
The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad - pg
http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/slider/13sentences
======
pg
I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since
Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play
them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad.
Now I'm going to write all of them on it.

Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications
of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in classes
where students write papers, because now you can finally "show your work" in
writing the way you do in math.

~~~
jodrellblank
_I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back_

You often talk about releasing early, building something people want, etc.
Since you carry a lot of influence, and (I guess) invest in Etherpad, and
they've adjusted it to your personal request - do you worry that this effect
might give you a distorted view of how well Etherpad specifically, and YC
startups generally, are building what people want?

~~~
swombat
Convincing someone of something you believe in and abusing your influence are
two very different things.

I don't think pg implied that he bullied them into implementing this, only
that he talked them into it. And I can't imagine that YC would last long if pg
got into the habit of bullying its start-ups into implementing his personal
requests.

~~~
wmeredith
I think it would last an even shorter amount of time if he never talked anyone
in the YC program into anything.

------
ivankirigin
This is so hot. I'm really blown away.

It's also really interesting to watch a good writer go about editing. This is
certainly a way to teach writing, besides the obvious method of practice.

~~~
there
i'd love to see how a piece of legislation gets written with something like
this.

~~~
tlb
"To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the
making."

    
    
      -- Otto von Bismarck.

~~~
cpach
That's a great quote. Seems like the original version is by John Godfrey Saxe
though, and reads "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion
as we know how they are made."

Source: [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/magazine/27wwwl-
guestsafir...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/magazine/27wwwl-
guestsafire-t.html)

------
gojomo
I'd been kicking around the idea of doing something like this in Javascript
for a while. My working title was 'TimeWriter', but I never got beyond some
notes on delta formats and UI, and discussions with friends.

There's lots more potential in the graphical dimension: sliders, text
color/weight that varies with age/volatility; timelines of activity (gross
keystrokes or net adds/deletes) that go by either keystroke-time or clock-
time.

Also an interesting thing to think about: how to build an efficient text index
that can find any word or phrase that was ever present, even momentarily (or
as the prefix of another word mid-typing) -- and plot its positions and
lifespans.

Of course with smallish works just replaying every tick and grepping every
frame could work. However, my initial inspiration for the TimeWriter idea was
hosting an indefinitely lengthy personal journal. Each day, you could edit
with abandon, knowing that instant search could find any fragmentary thought
(and surrounding context) you'd ever jotted. The freedom of a clean sheet of
paper, whenever necessary, with the confidence of perpetual perfect recall,
when desired.

~~~
eru
I would pay for a black board with history.

------
jasonkester
Thanks for that. I built this same thing into Twiddla (to replay meetings),
but never released it because I didn't like the interface.

I had always assumed that nobody would get it unless I built a silly little
mp3/cd player timeline with sliders and buttons. This changed my mind. Simple
works just fine. Gimme a couple days and I'll polish it up and throw it live.

Thanks again!

~~~
jasonkester
Followup: Done and launched.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496331>

------
jwb119
Great site. Interesting biz related side topic: Have sites like this trended
too far towards the policy of "no account required"?

This is a service I actually want to sign up for and I wasn't able to find a
sign up link after looking around for 30 seconds or so. Surely there would be
some benefit to EtherPad to have me sign up for an actual account and collect
data on me.. which in this case I am happy to have them do since they are
providing a solid service..

~~~
aaroniba
We're thinking of charging for having accounts.

~~~
kleevr
This might be a silly question, but could anyone recommend a solid resource on
case studies of _fairly_ recent startups?

...wait a second, a stupid detector is going off in my head, let me check
something real quick... (googles "founders at work")... well that's the one --
curiously I hadn't read it's synopsis before...

I would still be interested in further reading suggestions though if other
books come to mind.?

------
aak
What exactly about this makes it the most surprising thing you've seen in two
months?

~~~
pg
Being able to watch how I write. It's like seeing a photograph of oneself for
the first time. I had no idea how often I restarted sentences, for example.

There's other stuff I want to see that should be even more interesting. When
it's replaying, I want to be able to see characters that make it into the
final version in one color, and others in another. Then I'll be able to tell
when I'm writing well and when I'm writing badly.

~~~
blackguardx
I tend to frequently restart sentences as well. I have found that pushing
myself to quickly get an extremely rough draft down makes me more efficient.
This rough draft helps me focus my thoughts in the beginning on what I want to
say. I can come back later and change how I say it.

If I don't do this--and I frequently don't--I find my output grinds to a halt
with my brain both creating and editing sentences at the same time.

What are your thoughts on this?

~~~
andyjenn
I do something similar; get a first draft out quickly so I'm not inhibited by
grammar, sentence structure, logical flow etc.. then perform a second parse to
tighten everything up. Interestingly, I sometimes find I almost completely
reverse the passage I've written! It's as if my brain performs some sort of
initial stackdump to convey my thoughts.

------
utnick
i thought about doing something like this in javascript for the comment or
feedback boxes on websites, so you could see what people really think

This web site sucks and you are a
moron\b\b\b\b\\\b\b\b\b\b\\\b\b...\b\b\b\b\b\\\bb\bGood day sir, I can't seem
to find how to cancel my account. Thank you and I hope you are having a
pleasant evening.

------
dcurtis
This is interesting to watch. I notice you type something, you delete it, and
then type something different quite a bit. When you write on paper, how do you
deal with this constant deletion?

~~~
pg
I think more before writing when it's on paper. The medium has more friction.
But I haven't written anything for publication on paper since 1991, when I
finished writing _On Lisp_ on a stack of legal pads.

~~~
Xichekolas
You wrote an _entire book_ on legal pads?!

I mean, I guess people wrote books before there were computers, so I shouldn't
be that surprised, but I just realized I can't imagine writing anything longer
than a couple pages on paper.

I remember arguing with English teachers in middle school that I thought
better while typing. They insisted that I hand write my rough draft anyway,
and I hated it.

~~~
shader
J. K. Rowling did most of her draft work on lined paper:

"There is only one thing that annoys me about living in Edinburgh - well, two,
but I'm pretty much resigned to the weather now. Why is it so difficult to buy
paper in the middle of town? What is a writer who likes to write longhand
supposed to do when she hits her stride and then realises, to her horror, that
she has covered every bit of blank paper in her bag? Forty-five minutes it
took me, this morning, to find somewhere that would sell me some normal, lined
paper. And there's a university here! What do the students use? Don't tell me
laptops, it makes me feel like something out of the eighteenth century." -J.
K. Rowling

Source: <http://www.writerswrite.com/wblog.php?wblog=410061>

According to Wikipedia, she did the manuscript for Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's stone on a manual typewriter.

------
jfarmer
What does the [xfs] annotation mean? I like seeing how other people write. :)

Edit: Nevermind. I see they're the references at the bottom! Why xfs and xtc?

~~~
pg
I try to use strings of chars that don't naturally occur in English so I can
find them by searching.

------
dfranke
I might implement an emacs minor mode that does this.

~~~
shimon
You're probably thinking of an emacs mode that does this on its own, but it
would also be excellent to have an emacs minor mode that integrates with
Etherpad. Ideally, you just do M-x etherpad-buffer and emacs tells you a URL
that you can then send around and let other people watch / co-edit whatever
you're editing in emacs.

To make this work, Etherpad would need to provide an API, though not
necessarily a well-documented one. A supported API might make sense for
Etherpad, though. Imagine being able to load a Wordpress plugin that enables
playback of your blog posts. Or something that lets you co-author blog posts
on etherpad. Oh, and greasemonkey scripts that let you co-edit any elements in
a web form. OK... let's not get ahead of ourselves...

~~~
yters
Even without an API he could probably hack something with lynx and term-mode.

~~~
kulkarnic
Not so sure; if I'm not mistaken Lynx javascript support is rudimentary (if
not non-existent). Doing Comet on that would be somewhat challenging, I guess.

An API to etherpad would realy help, IMO.

------
eisenkr
A few years ago I stumbled on a wonderful art project where people used a
similar technique to record world class poets as they wrote for 15 minutes.
The site is still live at <http://quickmuse.com/> if you want to see a poet
laureate or two write poems. Robert Pinsky's poems are particularly
fascinating to watch because he never makes a single edit or mistake.

------
rokhayakebe
Etherpad technology marks the Beginning of the End of comment spamming,
although that is not what it is intended for.

~~~
anatoly
Wouldn't that penalize people who write comments in their editor, then copy-
paste into the comment box?

~~~
rokhayakebe
Wow. Who does that? I do not mean this in a sarcastic manner, but this is the
first time I hear of it.

~~~
anatoly
Many people. There's even a moderately popular firefox plugin to automate the
process (the name escapes me) - it invokes your editor for you, then when you
save and exit it copies the temp file into the textarea.

------
ananthrk
As others have mentioned - a great experience to _watch_ PG writing essays.
However, I was put off by the speed. Is this because PG was typing so fast or
is it the player? Is it possible to control the speed (other than the
Prev/Next link at the top)?

~~~
pg
It's the player. Controllable speed is high on the feature list.

~~~
ananthrk
Great! Good luck to the team.

------
sofal
I'm self-critical enough as it is just realizing that someone else is going to
read the finished product, let alone everything I wrote before exposing it. I
would have a hard time letting my thoughts flow.

In addition, for school papers I would type in sarcastic or snarky sentences
just for fun about what I really think of the subject matter or whatever book
I was forced to write an essay for at the time. Sometimes I'd go so far that I
would save a different copy of the paper just so that I could go back and
laugh at it years later.

It looks like a great way to gain insight into how you or someone else writes,
but I think it should always be opt-in.

------
julianz
Interesting - this is exactly how journal recovery used to work on VMS. I
remember watching my mother edit documents in the MASS-11
(<http://www.stanq.com/blog/?p=11>) word processor on a VT-100 terminal. If
her session fell off she'd ring an operator and he'd play her session back on
the screen; it looked exactly like this!

------
YuriNiyazov
how long did that take in real time?

~~~
pg
It's so hard to guess. I remember it taking about 3 days, but not working all
day. I know there were 5400 half-second intervals when I typed at least one
keystroke (that's what the numbers at the top mean).

~~~
briancooley
It would be really interesting to see timestamps, particularly in longer
works.

Two reasons: 1) You could see when the Eureka! moments occur. 2) To easily get
a real measure of how long it really takes to write.

I have a real problem with 2), both with underestimating how long it will take
to do things I think will be easy to write, and overestimating things I think
will be hard. Of course, there's a lot more to writing than typing, but it
could provide important information that is tedious to track at a high level
and impossible to track at the level of granularity that this app could.

------
youngnh
I'd like to see this applied as an embeddable feature in hacker news. see who
writes comments, which comments get commented on and what people really have
to say before they hit that 'add comment' button

------
simplegeek
This is very cool stuff. I wish it had existed before. One small wish/request:
can we have a slider that we can use to control the speed? I'm guessing that
would be very helpful.

------
CaptainR
This is really amazing. It's interesting to watch you experiment with many PG-
esque phrasings before settling on the final one, especially in the
introduction.

------
niels_olson
I'm in love. This is like seeing conversations in GMail for the first time. Of
course you should be able to do this. I want this function everywhere.

------
boredguy8
There's huge potential here, especially if there's some sort of even imperfect
high-level 'glomming'. How often have you written a clever turn of phrase, an
insightful paragraph, or a poignant witticism, gone back and removed it to fix
flow, and then re-wrote it, not getting the phrasing quite right?

The ability to fix those types of changes, or to revert back to a paragraph
"somewhere in the middle" would be huge.

------
quizbiz
An incredible website. Finally I have found the motivation I need to write my
IB Extended Essay (days before it is due).

How do you get the play back link though?

~~~
pg
For now they just hacked together something custom for me. However, Etherpad
saves every keystroke, so once they enable this for everyone, you'll be able
to replay stuff you wrote with it.

~~~
quizbiz
Incredible. I was talking about my teacher about how a transition away from
paper to tech is great and all but we have lost the sense of keeping drafts.
Drafts have a very high value. I don't know how you are connected with the
folks @ Etherpad but if there is anyway I can help, let me know.

------
andreyf
Would be interesting to see the same for code, with a high-level AST
representation, and with different coders shown in different colors.

------
martian
A similar project for sending email has existed for a few years, created by
the MIT media lab. Check it out at <http://www.fuzzmail.org/>

------
wenbert
This is amazing. I can't wait to have syntax highlighting for code. I am
imagining this as a "live"/"real-time" paste2.org

This would make collaboration much faster.

------
jodrellblank
You make so many spelling mistakes (compared to making none, not compared to
me), would a good autocorrect save you enough effort to be worth it?

------
dulbelajardul
I have been dreaming of all this stuff, unfortunately i don't have skill for
this. Thank you God someone made this happen

------
vidar
It might be helpful to get some visuals on time lapses, e.g. breaks and
perhaps multi-day sessions.

------
biohacker42
This is great, I would love the same for Emacs and coding, I'd love to see how
great hackers code.

------
keefe
it would be awesome to be able to specify a rate of change as changes/second
or something

------
dnaquin
Cute use of a Lisp comment as a temporary placeholder towards the end.

------
TobiasCassell
Spectacular! Reminds me of of Le Mystere Picasso eh, PG?

------
mynameishere
Eh. Welcome to the past. The copious version changes to Beethoven's 9th have
always been available, for instance. Pen and paper and scratch-marks...

