Hacker News Reader

Comment by dependenttypes | Hacker News Reader

It would be probably be more respectful if you would not mess with my posts, now even I do not know who made said comment. Guess I should start signing my posts and keep backups of them.

People sometimes have important personal reasons for deleting things but this does not mean anything. It is not as if "x posted y on twitter and deleted it afterwards" or "the page was edited/deleted, here is an archive.org link" is uncommon on HN, nor it is as if a stalker would not be able to scrap HN posts of someone instantly as they were posted.

> it disappears.

In my experience they show as [deleted] but I guess this is only for posts that have replies.

View on HN

Obviously it's rare for us to intervene in a comment that way (and never without letting them know), but in this case it was the lesser evil compared to compromising another user's privacy. Copying what they posted along with their username is basically overriding their deletion, and that was their choice to make, not yours.

I'm sure it wasn't that big a deal and I'm sure your intentions were good, but I'm also pretty sure most HN users would want us to protect them in this way, if only for the rare occasion on which it actually is a big deal.

> In my experience they show as [deleted] but I guess this is only for posts that have replies.

Kind of. Technically, posts that have replies can't be deleted, so what sometimes happens is the poster edits their post and replaces all the text with "[deleted]".

>Technically, posts that have replies can't be deleted, so what sometimes happens is the poster edits their post and replaces all the text with "[deleted]".

Which should also be prohibited, because it's just as destructive. You shouldn't be able to edit a post with replies either.

I don't know, if my posts were locked after the first reply, my contributions to HN would be definitively worse. I almost always find confusing typos and grammar errors, and things that just could have been stated better, after initially posting a comment, and I use edits to fix those problems.

Yes, ideally I would just do more revising before posting a comment the first time, but I don't seem to work that way.

I think the two-hour window is a good compromise, and if anything I really wish it was longer. Yes it has downsides, but I really think they're outweighed by the good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com