[atombender]

I think comment notifications is sufficiently core that it should be an official feature.

Letting the community solve thing externally to HN is well and good, but results in exactly this situation, where a lot of users relied on one user's system when it was abruptly taken offline.

It provided a convenience that, in my case, significantly improved my HN experience (and others', too, since it kept certain conversations alive that otherwise would have faded earlier), an improvement which was then equally subtracted when the service disappeared.

I'd love HN to be community-extensible, though. Current browser extensions are great (I use this [1], which adds thread collapsing and highlights unread comments), but need to be maintained across browsers and typically don't work on mobile.

A better solution would be to allow users to add scripts to their account, which could then be copied into a static location (so the author can't change the code to something disruptive) and inserted into the page body. Then a nice little ecosystem could grow where users shared useful extensions.

As an example of a personal need currenty unfulfilled: I recognize a few HN names, but most I just forget. Each thread is full of anonymous people who I've surely read, and maybe replied to, before. It'd be wonderful to get something (Gravatar icons, expand to full name, unique colorization, "previously replied to person" or "previously upvoted" indicator) for each name to make them easier to remember and recognize, even within a single thread. It's also be great to show company names next to user names.

[1] http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions

[glifchits]

I agree with pretty much all that you're saying (I like the hosted scripts idea a lot). However, I can't help but wonder whether HN should care about all this. Does the lack of these features (which, I argue, is about convenience) really hurt the community? Or is it a filter such that only high-quality users will be motivated to trudge on through all the inconvenience?

Given that HN is (probably?) not a revenue source for YC, these kinds of feature wishlists have very different implications, and the relationship between YC and HN users is very different than it would be for reddit/online communities.

[lobster_johnson]

As someone who uses HN every day, I would say that usability concerns are as valid for HN as they are for any other site.

Whether it's a priority for YC, well — considering the lo-fi implementation (not sure if it's a myth or if Paul Graham truly intended this as a strategy to avoid attracting the great unwashed as some people have claimed), probably not.