One really cool thing about Usenet readers (like slrn) back in the day, was that you could write your own scoring rules for comments to sort and filter conversations.

I will probably go as far as saying that no web based forum has come even close to producing a online group discussion UX as good as what Usenet readers used to have.

Bring your own ranking with an SQL input in the profile! /s

Hmmm, maybe no "/s"? That sounds really cool, especially if users can explore each other's custom feeds. HN admins would get some useful stats on popular feeds. Hackers get to hack...

Would be an interesting experiment, maybe they've tried it before?

Well the /s is for security implications as well as performance.

You can imagine someone writing a clever query to extract hashed passwords or something from different tables. Also with the amount of traffic HN gets the front page is probably cached - running a query for every single request sounds expensive.

It would be very cool if possible tho.

I wonder if one could express a complex ranking algorithm in, say, yaml

Or maybe send the entire list of links of the day to the client and sort it using JavaScript provided by the user

Doing it client-side could actually work.