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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

I stopped playing with it when I realized that the option to turn off instant-typing-relay wasn't implemented yet. Sorry, instant deal breaker. I've ^H^H^H'ed far too many obscenities directed at friends and clients for that to fly.

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That feature's already planned; that's what the "Draft" checkbox is for. I'm sure eventually you'll have a setting to default all blips to draft mode.

You can't expect every feature to be in and working flawlessly in the preview.

Here are three things that really bother me:

1. You can't do a threaded reply to the last blip in a thread. You have to make a "footer" and then reply to the next-to-last item.

2. When you copy something to a new wave, it doesn't copy the children over.

3. The hide all replies feature doesn't work yet.

Anyone else find these annoying, or am I missing some settings or not thinking about the first two the right way?

1. You can't do a threaded reply to the last blip in a thread. You have to make a "footer" and then reply to the next-to-last item.

You can, actually... just select a bit of text in that last reply and you can branch off.

That's cool, but it goes inside the blip instead of under it.

I suppose that you could type into another text editor and then cut & paste into wave once you've made your edits. Really kludgy, of course, but if you had to use wave for some reason and were worried about it, then that'd give you the necessary buffer. If the instant-relay proves unpopular I bet they'll offer a way to disable it (or someone will release a plugin or whatnot.)

I don't understand why instant-typing-display was implemented in the first place. Or rather, I understand that it's supposed to speed up communication, but the drawbacks to it seem so huge in comparison to the tiny benefit that it really just feels like engineering-porn; i.e. a "cool" feature that does more to showcase technical brilliance than to serve any real need.

I think it serves a very real need: discipline. By making it the most basic wave feature, they're committing to making sure that the system can always handle a constant stream of realtime updates from every user. If anybody breaks it or introduces a performance regression, everybody will notice. It also means that people writing robots and extensions can assume that they can deal with updates in realtime, on such a fine grained level. If extension writers had to worry that per-character updates might introduce too much overhead, it would hamper their creativity.

It really does speed up communication though. When I ran a BBS with a split-screen chat that had this feature, it saved a lot of typing when you could start to already reply the moment you understood what they meant, instead of having to wait them press enter.

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