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Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

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101–110 of 160 posts

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#102
post #30

Any chance we can have collapsible comments without a greasemonkey script, or bookmarklet?

Official word is that it'll be the "only major change to the Hacker News UI that we're committed to"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297695

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#103
post #76

When are you going to fix the mobile css? Surely that'd take about 4 minutes.

Not 5? :) This is what happens when we try 4-minute fixes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205733 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9206427 . We've been working on a more thorough solution since then. I've posted about it many times, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10104936 , and no one will be more relieved when those days are over. I just hope everyone doesn't still disagree and propose more…

I just hope everyone doesn't still disagree and propose more 4-minute fixes forever.

In the infamous words of Lily Tomlin, Oh, dang, that's so cute.

https://youtu.be/ZIOogEaO3Hc?t=1m18s

;-)

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, please. Managing your tabs is not the site's job, it's yours or your browser's, such as you choose to split that labor. In most modern browsers, manually opening a new tab simply means middle-clicking or Ctrl+left-clicking instead of regular clicking. And if you really want it to automatically apply to all HN links, that's a great use case for a userscript.

In application design, external links tend to open in a new tab (see Facebook, Twitter, etc...) It's been a standard on the web for almost a decade now.

My feelings are mixed on this.

On FB, I'm usually glad that links open in a new tab (well, I middle click them anyway, but sometimes I forget) because if they didn't, I'd have the huge problem of trying to infinite scroll my way back to where I was.

On just some random business website, OTOH, I usually take it to mean the business owner (or developer) thought their site was so important, it should make me keep it open while I go to another link.

I usually middle-click on HN anyway, but I feel like it's sort of nicer in a way, to be in control of that. Maybe HN feels like more of a page than an application to me because it doesn't use infinite scroll / a ton of custom Javascript behavior?

I'm inclined to agree that web _applications_ should open external links in a new tab, but I'm not sure it's best for HN.

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#105
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(But it isn't fixed for the cases where bad boys and girls submitted job ads as regular stories. That would require a job ad recognizer.)

Are those penalised (perhaps on a submitter basis)? A separate flagging feature (jobs ad) might help? Or just plain flagging.

When job ads appear as regular stories, users should certainly flag them, whether they're by YC companies or not.

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#106
post #28
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case I'm not sure I get it. Care to explain in more detail?

I was referring to the new "past" functionality running automatically on the submit form, on focus change for example.

Ok, I get it now. HN is extremely light on the Ajax, so it would be a major design change at that level. If we decide to take that step, implementing this feature would be reasonable. But we probably wouldn't do it for one feature.

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#107
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize people did that! I only checked my own company (vanity!) – I hope we're not guilty of this, if so, I'll raise hell :)

They do it without meaning to. People building startups don't always have time to re-learn the intricacies of HN.

Yeah, it's always good to assume good faith :)

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#108
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like this idea from a historical preservation perspective. HN comments contain a lot of a value in aggregate, and it would be a shame to lose necessary context to exploit this value due to simple link-rot. However, I can see issues arising with paywalled links. The HN cache would likely display a rather useless paywall for many of the most popular stories. Navigating around the paywall by technical means may…

What do you think about HN auto-submitting to archive.org? Archive.org does follow some rules (e.g. robots.txt and passwords as you mentioned), so not everything would be guaranteed. It could be a good start for a lot of the content here, though. EDIT: Forgot to add that I'm not sure how much it'd help with sites going down from the HN attention. I could easily see archive.org moving a bit slower than HN's users.

> HN auto-submitting to archive.org

Can you describe this in more detail?

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#109
post #8
post #6

Very good improvements, thanks. I think the dupe detection would be even more useful if done during submission.

The dupe detection software, of course, does run during submission. Clicking on a search link is something that humans have to do, though. That's for catching duplicates that escape simple URL matching. Writing software to identify which URLs are really about the same thing and which URLs are not is a nontrivial problem. I'd love to work on solving that in the general-enough case to be useful for HN, but we shouldn't…

Please don't make the dupe detector "too perfect". Fact is good content sometimes doesn't get noticed first time it is submitted.

It is common for re-submissions (sometimes with a better title) a few hours or days later to make the the top of the front page.

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