I love Hacker News. It quickly became my #1 favorite site in 2010. But, I really <i>hate</i> that stories don't open in a new tab. I click on a link to read a story, then close the tab when I'm done--forgetting Hacker News is click back. This leaves me having to open a new tab to come back to HN. This happens a few times a day. It's just not good.<p>Hacker News, can you make offsite links open in a new tabs? Please?
I generally hate having sites "decide" this for me. This is almost certainly a personal preference.<p>When I use Atomic on the iPad I set it to open off-site links in new tabs. Yet on my desktop, I never do. This is a setting in various browsers.
When you click a link, it opens in the current tab.<p>When you middle-click a link, it opens in a new tab (in the background).<p>I HATE sites that go against this, and decide for me where to open the link. Especially since Chrome has an outstanding bug where middle-clicking links with target attributes opens then in a new <i>foreground</i> tab. So annoying.
I agree with others that this doesn't make sense to become a default. However, it doesn't mean that's your only option. <a href="http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/57563" rel="nofollow">http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/57563</a> looks like it might do the trick (although I haven't tried it). If not, it shouldn't be too difficult to create your own GreaseMonkey script and solve your problem.