Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator

Instead of a blanket filter for political (and other) terms, why not create a way to check if certain terms already exist on the front page and only apply penalties to posts that include these terms if the topic is already being discussed on the front page. This way when big political news happens you can still talk about it without it taking over the front page.

[dead] is currently used for both comments and new submissions. I often see [dead] comments that are perfectly worthwhile, but new submissions that are [dead] are completely useless. The link is removed, and they clutter up the new page.

If there were two different categories of [dead] - comments and submissions - we could show dead on one but not the other.

I would like it if HN could be divided into separate sub-topics, or have each submission tagged with a few topical tags, like "web development", "javascript", "compilers", "linux", "graphics", etc. For bonus points, allow HN to be customized for each user so that they can subscribe to their favorite topics, which then populate the front-page and /best page.

I find that keeping up with news on HN is essential to me learning new things and becoming more skilled in my field. However, HN caters to a wide variety of interests, and it is time-consuming to have to sift through a bunch of posts on topics that I'm not really interested in.

Please provide more tools to help users moderate their own comments. In particular, I think the following features are sorely needed:

1. The ability to delete your own comments indefinitely, instead of having a window of only a few hours within which to delete your own comments.

2. The ability to flag your own comments for moderation.

I suppose one possible reason for not allowing comment deletion after a certain amount of time is that it forces people to really only make high-quality comments, otherwise they'll be downvoted and they won't be able to do anything about it after a few hours.

But if you're trying to improve the quality of Hacker News threads with high-quality comments, then I argue that it's counter-productive to force low-quality comments to remain by not allowing users to self-delete them after `X` hours.

Both Reddit and Stack Overflow allow users to delete their own comments indefinitely. Heck, Stack Overflow even encourages you to delete your own comments, if they don't contribute useful information to a post.

I can't remember if this is in effect or not, but stories starting with "show hn" (case insensitive) should get a ranking boost. That would help more user created content get on the front page, which is a good thing IMO.