You can now favorite Hacker News posts and comments

If you hang out on Hacker News, a developer-oriented online discussion forum that was spun out of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator last year, then you probably can’t remember every single one of the threads that you thought were great. Sure, you can see what you’ve upvoted, but people upvote a lot of stuff. Today Hacker News is introducing a new favorite button on each post and comment that will add it to your collection of favorites.

To see your collection of favorites, you just click the favorites link on the top of any Hacker News page, or navigate to news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=, with your user handle at the end of the URL.

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The point is to let users “save and share the best stories and comments,” Hacker News moderator Daniel Gackle, who goes by the handle “dang,” wrote in a Hacker News post.

The favorite option can also work as a discovery tool, because your favorites are publicly visible — you can just click on a user’s account page and hit favorites. Oh, and by the way, you can hit the “un-favorite” link on posts and comments that you’ve favorited to take them off your list.

There are indeed other discussion boards for talking about software and hardware, but Hacker News is popular and consistently interesting, so changes matter. By embracing the concept of favorites, Hacker News is a little more in line with social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Twitter lets you see everything you’ve favorited liked at twitter.com/i/likes, and Facebook does the same thing with the Activity Log.

Hacker News is launching a few other site-wide updates today, too. Perhaps the most significant one other than the favorite option is the new “hide” button on the Hacker News homepage.

“On the front page and /newest, click ‘hide’ if you no longer want to see a story,” Gackle wrote. “The next story in the list will slide up at the bottom. If you change your mind, visit /hidden and click ‘unhide’. If you’re logged in, hidden stories persist for a week.” Also it’s now possible to collapse certain comments in threads. Like hidden posts, hidden comments won’t be shown for a week’s time.

And now when you’ve voted on posts, you’ll be able to click new “unvote” or “undown” buttons. And you can now see the top stories for a given day, ranked based on how much time they spent on the front page. Just go to news.ycombinator.com/front?day=yyyy-mm-dd, typing in a specific date in that format.