I never even noticed that there was a search box until reading this.
Same here.
Same here. I'd put it on the right, just under the ID & "logout". That space is almost always unused.
if it makes you feel any better, it's quite new..maybe a couple weeks. PG posted about it at the time.
It is where it is because its new and not ready for prime time. It will probably be debugged for sometime before being placed in an obvious location. (This is of course a guess).
That's like asking why PG hard-coded table-based layouts into Arc. Or why PG's own paulgraham.com uses html markup that was deprecated many years ago.
Agreed. I never noticed it until I saw the post regarding the the api contest.
I'd just put it on /search and have a link in the header to it.
If your using Safari I made an extension (link in profile)
my guesses:
1. You want to force the user to read the page first.
2. It's not that important
Why would you want to force the user to read the page first?, if a user is specifically searching for something, why first read the page.
It seems to me that most HN users visit it regularly, and therefore new content is more important to them than search box. I like the box being on the bottom, it doesn't distract me. I think that putting it on the top would break simple aesthetics of HN main page.