breaks! =)

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

I support this suggestion. I have a bunch of problems I'd like people to solve that might potentially make a great startup for someone.

This is a totally awesome idea IMHO.

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.

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

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.

we now have this

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

linked at the bottom of the main page. n/m

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?

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.

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.

done

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is now fixed. Every form now does a redirect afterwards.

(It turned out to be a lot of work. The software used to think in closures and I had to make it be able to think in urls as well.)

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)

it corresponds to comment score

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Second the thread archive. I heard there was a secret YC video posted in an old thread but can't find it anywhere! :(

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

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.

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.

Something like a "code" tag that you can put around sections of your comment, and within these tags, the formatting will be left alone. This is supposed to be a technical news site after all, so I think this should be pretty high-priority. Thanks!

This sort of thing works much more cleanly in Arc.

I expect that ] to close all open parens would lead to code that is even tighter jammed to the left margin. I like that I feel comfortable writing nested code in Lisp, and if I was always looking for somewhere to put a ] I'd be tempted not to write nested code, and hence start leaking private identifiers.

That's why it's really nice to see that Arc has threads and an atomic-execution mechanism. GHC-style Software Transactional Memory would be a natural fit, and it seems to scale very well.

Locks seem to be on their way out.

On that note, you might take a glance at the lightweight concurrency paper; it proposes a new concurrency runtime for GHC, basically moving most of the implementation into Haskell, with just a thin layer of primitives in the RTS. Interestingly, those primitives don't include locks, but instead a very minimal transactional memory.

http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/lw-conc/index....

(The paper is also notable for giving a complete operational semantics of the system it discusses.)

(But this stuff isn't in GHC mainline, and won't be, for now, because it needs serious performance work first.)

Making a dialect that is the de facto for multi-core programming could be quite a ruse.

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.

Right. (It was a revealing slip. I've already started thinking of indexable stuff as like functions.)

See, THIS is the only reason I come to news.yc.

I love the idea of startups, but I've got the wanderlust. During the part of the year where I have net access, I watch ycombinator closely, and I'm not really hoping to see startup news.

I assume by taking a fn as input you mean taking a fn whose return values would become the input. That would not be hard, but the clean way to do it would be to modify read so that it could take a fn as an argument.

I could make it as easy as I wanted to write a codewalker, by changing the language where necessary. But it's not a priority right now. I haven't been doing anything where I felt I needed a codewalker.

Having a more dense language inevitably means that more programs turn out to be accidentally meaningful. Since Arc is designed to be an LFSP, that trade-off is worth it.

Having a more dense language inevitably means that more programs turn out to be accidentally meaningful. If the power of a programming language is the inverse of how long programs are (which is the best definition I've found so far), you can't make a language more powerful without the space of meaningful programs becoming denser.

Since I haven't used a language where unset variables are null or tried to design one, I'll assume you're right. I haven't had to use boundp much in Lisp, but I've had to use its equivalents in other languages quite a bit when working on other people's code for money. I suspect that boundp showing up in code a lot is a sign of badness - most likely in the choice of variable scope. I'm not sure if leaving it out will encourage people to write better code or just write their own workarounds.

Edit: aand binding test results to "it" reminds me of Apple's Hypercard. I will read the entire thread carefully before asking questions next time.

Very Interesting ! - especially the idea of using a count of the parse tree to optimize the language. Can you tell us anything about how well (or if) Arc is converging to a potentially releasable state?

User interface design is surprisingly helpful when designing programming languages.

I don't know why this is surprising (though I don't dispute that most people find it so). I think both Python and Arc pay a lot of attention to this principle, though their philosophies on the subject are quite different. I agree that allowing constants to be called as functions could be a source of bugs. It also seems like it could be, as PG says "quite handy". I'll have to see for myself when Arc is released.

OK, I stand corrected. Statically-typed minds also frown on this. It might be only Lispers that feel differently (after all, they've been conflating an empty list, a boolean false, and a symbol NIL and insisting it's the right thing).

Arc is supposed to be a LFSP. Smart people adjust their user model to the tools they have available (right?), so it's at least consistent with Arc's design principles.

It's not the choice I would've made - I tend to agree with you that "explicit is better than implicit". But languages all have to make certain assumptions about who their users are (same with UIs, really), and this design decision is consistent with Arc's previously-stated design philosophy.

For the record, in Python 3000, they're changing the printing and formatting around a lot, so the example above will become:

 "%s".format("a string")    #yields: a string
 "%s".format(["a string"])  #yields: ["a string"]
 "%s".format(("a string",)) #yields: ("a string",)

This will eliminate the confusing difference in the treatment of of tuples and lists when formatting a string. I think it's more clear, although I imagine some people will complain that "format" takes longer to type out than "%".

A truly advanced Lisp dialect will infer parentheses.

Oooo, a new shiny update with RSS. Thank you!

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

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.

Feature request: remember me being logged in with this browser.

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.

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.

I'd be nice to have permalinks of comments in the profile page, and ideally a notification when there's a reply.

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.

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.

And there was much rejoicing! yaaaaaay. Thanks, Paul!

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.

a "subscribe to feed by email" option will help !

Hardly takes any time to plug the feed to FeedBlitz/FeedBurner.

Absolutely awesome turn-around, thanks!

I dislike clicking "parent" multiple times in a row. Can we have a "root" as well to go straight to the top.

prototype at news.ycombinator.com/active

A search please.

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...

I cannot see when someone has added a new comment to my question or link. Please color unread posts differently.

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.

Yes, yes! Me too!!

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

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.

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

If other people agree with this, please upvote joshwa's suggestion. If you want to keep things the way they are, upvote this reply.

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...

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.

On 'self' posts, have the submitter's own comments always be listed first.

Please use a link rel="alternate" to let us know faster that you have a feed :)))

Thank you :).

I want a way to change my password. Or is there one and I'm just blind?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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?

I noticed that news.YC isn't letting me log in using opera 9.1 on OS X. I can't figure it out.

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

done

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

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.

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.

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).

see also: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=6139

good, i guess; i was sort of having fun with that one.

precisely

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

Parsing link parens is broke in a different way - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottler_(IRC_client) chops the (IRC_client) from the link.

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)

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

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.

Would be very nice if a users's profile page said when their account was created.

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

Bug report: deleting a comment from a thread does not decrement that thread's comment count by one.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/

1. Mark all items as read. 2. Avatars.

tags and tag clouds

fixed

Request: More meningful tag text. Paul, could you copy the text from the title of the article and palce it in between title tags?

Appears to be fixed. Thanks.

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.

RSS of best list, not only new. Thanks.

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.

I second this submission. I'd like to know the mean/mode/median of (karam/# submissions) for example.

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.

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.

A "change your password" feature.

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

:)

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.

I commissioned a Firefox extension to add a "Mark as read" button to news.yc: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=19816

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

fixed

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

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

fixed

10-15 lines would be nice.

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.

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.

a tool for admins to move feature-request submissions to comments here

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.

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.

#And a preview button couldn't hurt.

I would love markdown, when I rewrote my blog software I switched everything to use markdown. The worst part is that YC news does accept much of the markdown syntax... but then does different things with it. Humbug.

a small subset of markdown would be enough, namely blockquotes...

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.

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

At this point it's really difficult to sift through the noise on the feature request thread.

YC.news idea - category/tab for "our sites/startups"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29606

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).

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.

------------------------------------------------------------- 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.

-------------------------------------------------------------

news.yc doesn't validate its parameters properly, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479)foo

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.

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. :-)

They're all stored. More button for comments coming soon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

BTW, How to restore forgotten password? I didn't find that feature on the site.

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

Yup. For us hackers that don't live in the Valley or the Alley, it can be hard to find peers.

Detect and prevent someone from running through a user's threads down voting a lot of them in quick secession.

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

Create a syntax for referencing "items" within the site.

[item://363|Feature Requests] or similar.

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.

Bug/Misfeature: When I type the pound sign, it gets replaced with "GBP".

Can you put a page views number in front of each submission?

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.

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.

If you use Firefox, you'll enjoy the benefit of a spell checker built into all <textarea> boxes.

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.

Mark completed features as dead

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.

100% font size for body text, relative size for other text. A user should get his preferred font size set in the browser.

Use black text color for author comment text, the current gray is hard to read.

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?

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.

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?

On the profile page, break out the components of a user's karma.

How about a keyword based search.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

Can't locate a 'SEARCH in news' function.

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

+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.

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)

Undo-able votes, or an are-you-sure on votes-- accidentally downmodding random comments is unhappy.

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".

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".

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.

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.

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 ?

SEARCH

rss feed just for jobs

;-)

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. :-)

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.

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.

private messages to other users