It's a useful addition, but it messes up the visual flow, making it hard to quickly scan the comments page. How about putting the title at the end of the line with the rest of the metadata. E.g.
3 points by pg 8 minutes ago | link | parent | source: Reinstate hystry's Hacker News
A 'source' or 'root' link would be useful when navigating comments also, to save having to click through each parent.
Perfect! I actually thought about doing it that way (root next to link | parent) while I was driving home. The only observation is that all of the Ask YC type discussions (not links to other sites) have news.ycombinator.com as the url (without the link to the specific conversation). Other than that, it's perfect (until the Arc customizations are released)!
"When one of the customer support people came to me with a report of a bug in the editor, I would load the code into the Lisp interpreter and log into the user's account. If I was able to reproduce the bug I'd get an actual break loop, telling me exactly what was going wrong. Often I could fix the code and release a fix right away. And when I say right away, I mean while the user was still on the phone.
Such fast turnaround on bug fixes put us into an impossibly tempting position. If we could catch and fix a bug while the user was still on the phone, it was very tempting for us to give the user the impression that they were imagining it. And so we sometimes (to their delight) had the customer support people tell the user to just try logging in again and see if they still had the problem.
And of course when the user logged back in they'd get the newly released version of the software with the bug fixed, and everything would work fine. I realize this was a bit sneaky of us, but it was also a lot of fun."
pg, I think the current implementation has a problem. Most of the time, "on:" links go to NYC comment pages, but when the comments were done replying to the posted article (and not to other comments), "on:" links go directly to the posted article / website. I think all links should go to the comment pages always, to keep the "on:" behavior coherent.
Thanks a lot for implementing this feature, that was fast!
Edit: this happens only on the "threads" page I think.
Much better! Just adding pagination means I don't have to worry about missing new comments if I crawl too infrequently.
But the crawler is almost entirely unnecessary now. If you could make it convenient (ie no reload) to show the ancestors of comments (the context of each conversation) that pretty much covers all the features I built.
I've been using the new /newcomments. One other thing I noticed that's missing: it's not stateful. There's no way for me to kill off some users/threads so I don't see them again. I think my query mechanisms were pretty elegant and lightweight. hystry permitted filtering conversations (rather than comments) involving specific people, and also easily blacklisting going-nowhere threads.
