Ask HN: edit history for HN comments?
5 comments
I'll edit comments to clarify as long as there are no replies to it, and I'll edit them for grammar / typos after that. Any additions after replies have been added get marked with an 'EDIT' as seems to be common practice here.
English being my second language I just about always find a way to put my foot i my mouth the first time and I don't want to leave a trail of garbage behind :)
Part of the cause of this I suspect is the terribly small input form. If it is an attempt at enforcing brevity then it fails miserably but it certainly serves well to lose the overview of what you are writing.
I'm not sure if 'one size fits all' with this, I like your idea of a history but I suspect that it is computationally quite expensive to do.
Keep in mind that HN does not run off a regular webserver but on 'arc', which keeps just about everything in memory. And that adds up with the volume of traffic that it is receiving.
English being my second language I just about always find a way to put my foot i my mouth the first time and I don't want to leave a trail of garbage behind :)
Part of the cause of this I suspect is the terribly small input form. If it is an attempt at enforcing brevity then it fails miserably but it certainly serves well to lose the overview of what you are writing.
I'm not sure if 'one size fits all' with this, I like your idea of a history but I suspect that it is computationally quite expensive to do.
Keep in mind that HN does not run off a regular webserver but on 'arc', which keeps just about everything in memory. And that adds up with the volume of traffic that it is receiving.
You can resize it with a bookmarklet like: http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/FormTextResizer/
clever! thank you!
Still, it wouldn't be too much work to change arc to give us something a little nicer by default.
Still, it wouldn't be too much work to change arc to give us something a little nicer by default.
This too should probably go in the feature requests thread.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
That said, I silently make little edits for typos or expansions with more outlinks to add content to my post. If I think I'm making a new point, or refining a first point, I try to remember to post
AFTER EDIT:
before the new content on my post, especially if people have already voted on the post or already replied to it. But I probably make human-error mistakes and don't always carry out that intention perfectly.
Quoting the post to which you reply can help make clear what you are replying to.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
That said, I silently make little edits for typos or expansions with more outlinks to add content to my post. If I think I'm making a new point, or refining a first point, I try to remember to post
AFTER EDIT:
before the new content on my post, especially if people have already voted on the post or already replied to it. But I probably make human-error mistakes and don't always carry out that intention perfectly.
Quoting the post to which you reply can help make clear what you are replying to.
On one hand, I hate the fact that comments can be edited after they're replied to, because the whole context can be changed.
On the other hand, I'll often edit comments rapidfire for about 45 seconds to a minute after I submit to clarify or clean up grammar. It would kill me if the remnants of my sloppy editing were stuck there forever. I suppose I should just use the delay setting.
Either way, I don't know if it's that huge a deal. Miscommunciation happens; there's no reason we can't give people the benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, I'll often edit comments rapidfire for about 45 seconds to a minute after I submit to clarify or clean up grammar. It would kill me if the remnants of my sloppy editing were stuck there forever. I suppose I should just use the delay setting.
Either way, I don't know if it's that huge a deal. Miscommunciation happens; there's no reason we can't give people the benefit of the doubt.
I do the same thing with the rapid edits.
In your profile, the 'delay' setting prevents your comment from showing to others for N minutes, so you can do this without anyone noticing. Mine is set to 2.
In your profile, the 'delay' setting prevents your comment from showing to others for N minutes, so you can do this without anyone noticing. Mine is set to 2.
I'm glad you mentioned that 'delay' is in minutes. For some reason, I thought it was in seconds and I had set mine to 30 right after I posted.
FWIW, the max effective value is 10.
More info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024
More info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to be able to edit a comment that has a reply
[deleted]
I know there is a timelimit on editing, which limits the scope of historical revisioning.
Would adding a history of edits to a given comment make egregious revisions less likely?