What features would you like to see being added to Hacker News?

9 points by hidden-spyder 4 years ago | 14 comments

vmoore 4 years ago |

Currently it's perfect. No bloat. Works and does one thing well. One thing I've always wanted though: a 'rising' page like Reddit's that surfaces posts that are just getting popular, and haven't graced the main page, and are being discussed despite not reaching the main page.

hidden-spyder 4 years ago | |

Have you considered emailing @dang with this feature request on hn@ycombinator.com?

logicalmonster 4 years ago |

I would like to see a section where a list of Moderated/Dead/Flagged posts and comments can be seen and commented on. I think this would serve as a sort of "checks and balances" on censorship to provide one central place to see what exactly is removed and hidden from the main view and allow some interesting discussions to continue. This feature would also allow people to know what kind of spam topics are being pushed here by fake accounts: if you saw a lot of posts that are promoting some bad actor social media site for example, you might know to be more wary about posts discussing it in the future. Anybody who didn't want to view this section could easily not click on it.

gardenfelder 4 years ago |

A graph, a topic map which ties together related posts, detects duplicates automatically. Each URL is a topic, but is typically about one or more other topics. Simple NLP can detect those topics (NERs) and link them to URLs. Disambiguation will be problematic until neural nets are trained to reduce that.

gradschool 4 years ago |

I'd like it to cache the top stories, statically render them server-side if they need javascript (looking at you, gitlab), and serve them ad-filtered without geo-blocking or tor-blocking.

mac3n 4 years ago |

Search without enabling javascript. There's no need for that. In fact, everything without javascript.

cc101 4 years ago |

An option to hide my reputation points.

hidden-spyder 4 years ago | |

Not sure if this helps, but there's many userstyles you can apply to hide reputation points.

potiuper 4 years ago | |

That account has less than 500 points. So, better not vote for that comment to prevent it from getting down vote priviledges. That account already has over 500 points and the comment is already at the top. So do not bother voting for it.

krapp 4 years ago |

I want them to update the API so I can more easily add the features I want to my personal client.

hidden-spyder 4 years ago | |

Can you elaborate more? I want to how you'd want them to update the API to suit your needs.

krapp 4 years ago | | |

You can't currently get a thread from a single request, you can only request a single item, and build a thread item by item. At the very least it would be nice to get an entire thread as an array of ids the way you can with pages.

But mostly, I want to be able to query - get all ids for a thread since a timestamp, or all ids matching a domain, or filter out certain users or ids with less than 2 karma, filter out certain fields, etc. Firebase supports queries, and I wish the API did too.

I can accomplish this myself by just dumping everything into a DB, web scraping, using the Algolia API which does some of this but is rate limited, but I just wish the API did it.

helph67 4 years ago |

Message tags to enable searches to be performed by categories.