+1. This is what I miss the most as HN becomes more popular and slants toward a karma-game of news submission.
I would also like to be able to submit a URL and description for readers who click on comments as a way to provide context and clarification around why I submitted a URL without having to post another comment. Adding a comment later doesn't guarantee it will be at the top unless everyone collectively votes it up which is hit or miss.
It doesn't seem to happen as much any more, but historically people used to post "rate my startup" posts without a url and just link to the start-up in the body of the text.
If people did that now it'd show up in the Ask section, so maybe we should return to that practice.
Sometimes I may not the have time to review something, and just want a quick click to see if it catches my interest. I think having a clickable link helps with click through.
I would like to note that I and 44 people that voted me up initially missed that the feature and code as written were for all self posts, not just for ask posts.
So far it looks like the feature is working perfectly; the vibrant discussions on self posts were one of the best things about the earlier days of Hacker News and Startup News.
A worthy feature for sure, but moving something that's been commonly used for years to squeeze something else in is a negative UI experience. The "threads" link is no longer where it used to be. I'd guess the earliest it should go would be before "jobs" as I doubt the average HN user clicks "jobs" or "submit" more than once a day (if that often), whereas "threads" is the way to a common activity.
Twitter did something like this when they added the new "retweet" feature. They pushed the "reply" link aside and put the "retweet" in its place. I had to write a Greasemonkey script to resolve this due to years of muscle memory built up on how it was.
I'm just testing this. (I literally just pasted it into the repl.) If it's super popular I'd consider adding it to the top bar. But it will be on http://news.ycombinator.com/lists at least.
It would seem to be vastly more useful then the "leaders" link that's currently at the top of the page. How many people (other than people actually on it and trying to climb the ranks) actually use that page ?
Wow, I literally just posted a comment in a separate thread about how much I value ASK HN posts. And half hour later I see this - assuming it's a coincidence, but either way, thank you, thank you, thank you.
EDIT: Just saw the other post and saw that this is not a coincidence. As I wrote there, your responsiveness to this community is truly impressive.
How are these ASK posts are ordered? by the Points, Comments or Time Based?
I have been using http://ask.searchyc.com/ for checking ASK related posts. They also have the feature of highlighting the post in BOLD font if the post is commented heavily.
For speed it skims the url-less posts out of the sorted list I keep for the frontpage, which needs to be made longer to be used for this as well. I just cranked up the length a bit; should be ok now.
This is a really nice addition to HN. Hopefully this will enable more peer-to-peer engagement around issues that are of interest to the HN community. I know I will be checking this page out on a regular basis to see what I might be able to add to the discussion, and what I might learn from the rest of the HN community.
Great, now just move all of these off the front page entirely, and we'll be good to go.
I know self-posts are algorithmically docked already, but I think I would prefer that HN was set up like StackOverflow where all meta-posts were cordoned off from the real stories.
I disagree. The ones that make the front page are often interesting and I use the front page as a filter to keep me from spending too much time on HN while at work (as I would bet a lot of other people do something similar as well).
I know you can treat the front page of the ask section the same way, but now its a filter of a much smaller set which means that "top 30" is not as good a filter (in addition to doubling the number of pages that are on a "front page").
I would think that its best to create disjoint sections only if people usually want to target one section or the other, which I don't think people do here (though if I'm wrong, I would agree with your idea).
A parallel feature for "rate my startup" posts would be useful; those self-posts also tend to get lost.