Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197967 is correct: it means it's the most recent post by that user.

This is one of those things that pops into your head and takes 2 minutes to deploy, so I just did it. It was late last night and I forgot to not turn it on for everyone. Then I thought it would be fun to see what sort of discussion I'd wake up to.

Not sure whether to keep it. Advantage: it's a concise way of displaying some surprisingly useful information—useful to mods, at least, but I think maybe also to readers.

Disadvantage: it's obscure. The inconsistency will drive some people nuts. We'll have "Ask HN: Why do some times on HN have a full stop at the end?" threads for the rest of our lives. (No one reads the FAQ. The FAQ, you say? Why yes, at the bottom of every HN page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html...)

It also leaks when a user posted something later and deleted it. We could fix that, but as so often in software, it would make the thing way more complicated. So I'll probably just drop it.

Edit: dropping it.

The reason I noticed this feature is that it adds a pause when I'm reading through the HN front page with my screen reader. I don't really care either way, but it did make for a jarring change to the rhythm I'm used to when listening to that page.

I find these kinds of terse shorthand features valuable: they allow for a richer experience for users who care enough about HN to make the effort to understand the features that lie beyond the basic stuff, and for those who don't, they're basically invisible.

I think perhaps something to consider would be a `title` attribute on a span surrounding the full stop which says something like "most recent comment by this user", so that someone who mouses over the dot can get more information about what it means (thus hopefully avoiding the Ask HN threads)

I forgot to not turn it on for everyone

This makes me think you have a lot of moderation tools like this. Is there any way you could discuss the kinds of tools moderators have that most users don't see? It would be interesting to read about, though I guess it also would increase the chance of gaming the system...

Yes, the moderation tools have developed a lot over the years. I have a Chrome extension written in Arc (it has gone through a number of Lispy incarnations over the years, but we implemented an Arc-to-JS transpiler to get the last version and it works nicely). I rely on it heavily to navigate around the site. Eventually I'd like to open-source it and/or make it an option for any user to wants to load that JS to do so.

You use Chrome? Not judging (I use it too), but it was good to know given the pro-FF community here.

I use both, but at the time I first wrote this software it was easiest to make it be a Chrome extension. This was long before FF adopted Chrome's extensions API. It's on my list to see if I can get it running in FF but, like most things on that list, it never seems to get too close to the top.

I don't prefer this feature to remain for end users (those who are not mods). If someone wants to know the most recent post by a user, they can visit their profile and find it. I do not see value in making that easier, and for a reason I cannot explain well, it also triggers a sense of exposing someone's habits, behavior, etc.

That's a subtle point but I think you may be making the right distinction here. There's a difference in both style and ethos between the regular view of the site and the kinds of things that moderators need to keep track of.

Just take it out of the <a> element and add a tooltip to it.

The pedants will inspect the source code first before asking.

For the front page, it doesn’t seem to add much insight to know that someone’s post is their most recent HN content. But in a thread of active discussion, in which a someone’s top-level comment gets highly upvoted and kicks off its own fascinating tangent...sure, it’d be neat to know (vaguely) at a glance if the commenter has or hasn’t yet been on HN since their thread went off

It triggers mild OCD reactions for me, since there is inconsistency between the formatting of posts, a bit like missing apostrophes do, and as noted in a sibling comment affects how screen readers cover it.

Perhaps keep it a mod only feature?

Why full stop and not interpunct?

I didn't think about it, but a full stop there seems subtler and more plain-text, which is more in HN's spirit.

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