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

I am pretty happy in my job. Could you make a feature so that I could filter out all posts with the words "investor, investment, retirement, rich, killer app" or any other story that concerns the adolescent wet dreams of lots of money and the coolest private jet EVVAH!, and rather let me focus on storys on technology?

I would like a mobile stylesheet (also for iPad) that has larger buttons. Especially the upvote button and meta-links.

Would it be possible to have some sort of way of highlighting user comments within an item? For example, if I wanted to read all of PG's comments on this page, I could do something like:

    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363&user=pg

This would give you some signification a comment was from pg; either a highlight or a box?

Truncated URLs may be longer than the original URL if they were just left alone.

The URL truncator will append three periods (not a &helip; character) to the end of a URL. In some cases (say for a URL of 62 characters), the last character will be removed and replaced with three periods. This increases the total size of the URL text to 64 characters.

The algorithm appears to be

    def truncate(word, postfix = '...')
      if ((word + postfix).length > 64)
        word = word[0, 64 - postfix.length] + postfix
      end
      word
    end

There doesn't seem to be a need to add the postfix length to the check. This should suffice:

    def truncate(word, postfix = '…')
      if (word.length > 64)
        word = word[0, 64 - postfix.length] + postfix
      end
      word
    end

I have a submission link to HN on a Website. I'd really like a way to show two pieces of information in that link:

1. whether or not the page has already been submitted to HN

2. how many comments, if any, have been made in HN discussion about the page

My preference would be for a way to add that information to the page dynamically when the page is first loaded, on the server side, so that no client-side scripting (i.e. JavaScript) is necessary. If for some reason it is decided that it must be done with JavaScript, though -- well, I guess beggars can't be choosers, as they say.

As far as I'm aware, no reasonable way of doing this exists right now (short of something complex like automatically searching HN and screen-scraping). I'd really appreciate an API for this kind of thing being added to HN (and reasonably well-documented) so that I can make use of it on a site written in Ruby (not Rails, mind you).