Ask HN: How would you redesign HN?

Very very little.

I find it annoying when someone asks a question with no description and never comes back to clarify. Just an ambiguous question in a headline. Like (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27801976). No idea on the best solution…

I find the discovery of past content a bit rough. Specifically search is either always doing the most recent or the highest voted submissions: never a combination of the both (aka something like hotness). So if I search on “Python”, I can choose recent uninteresting low votes stuff or 10 year old highest voted stuff that’s out of date. What I really want is “most recent, interesting Python stuff”.

But please don’t touch much else, it’s probably the most useful website and community I’ve used anywhere!

Have the second chance pool[0] sort by number of comments, ascending, to keep posts with the fewest comments on top. Automatically remove items from the pool with greater than some arbitrary number of comments, since they've already gotten traction.

Don't display comments on the newcomments page beyond a certain comment depth (which inevitably stray from the context of the original article) or which have been downvoted. In other words, curate it a bit so it doesn't provide as much low-hanging fruit for snipers.

I really wish the API would get an update. It would be nice to be able to do queries by range or to get entire threads at a time.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

+1

Especially on threads with many comments (500+) with users being inside different timezones/activity rhythms or being subjected to time constraints as a reader.

Someone ought to make a Proof of Concept MVP because if a picture tells a thousand words , then just imagine what a moving picture with responsive bells and whistles can do ! [Queue foreshadowing Musical Score as we Fade to Black...]

TBH I think it’s very fit for its purpose.

It’s also like almost the only website I use that works fine on a crappy LTE connection.