How about a way to see all the up votes and down votes for a comment. I would be intrigued to see if there are any comments with low points but only because they were somehow controversial.
I'm not trying to be sensationalist but it might be interesting to see the most controversial comments on a kind of leader board format.
Maybe themes would emerge to show big dividing lines in the way that the audience here thinks about problems.
Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
471–480 of 1001 posts
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#472A character counter for the title input box when submitting links since you're limited to less than 80 chars.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#473Could you please use "monospace" instead of "Courier" for inputs in "http://ycombinator.com/news.css? It looks terrible on Windows.
And it would look just as nice on other platforms.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#474Every time someone asks for a search function here, someone answers with http://searchyc.com. This is a perfectly valid answer, but you should rather ask yourselves, why are people constantly asking for that? Because you don't have a "search" link in the HN header, e.g. right next to "new". It'd be fine if it'd just point to searchyc.com.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#475I'd like alternate lines in the list to be slightly lighter, like (very) old-school computer paper, so it's easier to see the grouping.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#476We have the ability to save topics. (I'm still not sure how this works, or how I can un-save.) It would be great to also be able to save comments.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#477add GitHub to the list of sites that have subdomains expanded. Some people blog from theirusername.github.com, and it would be a lot more obvious that it's a blog post, not code, if you showed the subdomain.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#478The "saved" page is slow and doesn't always load. Sometimes it just returns a blank white page.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#479A way to see what's new in a thread since I last visited it: with the threading it's impossible to see what's new on a big thread.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#480Resource lists for Hackers. This would fit nicely next to "submit" above.
Over the last few days, I've looked for music/white noise that people listen to while coding, and this kind of discussion pops up now and again. It pisses off people who've commented on the older discussion, and possibly disenfranchises newer readers who see all the negativity on the repeat thread.
Net result: it's difficult to get a nice, complete list.
What's needed is a list of books/music/white noise sources/software tools/hardware/useful websites divided by topic/[insert stereotypical geeky obsession here] that people can upvote and comment their favourite.
My suggestion would be to scrape the past discussions on these topics and let the readers sort out the jumbled data, as a start. Crowdsourcing one of the brainiest audiences on the web, bound to work out.
Bonus for Paul Graham's wallet: more book sales.