I'm curious to know why you're starting the code from scratch. I miss having a place to check on my own links, for instance, which I take for granted at HNN.
But kudos for getting it this far! I'll be reading it daily!
Edit for clarity: check my own comments. I swear, it's like I'm not paying attention at all sometimes.
Well, the latest version of HN I could find was a couple of years old and even tho I know a little bit of lisp, I didn't feel I could maintain/adapt the arc code that runs this beautiful website.
I decided to start from scratch and do it in python for the app engine, it was hard to get it to run smoothly(and I will still optimize some more to try to batch the RCPs for memcache and db).
Those features that you mentions will come in the next couple of weeks, right now I am going to concentrate on having some moderation tools and then i'll finish the profile and password recovery.
I figured that was about it. Well, consider my vote put in for a check-my-own-comments link. Maybe my Spanish will have gotten intelligible by that time! (It's about damn time there was a Spanish tech community I could sink my teeth into. I read Spanish at about 90% fluency, but my writing skills are abysmal.)