If you have ideas on how to improve the front page, a great thing to do is to send them to hn@ycombinator.com. Dan and Nick are super responsive, and you might be able to have a more productive conversation in email than on a thread.

Posting it here helps accumulating other people upvotes, which, presumably, Dan and Nick can see on their end. It also opens subject to a wider discussion, which is hardly a bad thing. Meta threads are pretty damn useful if you ask me.

I agree, and I actually like the meta-threads, but I've had much more success talking to Dan privately than I have in trying to motivate changes with public comments. I think if you're really serious about a suggestion, mailing Dan is the right way to go.

If there's one consistent thing I've read from Dan in his tenure of publicly moderating the site, it's "please mail hn@ycombinator.com about this stuff". I'm just heading him off here. :)

Would two columns be too messy? Left one is top, right one is new?

Honestly though, having 20 green new stories at the bottom of the front page would be great and would increase my interaction with the site.

This is a great suggestion. Or the bottom 5 are newest or something like that.

I check the front page a couple of times a day but don't take the time to go any further.

This.

I use HN only for the front page and I occasionally upvote or downvote comments. I'd be totally willing to have one link from the /newest in a different color on the front-page and if it's good I would upvote it. The action could be a bit more explicit [Keep on front-page?]

> Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.

Love this suggestion. +1