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Comment by hawktheslayer | Hacker News Reader

This point is particularly salient: "Either Comment Nowhere, or Comment Everywhere". It reminds me of people who highlight so much of the textbook that the unhighlighted words actually stand out.

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That is more like a paper version of the "I select text when I'm reading it" behavior rather than a way to signify importance. I know some people who rage-close websites if they can't select text.

> I know some people who rage-close websites if they can't select text.

I don’t even highlight as I read, but I would close such a page out of principle.

I have heard of that (select while reading) but it just seems so weird. It would slow me down to do that!

(I am sure the people who do it consider those who don't weird!)

I don't consider you weird! But I do do this. I have a large screen and a wandering mind, so it helps me keep my place and thus read faster than if I don't highlight.

I do it pretty often, in fact I was doing it as I was reading GPs comment and had a good chuckle. It started out as a way to differentiate which line I was on in dense text since I have some vision problems and it just sort of become a habit.

Anecdote time: I do this, and I know it's weird. You just have to look around to see that almost nobody else does it (and it drives people I'm around nuts with the constant clicking).

I think it started in like 1998 when I was a kid using ancient slow browsers on tiny fuzzy monitors over dialup speed internet. I'd be in the middle of reading an article/forum/etc and something would make me lose my place, like a picture (finally) loading above, or trying to scroll at 7 fps and the page jumping way past where I was (I never trusted pgdn), and it would be quite the chore to find my place again. So I started selecting around where I was reading, especially before scrolling, just so I can easily find my place again and it just became a habit.

Now I'm using a giant WQHD monitor at 144 Hz using the fastest page renderer in the world (webrender), so I really don't have those excuses anymore, yet the habit remains. At this point it's probably more ADD and habit than anything else; if I'm not selecting text, I'm fidgeting with something, a pen, usb drive, etc.

I think it's an ADD/ADHD thing.

Highlighting text as I read helps me out when I'm having trouble focusing on the page.

I have ADHD. Also selected the text while read the comments, never realized how often I do it until now.

I agree. Mine is mild, but having that hilight save the endpoint of my last thought for me to find when coming back to attention is hugely beneficial for me

I never really noticed that I do this. On paper books, I remember I didn't use a highlighter, but used to drag a pencil down the right margin, as I went through the page.

I always appreciate the line "//Incrementing i by 1"

Or the related "// going through each item (i) in the list (myList)"

Yeah, it's a foreach loop. I remember my keywords.

Just to add my own, I had a coworker who used to do:

# Set x to 1

x = 1

...not even kidding.

You could probably automate this and write a plug-in that that translates every line of code into plain English :)

I've been working on old SQL code written 10 years ago, and the original developer used comments as a way to track his to do list (e.g. --TO DO: fix this procedure). It's safe to say that stuff isn't going to get done.

Or comments written in the first person. "// We need to increment i by 1"

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