If news.ycombinator.com is running on php, then the following code can be used to convert into links:

$Insert_Message = eregi_replace('(((f|ht){1}tp://)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.,~#?&//=]+)','<a href="\\1" target="_blank">\\1</a>', $Insert_Message); $Insert_Message = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])(www.[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.,~#?&//=]+)','\\1<a href="http://\\2" target="_blank">\\2</a>', $Insert_Message); $Insert_Message = eregi_replace('([_\.0-9a-z-]+@([0-9a-z][0-9a-z-]+\.)+[a-z]{2,3})','<a href="mailto:\\1" target="_blank">\\1</a>', $Insert_Message);

I hope that helps :) - Jawad Shuaib