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The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad

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Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad

#71

Post by markessien »

jyothi wrote: post #58
pg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you do this with any piece of writing on Etherpad? Anything you write with it now you will be able to play back like this soon. Etherpad is already saving all the keystrokes. They just haven't released the player yet. (This is a one-off prototype.)

That is going to be a killer. However, it should be somewhere hidden and available only if people really want to be able to replay. Else it is going to be an over kill on their servers.

Not if everything is delivered in one blow and then played back with JS.

Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad

#73

Post by swombat »

jodrellblank wrote: post #65
pg wrote: post #2

I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad. Now I'm going to write all of them on it. Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in…

I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back You often talk about releasing early, building something people want, etc. Since you carry a lot of influence, and (I guess) invest in Etherpad, and they've adjusted it to your personal request - do you worry that this effect might give you a distorted view of how well Etherpad specifically, and YC startups generally, are building what people want?

Convincing someone of something you believe in and abusing your influence are two very different things.

I don't think pg implied that he bullied them into implementing this, only that he talked them into it. And I can't imagine that YC would last long if pg got into the habit of bullying its start-ups into implementing his personal requests.

Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad

#74

Post by swombat »

bockris wrote: post #33
dcurtis wrote: post #18

This is interesting to watch. I notice you type something, you delete it, and then type something different quite a bit. When you write on paper, how do you deal with this constant deletion?

I do this too. I basically am a non-functioning writer unless I am on a computer. I guess I'm lucky I was born when I was. Side note. Neal Stephenson wrote the Baroque Cycle out long hand. This post ( http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/01/the-entire-terr.html ) was from last month ago but I also remember 3 other pictures from several years ago. http://www.nealstephenson.com/photos.htm I was completely dumbfounded wh…

Writing on paper has one advantage: because you can't revise things, you're forced to finish the first draft before you start on the second.

So, what you produce may not be as good as it will get later, but at least it's complete.

The major disadvantage of writing on paper is of course when you have no idea what you're going to write ahead of time, because then your first draft is going to be very, very low quality.

Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad

#75

Post by nitam »

pg wrote: post #48
aak wrote: post #41

What exactly about this makes it the most surprising thing you've seen in two months?

Being able to watch how I write. It's like seeing a photograph of oneself for the first time. I had no idea how often I restarted sentences, for example. There's other stuff I want to see that should be even more interesting. When it's replaying, I want to be able to see characters that make it into the final version in one color, and others in another. Then I'll be able to tell when I'm writing well and when I'm wri…

I really like this evolutionary-way of writing. Small little improvements and changes until it sounds better and fits better to the rest of the paragraph/text/code. I found out that if i am disciplined enough when writing code this way the result is much much better. When i was working in corporate world there was always some distraction (boss, time constraints , ...) to break this flow resulting in not so good code.

Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad

#76

Post by gstar »

petercooper wrote: post #20
ivankirigin wrote: post #15

This is so hot. I'm really blown away. It's also really interesting to watch a good writer go about editing. This is certainly a way to teach writing, besides the obvious method of practice.

Maybe, but only if you had a larger sample than one person. You'll find that there are at least several common ways to write - most quite unlike each other. That would probably be the biggest lesson.. that there is little you can learn from watching this process except "just do it your way". I found it quite surprising to watch. I thought it was a genetic algorithm writing an article somehow at first with all the con…

I thought it was a genetic algorithm writing an article somehow

You have great intuition, because it actually was!

Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad

#77

Post by prakash »

pg wrote: post #2

I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad. Now I'm going to write all of them on it. Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in…

This is absolutely brilliant!!

If this were only available when you guys were writing code for Viaweb, and when you were writing On Lisp -- what a wonderful thing it would be to learn from. It would show the thought process behind what went into writing what you wrote!

Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad

#78

Post by briancooley »

pg wrote: post #36
YuriNiyazov wrote: post #22

how long did that take in real time?

It's so hard to guess. I remember it taking about 3 days, but not working all day. I know there were 5400 half-second intervals when I typed at least one keystroke (that's what the numbers at the top mean).

It would be really interesting to see timestamps, particularly in longer works.

Two reasons: 1) You could see when the Eureka! moments occur. 2) To easily get a real measure of how long it really takes to write.

I have a real problem with 2), both with underestimating how long it will take to do things I think will be easy to write, and overestimating things I think will be hard. Of course, there's a lot more to writing than typing, but it could provide important information that is tedious to track at a high level and impossible to track at the level of granularity that this app could.

Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad

#80

Post by Xichekolas »

pg wrote: post #2

I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad. Now I'm going to write all of them on it. Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in…

Might I suggest, from the watcher's perspective, it'd be handy if the final feature sets the vertical scrollbar such that the currently playing change is on the screen?

It might be kind of jerky during the editing stage, but it's better than scrolling around trying to find out where the action is. ;)

What I learned from this is that I write very differently from the way you do. My first draft is almost straight stream of consciousness, and then I go back and reread and edit several times. You seem to make several attempts at each sentence before finding one you like, and then edit the whole thing.

Of course, I may just not realize how I actually write, since I don't have a playback of anything of length to watch.

What I'd really be interested in watching is some famous programmers working on code with this kind of playback. Not sure if it'd actually be enlightening, but it would be fun to experiment with.

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