I feel I am building a new Google Wave

I hate to be that guy, but you called it a startup so...

What's the revenue model here? How's it going to make money?

Magnificent. Simply wonderful. This feels like a prototype for the future of forums. It's got its little UI flaws here and there but I understand why and almost all of them can be fixed easily. Very nice work. So much potential.

- There's no reason to have the scroll bar of the thread list on the left. Hiding it unless you hover directly over it is also not a good idea. It should appear when the mouse hovers anywhere over the entire thread list.

- I strongly hate non-browser-native scrolling (scroll by javascript in an effort to style the scroll bar using css and javascript). It never feels right, or fluid. There IS a way to hide the scrollbars until the mouse hovers over the element that requires scrolling. Example: http://www.repcmods.com (abandoned prototype) (hover over the horizontal galleries) It's all done using css :hover and no javascript. The element with the scrollbar is set to overflow:hidden and on :hover it's set to overflow-y:auto; It may or may not work for you. Fix everything else first before coming back to this one.

- It's missing some white space toward the bottom making it feel really cluttered down there. Give the #left_panel and #mid_panel elements a padding-top:12px; and give .xpadbox a margin of margin:0 24px 5px;

- Also give the element #mid a padding-top:9px; so its lined up correctly. You'll have to also move up the links on in the top right of the mid panel to match as well.

- When posting a reply, the "preview" and "post" links should really be buttons not just text and they should be on the left and the text "sign up to bump, Online: 1002 users, etc..." should be on the right.

- When I open up the setting tab in the threads list it needs to stay red so the user knows they need to click it again to close the settings.

- Get rid of the dashed border bottom between threads and posts. It's too visually intrusive. Change it from dashed to dotted, instead.

- Hiding controls under the whole "to top/toggle functions" bar is completely unnecessary. As a young designer I used to hide a lot of elements thinking it would look nice and minimal and clean. Later on I find out it's one of the worst things you can do to your users. Your design is already minimal, it's already clean, don't over do it. Just keep the elements there, don't hide them.

There's a lot of confusing UI here but that's the end of my free consultation.

I don't want to be misconstrued a "bad HN commenter", so I'll say first of all, technically amazing. Also, UX is consistent and aesthetically pleasing (though admittedly incomplete; lots of actions are unexplained... e.g. what's the difference between Focus and Shift).

Technical and design accolades aside, IMHO I would not call this an improvement on existing discussion forums. In Part 4 of his post "Building a Better Online Community", he implies that a major problem is the signal to noise ratio. This web app has not solved that problem.

The extremely low barrier to participation, while inline with privacy ethics and democratic ethics, unfortunately removes important incentives to creating quality content. It is however, successful at enhancing anonymity and removing the (burdensome?) requirement of identifying oneself.

Let's take a step back and re-assess what we're looking at. It's not an improved discussion forum, it's an improved chatroom app, plain and simple. And for that, I credit it with certain innovation.

I really would love it, especially if they add export mechanisms so I won't lose my data if they ever decide to die. Burned once already, unfortunately.

As a web-dev I see these kinds of comments a lot.

There is a simple solution: Step 1) Upgrade your browser. Step 2) Enable JavaScript.

You can't strip down your browsers functionality and expect the web to conform to it. Thats like saying this website won't load on my potato! EVIL EVIL potato haters!