On a related tangent, why have all instances of "submissions" on HN been replaced with "stories"? It's an change which IMO does not fit the usage. (A Show HN wouldn't make sense as a "story.")

Request: Feature 5 most-popular-by-day is almost exactly what I've wanted for a long time, except in RSS form - a feed that updates once per day with the top 30 stories from the previous day in the order of most time on front page. None of the external HN-specific RSS generators do it quite right.

Great stuff, overall -- thanks!

I'm also happy you guys are stealing all the best stuff from Reddit and leaving the other stuff behind. Great set of new features!

And final thought on the stories/submissions vs comments the challenge is that comment is both a verb and a noun, you comment, and you can read a comment. Whereas stories is always a noun. Submission is the correct name for something submitted.

>>> 5. Find out which stories were the most popular on HN on a given day by visiting /front?day=yyyy-mm-dd. You'll see all the front page stories for that day, sorted by how much time they spent there. For example, Alan Kay's AMA had the most front page time on June 20: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-06-20

That's cool, I guess, but algolia <https://hn.algolia.com/> seems like a much better tool for the task.

The one feature I can't believe I lived without that the HN Enhancement Suite chrome extension provides, is highlighting unread comments since your last visit. It actually makes it worthwhile revisiting e.g. a 200 comment thread when there are now 300 comments without just reading all the same comments again and being unable to spot the new ones.

If it became supported cross device by HN itself I would be very grateful.

The new collapse button is at the end of the comment. This means that the collapse button's position on the page changes based on username length and duration wording (hours Vs. minutes, etc).

One nice thing about other websites which I won't name, is that you can read and collapse all of the top comments without having to "seek" the collapse button constantly. You can literally scroll and collapse as you read, it is always in the same spot.

The functionality is most welcomed, and I'd take this design over not having it. But it could be slightly better with a subtle design change.

1. The time-capsule feature is really cool. Traveling back in time to see what sort of tech people were building / what other things were on the front page when X popular product launched is going to be so much fun. Update: it only goes back about a year and a half. See below.

2. Undoing votes has also been something I've wanted for a long time. I've accidentally downvoted/upvoted more times than I'd like to count when using my phone.

3. I currently use a bookmarking service to keep track of posts I want to save on HN, but native favoriting is much better. :)

Also, welcome, Scott!

--

Edit: I tried to view the front page [1] on the day I launched Breakup Notifier [2] ~5 years ago, but I get an error message. Is there any way you HN wizards can add the ability to go back further in time?

> We don't have this data before 2014-11-11.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-02-21

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2243650

Look at a submission, decide whether to just ignore it, upvote it, flag it as spam or open a tab and leave a comment or to watch it for later.

Then 'hide' the submission. Like that you can easily keep track of what you've seen and what still needs to be looked at.

You could use the same method for the homepage.

It's a super useful feature.

Thanks Dan & Scott!

1. The up/down arrows after a vote leave behind a clickable void. That means you can still click that void after you have voted. If you changed the visibility on .votelinks instead of the buttons this would get fixed. Though even better UX would be to have togglable up/down buttons ala stackoverflow and others.

2. Why not provide the favourite link directly on the comment instead of forcing an extra click and page load. If it's a UI clutter issue maybe consider adding star and flag UNICODE characters. Again, having togglable icons for the same would be nice.

3. The collapse icon would be better off on the left for improved UI consistency.

EDIT: UNICODE characters don't show in comment. Is this a bug? They show in the textarea while composing the comment.

EDIT2: Add the following User CSS using your preferred browser addon for a bit of cleanup.

    .togg {
      float: left;
      margin-right: 5px;
    }

    .votearrow {
      margin-bottom: 10px;
    }

The most impressive thing to me is that this feature exists and yet HN seems to have kept its good ol' fashioned <table>-layout. Obviously, it logically follows that it is perfectly possible to write a script to traverse a hierarchy of nested-<tables>, just as it's possible to recreate the Apollo guidance software in Brainfuck...but it's still impressive nonetheless.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...

If you collapse a comment in a thread it also collapses when viewing the comments page on a user's profile, and visually it is very hard to spot when collapsed on that page due to the styling.

For example, open the below link[0], collapse this comment, then refresh the link. The comment becomes quite hard to spot on that page. The red/orange star or vote button is also strangely missing while collapsed, which further makes it visually hard to distinguish.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Someone1234

There is a CSRF vulnerability in the "favorite" feature.

A very quick demo, Visit this URL: https://jsfiddle.net/o9hw1u75/embedded/result/

Now visit your favs from your profile and you'll notice that "SQL Injection" post is automatically added your fav list. Just like upvote system fav needs to be protected against CSRF.

Well, that's true of collapsed comment threads as well, and I somehow doubt that logged-in users are the only ones who see things on the front page they'd rather not.

> why have all instances of "submissions" on HN been replaced with "stories"

Because posts to HN are either stories or comments? Happy to discuss this at [email protected] if you want to apply some lexicographical fine points.

Unvote links last for an hour. This is because the main use of voting data is to rank posts, and that's time sensitive. If we let people go back and unvote after hours have gone by (let alone years), that would be rewriting history, or counterfactually messing with it.

Even an hour is arguably too long. Since the main purpose of this feature is to correct misclicks and over-hasty impulses, a few minutes would probably be enough.

The spacing above the username at the top of the comment shouldn’t change when a thread is collapsed.

Comments are submitted, too, though, so the word 'submission' seems oddly ambiguous to me. Also, I doubt I've ever anyone say 'submission' in conversation. People say "story" or "post" and of those two only "story" is unambiguous.

(But I'm happy to change it back if people feel strongly about this! It's an amusing lesson in how you can't change things without being noticed.)

i'm also confused, wasn't there already a "saved" section where upvoted items went previously? seems like all which was done was renamed a few items (and added the favorite which allows marking for later, without giving a vote)

Tested undo upvote, worked.

Tested downvote, worked.

My testing is complete.

Until HN has a good mobile theme by default, I'd prefer collapse and voting buttons to be well separated from one another.

I understand HN likes to keep things limited, which has been a real benefit to the overall UX on HN. But minimalism is often something that requires more time to get right, rather than just the result of having spent less time working on it. I feel like that might have been the issue here.

Then later I changed my mind because really, it deserved a downvote.

Anger passed and facing the consequences of my actions I was nothing but a broken man. I brought back equilibrium and removed that downvote.

This is when I realized that the timing was perfect for a self-centered comment.

What I'd like to see is a control that takes advantage of this right-side position of the collapse button to add something like the following, perhaps only visible on rollover:

  [-] all

    @-moz-document url-prefix(https://news.ycombinator.com/) {
      td { vertical-align: top }
      td > img { background: repeating-linear-gradient(to right, rgba(0,0,0,0), rgba(0,0,0,0) 38px, rgba(0,0,0,0.3) 38px, rgba(0,0,0,0.3) 40px); margin-top: 4px; height: 12px!important; }
      div.votearrow { padding-bottom: 3px; background: url('http://localhost/uparrow.png') !important; background-size: 12px 20px !important; width: 12px!important;}
    }

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

  // ==UserScript==
  // @name        move_collapse_link
  // @namespace   com.kludgecode.hn.demo
  // @include     https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675
  // @version     1
  // @grant       none
  // @run-at      document-end
  // ==/UserScript==

  window.$destination =  document.getElementsByClassName('comtr');
  window.$source = document.getElementsByClassName('togg');

  for (var i = 0; i < $source.length; i++) {
    var row = $destination[i].getElementsByTagName('tr')[0];
    var cell = row.insertCell(0);
    row.children[0].appendChild($source[i]);
  }

Re #2: yes, clutter (icons don't solve the clutter problem, and HN's design is emphatically textual), plus there should be a bit of a speed bump before favoriting much as there is before flagging.

http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/