You could hack markdown support into the HN code base. It's open source. And once you've written it, you should have a decent chance of lobbying for its inclusion into the copy running news.ycombinator.com
Why would the austerity of current support hinder his lobbying efforts for his improved version? If compatibility is a problem, you can just run comments before flag day through the old code. Or write a converter.
You are thinking about HN as if it was just a piece of software. It isn't just a piece of software; it's also:
* an important piece of YC's infrastructure, so it doesn't have a normal dev team; some of the data going through HN is "hazmat".
* a demonstration of a new programming language Graham is ostensibly working on, which implies that doing things "the right way" is more important than on a typical project.
* in part a secret (the published HN code is not the code running on HN).
Comments
You could hack markdown support into the HN code base. It's open source. And once you've written it, you should have a decent chance of lobbying for its inclusion into the copy running news.ycombinator.com
He would have very little chance of getting that support included; HN's code is "markdown" in name only, and is hand-parsed.
Why would the austerity of current support hinder his lobbying efforts for his improved version? If compatibility is a problem, you can just run comments before flag day through the old code. Or write a converter.
You are thinking about HN as if it was just a piece of software. It isn't just a piece of software; it's also:
* an important piece of YC's infrastructure, so it doesn't have a normal dev team; some of the data going through HN is "hazmat".
* a demonstration of a new programming language Graham is ostensibly working on, which implies that doing things "the right way" is more important than on a typical project.
* in part a secret (the published HN code is not the code running on HN).
Since it only supports emphasis, paragraphs and auto-recognizing links it's clearly not even remotely close to markdown, even in name.