A "HN Labs" style concept would be amazing. I know it probably goes against the HN mentality, but a gmail style label system would be so useful. "Javascript", "Press", "Databasing" etc.

That'd be quite cool: Allow users to create javascript plugins for the site. Could have a karma minimum limit to be listed as a list of "labs" plugins.

People could tackle things like layout, sort, hide/show karma, display an iFrame of the content, etc.

But the security implications would probably be completely unacceptable. Ah well.

You already can create JS plugins for HN with Greasemonkey.

I have one which currently:

  - hides links based on domain (like techcrunch.com)
  - hides links based on words appearing in the title (like gogaruco)
  - highlights names of known posters and adds a string describing them ("somenick" becomes "somenick: Firstname Lastname (Companyname)")
  - makes comment boxes bigger
  - adds a margin at the bottom

It's pretty easy to do, really.

Yeah, but I use Safari. There's GreaseKit, which I have installed, but I've had little success getting it to work with regular GreaseMonkey scripts.

Is it available somewhere?

I cleaned it up a bit (removed names, etc) and uploaded it here: http://lexandera.com/public/hackernews.user.js

There's a configuration section at the top which you need to customize.

Cool! Thanks!

There are several GM scripts for this site:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=hacker+news&x=0&...

But as you suggest, karma limitations would mitigate security issues. Updates could also be reviewed and controlled by moderators.

I only suggest this because quite often you see websites (like the above) popping up on externally hosted servers, when they could potentially integrate into HN.

Pretty cool! Any way to make it remember my sort order (just a cookie or something?). If I sort, then click a site (rather than open a new tab) and go back it will have forgotten my order. Not a big issue but could be nice, especially for those that might want the same sort order each time they visit.

I think a site that was submitted here about a month ago has almost the same features except that they fetch news from everywhere, not just HN and order them based on several interesting scores like "popular", "controversial", etc. They call it <a href="http://www.euraeka.com>All the news that's fit to read</a>. Pretty bold claim:-) From what I can see on their site, when you register you can "save" your sorting preferences (click on Advanced at the top of the site) and the site also allows you to filter by topic and domain. I am personally using it for their recommendations system. Truth be told, all news sites are really just a portal so you can find what's interesting to you. Once a system is trained on recommending you what you like, then all the sorting, scoring, mashing up, etc becomes pointless. That's goal really of every information providing site - customize the information flow to every user to the point that every user sees a unique version of the site based on their unique preferences. So, while I like the sortable HN concept ultimately it needs to be extended to a personalized recommendation news system in order to be truly useful. Euraeka and Google News are two sites that I like, Digg's recommendations frankly suck in my opinion. Good luck to you though, good stuff.

Is there any way to get a "raw HN feed"? I imagine there are a number of interesting hacks which could be made given real-time access to a stream of submissions and votes.

Yeah I used Dapper.net to scrape the homepage and have it return an XML result set. Here's the Dap: http://www.dapper.net/dapp-howto-use.php?dappName=HNhomepage You can have it output JSON, RSS, XML, whatever...

sean

Yeah, but that (a) requires scraping, and (b) only gives you the vote totals. Given a raw feed far more interesting things could be done -- say, figuring out which people tend to like the same stories as you.

I wonder how many people are running bots on HN to correct some 'perceived' shortcoming of the site.

The fact that people like to read HN in different ways isn't due to shortcomings in HN -- it's simply an inevitable result of the fact that HN has a large and non-homogeneous readership, and thus any one way to view HN will not satisfy everybody.

So, the lack of configurability would then count as a shortcoming ?

Maybe services like HN should be built up around an API where the default website is just one way to use the site.

Everybody that is capable of doing so can then roll their own.

This is interesting. I have been thinking along the lines of sort/filter considering the massive volume of good stuff that goes through this site.

http://cin-o-matic.com/on-video.php has a fantastic filtering system for movies. Some of these things could be incorporated into hnsort.

Instead of a selectable "by-field" comparison, can we have a "formula" box at the top that lets us write our own comparison function? I think that'd be a lot more fun for us here to play with—we might start trying to optimize it ;)

Very handy! Nice work, Sean. I like being able to quickly jump to threads with high comment counts.

"Address Not Found"

yeah, opendns alerts it too.

bummer - apparently my hosting provider had a DNS outage last night that cut the site down in its prime while it was on the homepage of HN. It's back up now.