[adrianwaj]

A way to see a HN profile while staying on an item.

Elaborating:

A small popup can appear upon selecting someone's HN username on a thread to then show their profile information. Selection would involve holding the left mouse button down on the user name for more than 1.5 seconds, and then the popup would appear with bio, member since, and karma. When the mouse button is released, the popup disappears.

The profile page may need to be parsed to extract information before displaying. It could also be cached client side with HTML5.

As an extra nuance, if the mouse is moved away from the username, the left button can be released but the popup remains activated and a little 'close' is inserted (and the submission and comment links appear). This allows the user to click on any links in the popup, as well as the submission and comment links.

In effect, the popup operates much like on Twitter when the mouse is moved over a username in the timeline, but in a more controlled fashion where it doesn't appear automatically upon mouseover.