Dang those are some nice features! :-) I really really love the collapse feature. Does the collapse persist across new comments being added or are those not collapsed? We'll have to see.
And final thought on the stories/submissions vs comments the challenge is that comment is both a verb and a noun, you comment, and you can read a comment. Whereas stories is always a noun. Submission is the correct name for something submitted.
Collapses persist even if new comments are added underneath them, though the number of comments in the tree (e.g. '[+4]') will update.
Comments are submitted, too, though, so the word 'submission' seems oddly ambiguous to me. Also, I doubt I've ever anyone say 'submission' in conversation. People say "story" or "post" and of those two only "story" is unambiguous.
(But I'm happy to change it back if people feel strongly about this! It's an amusing lesson in how you can't change things without being noticed.)
Posts is an interesting alternative. It has the same verb/noun flexibility as comments. But really it is minor, I wondered what 'stories' was but quickly realized it was things that I had submitted. So I think you should keep what ever you feel is best.
Given that you know "when" a thread was collapsed and you know when a given comment was added, there is data available to compute "new since you collapsed it" but I recognize that would an interesting challenge. So you keep the comments in a list, and the list can be internally sorted in date or karma order, then sorting by date you could splice it at the date it was collapsed and compute the length of the two lists (pre-collapse and post-collapse). I have no idea how useful that is, just collapsing huge threads (especially ones that wander off topic) is such a huge win.
I agree with Chuck, by the way. "stories" is much less clear than "submitted". Perhaps in the theme of verbose clarity, "submitted stories" would be a good label?
yeah collapse is nice, but curious what will happen on collapsed thread which is added to...
i'm also confused, wasn't there already a "saved" section where upvoted items went previously? seems like all which was done was renamed a few items (and added the favorite which allows marking for later, without giving a vote)
The old 'saved' list still exists, but has been renamed to 'upvoted' because that is a more precise name. That list is private—we certainly don't want to publish users' votes.
The new 'favorites' list is for highlighting the best stories and comments you see on HN. That list is shared, because want people to browse each other's favorites. The idea is to help disseminate more of the amazing content that people post to Hacker News, much (most?) of which is only seen by a few readers. And I hope that for dedicated HN users it will be fun to curate your own list of highlights, plus see what others have on theirs.
Also if the most-favorited stories and comments turn out to be interesting, we'll publish those lists.
And final thought on the stories/submissions vs comments the challenge is that comment is both a verb and a noun, you comment, and you can read a comment. Whereas stories is always a noun. Submission is the correct name for something submitted.