Can I suggest changing the CSS units for fonts from points to pixels? That way HN will look the same on both Chrome and Firefox for me :)
On Chrome 10pt HN type is 12px on Firefox it's 13.3333px (Mac OS X).
Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
781–790 of 1001 posts
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#782Pushover support. Notifo is basically the same thing, but Pushover supports all platforms while Notifo has been "in development" with their other platforms for the last several months.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#783pg once lamented "comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
There have always been mean/dumb comments on HN, but in the past they were routinely downvoted to -4 and then ignored. The problem is that now, people have begun upvoting them, and there are more upvoters than downvoters. Thus, the reason this is a problem is a change in voting patterns, due to a shift in community makeup and expectations.
Partial solution: when a mean/dumb comment is killed by flags or moderators, send an automated warning to anyone who upvoted it and apply a token karma penalty. Increase in severity for repeat offenders -- from a larger karma penalty to no longer counting their votes to a hellban. This educates those who simply don't understand that mean/dumb comments don't belong here, and removes those who continue to intentionally violate guidelines.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#784When a submission is new and has no comments, the link to the discussion
page reads "discuss".
When a submission is active and has comments, the link to the discussion page reads "# comments" where the "#" is the number of comments.
After some period of time (yes, I know it's more complicated than just time), the comments on a submission are disabled. Of course, this is good, and it stops the stupid bot that always posts "This is why we can't have nice things."
The trouble is when comments are disabled, the various submission listing pages reads "comments" without the leading number. Since we're trained to expect seeing a leading number from active threads, the expectation when seeing just "comments" is that there are no comments at all. It would be better if closed submissions are marked "# closed" or better "# comments (closed)".
Although it seems you have a special exception for this "Feature Request" thread to allow submissions even though it's ancient, it still reads just "comments" without the leading number, and hence, we've got no clue how much reading we might have to do.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#785When all commenting is closed on a submission, all of the 'reply' links
are replaced with '----'.
It would be better to use '(closed)'.
When your anti-flamewar code kicks in to slow down posting by preventing replies, the 'reply' link is also replaced with '----'.
It would be better to use '(paused)' or '(wait)' or best of all, something more informative to describe what is going on. Simply not being able to reply to a post and the 'reply' link showing as '----' fails to instruct the user of the reason, so you're wasting a valuable opportunity to teach them something.
You could even replace the 'reply' link with a link to something else (instructions, guidelines, faq, ...) as well has have more descriptive text for the temporary anchor.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#786New visitor. Login page has no option to register for an account. Doesn't say anything about how to signup.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#787Whenever an article has a title text that ends with a question mark, automatically add a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines following it.
(Someone posts this on every such article anyway)
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#788After reading an interesting discussion's comments, I'll often close the window, do something else, and return to the discussion to read the new comments.
However, it is annoying to re-read the same comments I've already read. Sometimes I'll refresh a discussion 5+ times to see the new comments, and it's harder and harder to find where the new comments are located. I suggest that comments posted < 30 minutes before be marked somehow as "new", either through CSS or some visible indicator.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#789Make http://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin redirect to https://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin. Not to be overly facetious, but there's some irony to having an unsecured login form on a site called "Hacker News". :p
On a related note... any chance we can get confirmation on passwords being hashed/salted?
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#790Forgot password/username support. This is my 50th account, no joke.