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The replies are listing a lot of tangential rules like "major/minor", "typo", "punctuation", "[in]significant change", but all that really matters is: Does your
by happytoexplain 5y ago
The replies are listing a lot of tangential rules like "major/minor", "typo", "punctuation", "[in]significant change", but all that really matters is: Does your change add, remove, or alter meaning or even tone in your post, even implicitly? If so, somebody may have written a reply that no longer makes complete sense in relation to your post (or they may currently be writing it! "Nobody has probably even read it yet" is not a good thing to assume on an internet where the page remains static until they refresh).
The big thing is: It's hard to imagine all the ways a change can conflict with replies, and the HN crowd is probably more likely than most to "know what they don't know" (i.e. more likely to play it safe).
- mindcrime 5y agoI think all of what you say here is true, but at the same time, I don't consider it sufficient justification to have a policy of always adding an EDIT marker. The simple truth, for me, is that when you get down to really unlikely edge-cases regarding possible misunderstandings or whatever, I just don't care that much. At least not in most cases. So I suppose you could say my policy is a sort of subjective, probability weighted policy, based on the expected probability of my edit leading to A. a misunderstanding and B. that misunderstanding being one I would care about.