Ask HN: What do you want to be able to customize? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you want to be able to customize?

70 pointspg103 comments

In the future I plan to let people put code in their profiles to customize various aspects of HN for themselves. What would you like to be able to customize?

(Note: This may not happen especially soon, and at first the options will be very limited.)

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I'd like to be able to flag/mark a particular post so that I can continue to follow the comments that are being generated after it falls off of the front page. This would also help to parse "important" posts from those that have simply been visited. Along with this, it would be nice to be able to then unflag/unmark the post once I've followed it long enough. The unflagging could also be done automatically, after some period of time defined in my profile or per post.

The first part could theoretically be achieved via your "saved" list (anything you've up voted).

I.e., http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=naish

True, but I upvote articles based on value of the article content, not necessarily the comments. I'd like better granularity, especially since all of my submissions are also automatically added to my saved list.

Yes! Yes! Yes! I would get so much more out of the site if I could revisit some threads I'm interested in. I quickly forget when the post is no longer highlight as unvisited.

Maybe threads can be "floated" to the top of the page until they are "unwatched".

In fact, I'll probably forget about this thread by tomorrow -- a thread I'm very much interested in!

I usually make a point of commenting in threads that I'm interested in following, and so I just look at my own comments and then I know what I wanted to follow. Or maybe I actually am only really interested in the sound of my own voice, and the mere fact of my having commented in a thread makes it interesting. Whatever. Works for me.

How about using the bookmark feature of your web browser?

Why not just write down the url? I mean, that functionality already exists.

Why don't we just use carrier pigeons when our favorite message boards are down, too.

People don't always read HN from the same computer (and don't necessarily bother to keep bookmarks sync'ed between machines).

Not only that but if I do remember/find the threads I'm interested in, I'll definitely not remember which comments I've read already, so...

Wouldn't it be nice to also have the ability to highlight comments that are new since your last visit? That, or the ability to sort comments in chronological order (like in a forum).

I'd expand that to have 4 options: hide totally, hide but watch, watch, and normal.

Hide but watch will not show that story on the home page anymore, but will keep track of it for me so I can follow the comments.

Hide totally will remove it from the home page (just for me), so something else can go there.

Expire the flags, say, 3 days after the last comment in the story (rather than a fixed time).

And include a "view all" option of course.

Running corollary to that, I'd love to be able to set HN to give me some sort of alert on site whenever someone has responded to one of my comments/submissions.

There was a Firefox plugin that did this, but it's not 3.0 compatible.

Provide a notification, within the site or using the email address in my profile, when someone has replied to one of my comments. This could be turned on/off on a per comment basis by providing a checkbox along with the comment form or handled globally in my profile.

Or maybe just a little envelope icon like at reddit.

The thread system is nice to look at, but I think a place for direct replies would be incredibly useful for prolonging conversation.

Perhaps have a view for threads that lets you see only updated threads?

I know what I _don't_ want to be able to customize. What I can and can't see. Similar sites give the ability to block submissions or comments from a particular user. I think this is a horrible idea given the special nature of this community. The most defining aspect about Hacker News is its high quality. Any type of ignore feature is just going to take away from that. Just because you can't see the garbage doesn't mean it's not there. The flag feature is already sufficient; ignore functionality would be a huge mistake.

EDIT: I just had another thought. I also believe that any type of functionality that allows the categorization or filtering of topics would be bad, for the reason outlined above. If there are too many high quality stories that people need to filter or categorize them, the rate at which stories fall off the front page should be increased. Having too many high quality stories is a fantastic problem, but it should be solved by being more selective, not by filtering.

Why argue against a feature that you wouldn't have to use? I would appreciate the option to ignore certain users. In fact, you may eventually find it useful to ignore me and my future disagreements with your future anti-optional-feature advocacy.

Because it has an impact on the community as a whole, if you have the ability to not view submissions, you dont get to downmod them if they arent "in the spirit"

Look at loosely computer related obama articles, or techcrunch ones, they are inevitably posted and quite a lot of people dont like to see them. Given the ability to block them means they would receive less downvotes and make articles that a lot of people dont want to read, more likely to go on the frontpage. combine that with the impression of new users (who havent blocked anything) and its a cycle.

"Given the ability to block them means they would receive less downvotes and make articles that a lot of people dont want to read"

Errr ... downvote comments I understand, but downvote articles? It's unpossible! Personally, I'd like to be able to hide or filter articles I'm not interested in. User blocking, I would agree, is antisocial and not in the spirit of things.

You can't downmod submissions. And comment downmods already act as a filtering device by graying out the text of unpopular comments. I doubt many HN regulars would say that the site today suffers from a lack of comment downmods. Those who would choose these hypothetical filtering options would be choosing to passively consume HN as readers rather than as participants. Those who wished to remain active participants would be able to do so. This happens already, where a minority of "leaders" drive most participation and a silent majority consumes the site passively. The only difference would be that you'd be giving tools to the silent majority to make their experience more compelling by automating the filtering that they already do manually.

I want to "follow" people. Color user names a different color of those I care about.

Also, potentially add a bit of text next to those usernames (their startup/locale)

It might be cool to let start-up owners attribute their company to the comments. Maybe it's just from using Facebook a lot, but I really like seeing where a poster comes from - if, of course, they choose to reveal that information.

ability to show comments for a specific time period(10-20-30-60 minutes).

Right now in long threads when you go there a second time you pretty much have to read the whole thing over again. Granted you can use ctrl f and search for minutes to find the stuff made in the last hour, but its kinda ghetto

Or maybe flag new posts since your last visit, so you can scan a thread more quickly?

Maybe some sort of color scheme or lightening (e.g. downvoted comments) of the time stamp on the comments?

i.e. the longer the period since the comment was made, the lighter it appears? (Maybe a non-linear function related to the time the initial story was posted?)

There was quite a discussion about this some time ago.

Ask YC: How do you follow YC threads you enjoy?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396186

I'd like this too. Even when I do remember to come back to a thread and look for new comments. It's tough to find the ones I haven't read when the thread grows beyond a certain point.

I think you could solve this by changing the comments to sort by most recent rather than score. (edit: not permanently, but have a user option to choose how the comments are sorted)

Ability to style the page so that it's readable on an iPhone (without zooming and panning)

Sorry I haven't done that already. I should soon though, because I'm finally getting an iPhone.

About time!

It's actually really nice to surf on the iPhone, I hit up several sites on my phone when I'm out of the home/office.

But Y!Hacker isn't on the list because of that issue. Not sure how you are going to deal with it though, different style sheet for iPhone users?

Style sheet? What's that?

Wait. No way. Really?

checks source

Wow.

http://ycombinator.com/news.css

This is a good start... The iPhone defaults to a pretty large viewport which makes text small, and lots of zooming, scrolling. The meta above just tells it to not create such a large virtual screen.

Stylesheets (called CSS) are the ways of changing the way HTML is presented with a browser. The idea was that HTML would be for document mark-up, while CSS would be for how that mark-up would be formatted (although that idea isn't ever really followed).

You seem to have a news.css, though, so I guess you must've just missed the terminology? That's a stylesheet.

You can just create a separate one which will be used whenever the browser is the iPhone browser, and that would change the entire page such that it's easily viewable and usable on an iPhone. (Change the margins, the view-port, the font sizes, maybe colors if necessary, etc).

PieSquared, pg knows what a style sheet is. He was making a joke.

A HN classic. I hope Pie was also joking :)

Oops. Guess I should've made that clearer.

el O el.

http://www.icombinator.net

An unoffical iPhone mirror.

Going back to the roots, the I-combinator is especially easy to define in lambda calculus: \x -> x.

Specifically, I would like to be able to filter out TechCrunch, CodingHorror and ArsTechnica articles. I never learn anything from them. (the comments, on the other hand, are sometimes interesting - but I still would rather not have anything from those sites appearing for me).

More generally, the ability to filter out stuff I don't want to read about using a Regexp or a Scsh-style SRE in the Website URL would be great.

ArsTechnica really? They are usually right on with privacy, political-tech, RIAA and EFF related issues. TC and CodingHorror I could do without.

* Spacing between items. Vertical screen real estate is important.

* Show up and down votes. Provides information on contentious comments.

* Ability to mix brand-new and front-page items on the same page. For better scanning of new content.

* With the ability to show up and down votes comes the ability to quantify the contentiousness of entire threads. Show us the aggregate "variability" of voting in the title of a thread.

* Get people to vote more.

* Let us develop our own ranking metrics.

* More stories per page.

Show up and down votes. Provides information on contentious comments.

Agreed. And the further suggestion of showing contentiousness of entire threads would be informative (and help participants trying to avoid contentiousness learn how to avoid it).

(and help participants trying to avoid contentiousness learn how to avoid it)

That supposes that anyone wants to avoid contentious positions on the internet -- it is to laugh!

Just showing (+/-) vote totals is bad enough when it comes to the "king of the shitpile" problem (showdead is worse); showing both independently is pure troll fuel.

I wish there was a way to see WHO did the up and down voting, personally. I bet there would be far less piling on if everyone could see.

A reddit-style mail notification icon in the top left when somebody has replied to me.

Oh, and requiring hex numbers for color selection is a bit naff, but I suspect most people know where a decent color->hex tool lives.

* The ability to "hide" a story so that I don't see it on my page anymore.

* The option to auto-hide stories that I've upvoted

I'd like to be able to filter submissions, in particular to be able to block specific sites. As in, no TechCrunch links (hypothetically speaking ;)).

I've been wanting this feature for a while.

For what it's worth, I have a Yahoo Pipe that does this for me. The source is easily customizeble to suit your own site-blocking needs.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/brianseward/hackernews

I am probably just rephrasing your question. It looks like a lot of the suggested customizations (except things like ranking algorithms) can be coded on a site-wide basis and enabled/disabled on a per-user-basis by just selecting drop-down values or entering text in a box, without users putting a single line of code in their profiles. Just like noprocrast, topcolor etc. Additionally, a user code fragment that provides useful customization may also be useful to others (like a greasemonkey script). So, what exactly do you see a code fragment doing that would be unique to a user?

It would be nice to be able to view stories submitted within a given date-range (and possibly insert a false date into the decay algorithm), to generate an approximation of what was on the front page n days ago.

* user customizable keyboard shortcuts. I currently use GM script: http://www.acunote.com/files/acunote-shortcuts.user.js but something natively supported and configurable would be good

I think it might be interesting to see some sort of user-voted category system so that people who aren't interested in certain topics can filter them.

Conversely, if someone was more interested in one topic at any particular time (eg, depending on mood) they can instantly grab all topics in that category without having to trawl through the whole site.

But that's not really a personalised customisation thing.

Another thing might be the ability to grab someone's "about" box just by hovering the mouse over their username (when reading the comments on an article) - so you can get some more perspective on their point of view without necessarily leaving the page. That would be something I'd personally like to see.

I'd like to be able to save a story without voting it up. Sometimes I just want to read it later and I don't know if it's something I would actually vote up.

I'd also like to be able to collapse comment threads. (i.e. hide all of a comment's children)

also, maybe a "review my project" button for users over n karma? Clicking that allows them to submit a url and a description, and it gets submitted to a page similar to the jobs page.

* Ranking algorithm

* Following users' submissions/comments

* Filtering submissions

* Ignoring users' submissions/comments

On my threads page, I'd like it if threads with recent comments floated up. Right now it sorts strictly by the date I posted something.

I don't particularly want to customise.

I would like wide comments (e.g. containing <pre> text) to not force the whole page to be that wide.

I would like to be able to hide sub-threads if I do not find them interesting. (Whether this should be considered as voting down each individual comment I don't know.)

Actually, I wouldn't mind being able to choose between writing comments in markdown/textile/etc.

Pick any of these you like:

1) Ordering of articles by comment activity instead of votes

2) Ordering of articles by hits on a RegEx expression (which would persist between sessions for each user)

3) Listing of who's online now (reads/comments in the last 15 minutes or so)

4) Photos in the profiles

5) E-mail alerts when somebody responds to a comment I've made (for extra-cool points: allow email replies to auto-post)

It'd be nice if stories we've read leave the HN front page. display: hidden's fine, just less visual parsing.

I want this feature too and add ability to hide stories I'm not interested in but I've already seen on the front page.

I'd like to be able to change the gray text on the article itself as well as the visited link color. For some reason, when trying to read it I find myself highlighting it, to give a little contrast.

If this occurs after breaking a karmic threshold, I am sorry I did not know about it and disregard my request.

This isn't directly what you asked, but I'd like to be able to make a list in a comment.

Use the existing code (blank line, indented 2 spaces) and add: 1 space with a # does ordered list, and 1 space with a * does unordered list.

And please add white-space: pre-wrap; to the code blocks.

Some simple tagging and a way to add links to custom views on the top bar -- so I can have a view of all the "Review my Startup" submissions and the "YC Startup XXX launched today" submissions.

  (def customize-nav-bar
    (lambda ()
      (filtered-view 'Startups'
                     (lambda (submission)
                       (tagged-as 'startup'))
      (filtered-view 'YC Startups'
                     (lambda (submission)
                       (tagged-as 'YC startup'))
      (filtered-view 'Ask HN'
                     (lambda (submission)
                       (tagged-as 'Ask'))

Curious: Arc? Javascript? CSS?

What are the design and security implications?

Us hackers need to know these things :-)

Have the "comments" link text color, or something else, change to show that I've followed that "comments" link. I sometimes only look at the comments, and would like a reminder that I've done so.

Be able to "save" an item without upvoting it. Upon occasion, I want to do the former for personal interest but am not sure that upvoting serves the interests of the community. On the other hand, I can see where the current design may lessen fragmentation of interests and community focus.

I would like to be able to provide my customers and prospects a link to the threads where I have made a comment about their specific problem. They could see what I have had to say as well as the ensuing discussion of other competent people.

This could provide incredible value for all of us.

Very little I tell them would have as much impact as our discussions of their problems. I would love to use our "investment" here as an easy sales tool.

I'd quite like to be able to quote people via " > quote txt" please don't make it a clever "quote this post" button though, as then we'll just have everyone quoting entire posts.

flag/save a post? isn't that what bookmarks are for?

I would like to be able to hilight "friends" -- I made a greasemonkey script that people are welcome to use if they desire - http://is.gd/gXyh

I would like to be able to put avatars on the comments, probably through gravatar, which would also have the advantage of being able to recognise users through github

I mentioned it in another comment but to be able to access a users site without having to go through the profile would be nicer, in fact the ability to view the whole profile without opening a new tab / following a link

Some sort of geography bias setting. I know a lot of people here come from around the world, for example, I am in Hong Kong so anything remotely related to this region or startups in China I would like it to be more prominent for me.

This is probably only useful for posts that can be tied to a location and not general hacking posts.

I would like to save stories without upvoting them. It'd be even nicer to be able to bookmark individual comments.

I'd like the color of usernames to change depending on how many times I've up/down voted their comments & submissions. This way people I've liked a lot in the past will pop out at me as I scan through pages on the site.

A lot of good suggestions on this page; thanks for soliciting our input.

When submitting a new story, automatically add it to the "threads" tab.

I usually just click on threads to see if there was anything new since I last logged in, and this way everything will be in one place. Instead of having to search for the thing in the username > submissions

- the ability to ignore certain hostnames - option to follow submissions + comments of certain people on one page ala friendfeed - gmail label type customization to follow certain people

Though it might be too computationally intensive, I would like to be change the ranking algorithm by adding a factor to increase or decrease the weight of votes from particular users.

Customize the number of "reply comments" visible below each main comment. Or maybe, a widget to show or hide a comment tree (with the option to be hidden by default).

I'd like to change the background color on the pages, maybe the text and font too.

Maybe figure out a way to be able to comment on older articles and have them still be seen.

Gosh.. I know I posted a comment pertaining to this very question years back... If only I could find it now without doing a linear search backwards.

I always liked the slashdot-style friend/foe designations. Maybe automatically weigh friend's and foe's comments and submissions?

I want feeds and an API in s-expression format.

Feeds of what?

Feeds of comments would be nice.

How about submissions over a certain # of upvotes. That way you'd have your own custom "Best of"

You should hook in a disqus API (if it exists) or roll your own email notifications of a replies to comments.

You'll find people are more cordial when they are responding to a comment via email. It makes people think to be more professional.

That's a feed, but per instance, per user. More powerful, imho.

Backtype already gets of feed of my news.YC comments. I see them in friendfeed, but not the replies. You should talk to Paul Buchheit about SUP too http://code.google.com/p/simpleupdateprotocol/

An API would be great for HN since it would allow the community to do all of the sorts of things that it's interested in around rather than on HN. It'd be the ultimate meta-customization. :-)

Here's how I would break it down:

  - List of [top / newest] topics
    - Number of points
    - Time submitted
    - Sumitter
    - Upvote / downvote calls
    - List of comments
      - Submitter
      - Text
      - Points
      - Upvote / downvote calls
  - User
    - Description
    - Comments
    - Points

And then let the mashups flourish. It would seem fitting for HN. I'd be interested enough that I'd do a patch for such if there were a reasonable chance of it being integrated. I personally would really dig being able to see who upvoted what since that would let me do the magic that's my specialty and be able to organize top stories personally based on my a users upvoting patterns, but I suspect that might be undesirable for reason of keeping things anonymous.

Each domain name next to each article headline should be a link that allows you to view all of the articles from that domain.

How about allowing arbitrary javascript on the users profile page, such that each profile can be made as geeky as possible?

I would like an option to hide the scores of comments, since I find them distracting.

Data portability of my submissions and saved for easier slicing and dicing off-line.

The ability to put in your own ranking algorithm would be really neat.

I'd love to have a page only listing the Ask HN submissions...

Custom shortcuts on the top new/threads/comments/etc navbar

I want the option to choose between Serif and Sans-serif

Only see submissions from selected HN users.

my own bookmarking/tagging/searching facility.

Nothing

Automatically downmod people who don't have websites and e-mail addresses in their profiles. I subscribe to the greater internet fuckwad theory.

heh could have been worded in a nicer way, but I do agree

not automatic downmodding, but it would be nice to be able to have an indicator if a person has a website, and a way to go to it without going though the profile.

Some of us prefer to separate the things we say in our leisure time from the things we do at work.

It's trivial to find out who I am, but I know there are more than a few people here who prefer to have a separate "news.yc identity".

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