81–90 of 130 posts
This web site sucks and you are a moron\b\b\b\b\\b\b\b\b\b\\b\b...\b\b\b\b\b\\bb\bGood day sir, I can't seem to find how to cancel my account. Thank you and I hope you are having a pleasant evening.
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.
i'd love to see how a piece of legislation gets written with something like this.
I might implement an emacs minor mode that does this.
To make this work, Etherpad would need to provide an API, though not necessarily a well-documented one. A supported API might make sense for Etherpad, though. Imagine being able to load a Wordpress plugin that enables playback of your blog posts. Or something that lets you co-author blog posts on etherpad. Oh, and greasemonkey scripts that let you co-edit any elements in a web form. OK... let's not get ahead of ourselves...
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 think more before writing when it's on paper. The medium has more friction. But I haven't written anything for publication on paper since 1991, when I finished writing On Lisp on a stack of legal pads.
I mean, I guess people wrote books before there were computers, so I shouldn't be that surprised, but I just realized I can't imagine writing anything longer than a couple pages on paper.
I remember arguing with English teachers in middle school that I thought better while typing. They insisted that I hand write my rough draft anyway, and I hated it.
The ability to fix those types of changes, or to revert back to a paragraph "somewhere in the middle" would be huge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think more before writing when it's on paper. The medium has more friction. But I haven't written anything for publication on paper since 1991, when I finished writing On Lisp on a stack of legal pads.
You wrote an entire book on legal pads?! I mean, I guess people wrote books before there were computers, so I shouldn't be that surprised, but I just realized I can't imagine writing anything longer than a couple pages on paper. I remember arguing with English teachers in middle school that I thought better while typing. They insisted that I hand write my rough draft anyway, and I hated it.
How about an entire trilogy of books. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495491
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…
Thanks for sharing, very awesome to watch. My only request would be the ability to adjust the playback speed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think more before writing when it's on paper. The medium has more friction. But I haven't written anything for publication on paper since 1991, when I finished writing On Lisp on a stack of legal pads.
You wrote an entire book on legal pads?! I mean, I guess people wrote books before there were computers, so I shouldn't be that surprised, but I just realized I can't imagine writing anything longer than a couple pages on paper. I remember arguing with English teachers in middle school that I thought better while typing. They insisted that I hand write my rough draft anyway, and I hated it.
"There is only one thing that annoys me about living in Edinburgh - well, two, but I'm pretty much resigned to the weather now. Why is it so difficult to buy paper in the middle of town? What is a writer who likes to write longhand supposed to do when she hits her stride and then realises, to her horror, that she has covered every bit of blank paper in her bag? Forty-five minutes it took me, this morning, to find somewhere that would sell me some normal, lined paper. And there's a university here! What do the students use? Don't tell me laptops, it makes me feel like something out of the eighteenth century." -J. K. Rowling
Source: http://www.writerswrite.com/wblog.php?wblog=410061
According to Wikipedia, she did the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone on a manual typewriter.
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?