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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, you're right. How about now? Kind of interesting modifying software on the fly in response to user input. I wonder how often this happens.

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Perfect! I actually thought about doing it that way (root next to link | parent) while I was driving home. The only observation is that all of the Ask YC type discussions (not links to other sites) have news.ycombinator.com as the url (without the link to the specific conversation). Other than that, it's perfect (until the Arc customizations are released)!

This is certainly the best feature request I've ever been involved with! It reminds me of http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt :

"When one of the customer support people came to me with a report of a bug in the editor, I would load the code into the Lisp interpreter and log into the user's account. If I was able to reproduce the bug I'd get an actual break loop, telling me exactly what was going wrong. Often I could fix the code and release a fix right away. And when I say right away, I mean while the user was still on the phone.

Such fast turnaround on bug fixes put us into an impossibly tempting position. If we could catch and fix a bug while the user was still on the phone, it was very tempting for us to give the user the impression that they were imagining it. And so we sometimes (to their delight) had the customer support people tell the user to just try logging in again and see if they still had the problem. And of course when the user logged back in they'd get the newly released version of the software with the bug fixed, and everything would work fine. I realize this was a bit sneaky of us, but it was also a lot of fun."

This is a step beyond that. I'm not even doing releases; I've been pasting the changes into the running server's repl.

BTW, the urls of the ask-yc items are a bug. Will fix.

Edit: Should be fixed. I replaced

  (link (ellipsize (s 'title) 50) (s 'url))

with

  (link (ellipsize (s 'title) 50)
        (if (empty (s 'url)) (item-url s) (s 'url)))

pg, I think the current implementation has a problem. Most of the time, "on:" links go to NYC comment pages, but when the comments were done replying to the posted article (and not to other comments), "on:" links go directly to the posted article / website. I think all links should go to the comment pages always, to keep the "on:" behavior coherent.

Thanks a lot for implementing this feature, that was fast!

Edit: this happens only on the "threads" page I think.

I think that's a feature. It's pg's call as to which way is better, but right now it behaves like hystry did and how I prefer it.

Kind of interesting modifying software on the fly in response to user input. I wonder how often this happens

Funnily enough, I was just thinking that. New version works well for me.

Awesome. Can you add the same thing to each user's comments page, too?

Ok.

Excellent. Thank you!

I like the current iteration a lot.

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