There are minor things that would make Hacker News better.<p>- Use AJAX to update the homepage and comments in real-time, while highlighting articles and comments that are new. This could be a toggle.<p>- Allow marking articles as read without clicking on them. (imitating :visited)<p>- Auto-notify when someone replies to your submission or comment.<p>- Perhaps a way to follow a user and receive updates to their submissions and comments.<p>- Allow collapsing comment trees.<p>I'm not suggesting to transform HN into a full-blown social site. These features could be implemented with minimal presentation. (an icon here and there)<p>I get the feeling HN is feature locked and they just defer improvements to 3rd party apps.
I get the feeling that the people who code it make good product decision such as: is the investment in engineering resource worth the payoff?<p>If traffic trends are any indication people are perfectly happy with HN just the way it is.