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Comment by genedangelo | Hacker News Reader

Wow! I appreciate all the interest and feedback - quite unexpected. I'm glad I found HN. I'll try to add more responses tomorrow.

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(I'm a moderator here. Welcome to HN!) Because you're likely to get a flood of comments and questions overnight, I've switched an alpha feature on for your account that will highlight new comments that have appeared since you last viewed the page. They'll show up with a colored bar to the left of the comment. The feature doesn't work perfectly yet, but hopefully it'll help you keep track of what's been posted since you last looked. Note that the colored bars will disappear each time you refresh the page.

Good luck and thanks for a great post!

(Anyone else who'd like this alpha feature turned on for their account is welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to.)

I haven't been able to find the colored bar, maybe because of refreshes, but let me suggest you use something that is searchable. That way you could use CTRL-F and then jump from one to the next. Right now, I'm searching for " min" (note the space) to find the most recent posts, and "1 hour", "2 hour" etc. to find older ones.

That's on the list to add.

how about a checkbox in the profile for people willing to test new features? i bet you'll find a number of volunteers.

i am definetly interested in this one. i often search for timestamps to find newer comments. color markers would make that a lot easier.

Have you considered implementing accessibility for this feature before it goes live for all? Screen reader users cannot see colored bars, and need a different indication of the fact a comment is new. I can give suggestions if needed.

Yes. If you'd be willing to email hn@ycombinator.com this would help me keep track.

Is there a feature request subsite for HN? I’ve seen this implemented really well on other sites[1] in ways that don’t detract from the main site focus or functionality.

[1] https://nolt.io

No affiliation, I just use a site which uses this to provide functionality suggestions. I don’t see why this kind of functionality can’t be bootstrapped from existing HN code.

As a rather young person in the field, I'd love to hear your thoughts on any question you feel the motivation to answer. Your learned wisdom is appreciated by all of us young bucks!

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