Show HN: Submit your ideas for improving HN
hnwishlist.com
hnwishlist.com
("Implement a real name policy")
Seriously? Why does anyone think this is a good idea? Can't we just stomp this one out for good?
I really miss noms de guerre. It saddens me that we moved away from handles and pseudoanonymity being a default.
Says the guy using his real name.
Did I miss something? I can't find any username policy in HN's guidelines.
The policy, then, is completely implicit: you can have any valid username which may or may not reflect your own name.
Oh, and you can't change them after the fact. As far as I know. That would be a nice feature...
Here's a good place to start:
UNKNOWN OR EXPIRED LINK
C'mon, this is 2013... paging dynamic results shouldn't be an issue.
What makes HN great does lie with us, but I strongly disagree that it's also the greatest opportunity for improvement.
And, of course, people should be more willing to contact each other outside of comments for whatever reason. I've had some very interesting, protracted side conversations from HN and they've all been great. That's also how I've met some very interesting people and seen some very interesting companies.
EDIT: Oh hey, reading through your linked post, it seems you have that exact point there, and I was just paraphrasing you. As you can guess, I agree with it wholeheartedly :P.
The sign in box seems to break Firefox's ability to save the username and password.
When signed in, the "Change password", "My Account", and "Sign out" buttons have three different clashing visual styles.
Please consider adding downvotes; for instance, I'd like to downvote ideas like http://hnwishlist.com/posts/ae15555a-f3c1-43f3-8a80-cef2a22e... or http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893f...
Also, a little more far-fetched: if you don't mind doing a bit of page-scraping, you might consider letting people link hnwishlist accounts to their HN account. Just have a profile field for an HN account, and let people prove their ownership of an account by putting something like "hnwishlist username: $NAME" in their profile temporarily. Then you could do things like offering upvotes and downvotes using the same karma thresholds as HN.
It could be like killing two birds with one stone actually, because making it mobile friendly quite likely would make it friendlier for non-mobile uses too.
So what's the argument of the site? "Hey PG, we know you're busy funding startups and stuff, but we're mildly inconvenienced by some UX decisions you've made with that experimental site you run on the side, and were hoping that you could take the time to implement these seemingly-minor features that've been discussed on HN for years. In exchange our happiness while using the site will be somewhat increased, and we will instead whine about HN's lack of modern CSS and Twitter Bootstrappiness and what have you."?
You seem angry at something that HNWishlist isn't trying to be at all.
My suggestion is singular: Let posts be tagged for startups, and bootstrapping, so I can filter everything else out.
I'm happy to geek on my own time but what I come here is for startup content and less interesting/novelty stuff.
I, for one, am very much in favor of it. I'd love to be able to filter out topics I don't find interesting. It would also effectively address a lot of griping about supposedly off-topic submissions.
If you're looking to seed your site with other ideas there are many existing add-ons and clients and etc.
Searching Github for ["hacker news"] returns something like 700 hits. Obviously, most of those are not relevant, but different searches for ["hacker news" client] or ["hacker news" extensions] return over 100 projects where people have implemented features that they feel improve HN.
The Chrome webstore, and the Firefox add-ons page, also have many projects that people feel improve HN.
There's also the userscripts site, and userstyles site, also having many changes to HN.
I'm sure it would be easier to convince Reddit to let subreddits behave like HN than trying to keep HN up to date with the modern world.
Just my two cents.
YC folks will post to whatever is considered the de rigeur nerd/startup news site, which over the last couple of years has become HN - having migrated from reddit (and slashdot, before).
There will be another one, in due time.
I think it'll instead be something built from the ground up specifically for this community that serves its needs better than HN currently does.
That being said, as someone who's working on this very thing I can say that developing a "Better HN" is far from easy…
If you want another example, just look at Discourse (http://discourse.org). I think it took them one year with a 5 or 6-people team to get there, and I didn't see anybody jumping ship from HN to a Discourse implementation yet.
If it's working "really well", why do you care about the fact that its implementation is a kludge? It seems like we already have a good-enough solution.
There's also the simple problem of discoverability. I never knew about hnnotify until now, since it's not part of the main site.