Thank you for the correction. It still takes a while to get towards anything like five minutes. (That or the pace of discussion on HN is slow enough that I didn

Thank you for the correction. It still takes a while to get towards anything like five minutes. (That or the pace of discussion on HN is slow enough that I didn't notice.) Another thing to keep in mind with this is that HN isn't really like a traditional web forum. If you were to put a limit like this on a more traditionally threaded bulletin board it would stall the whole thread for five minutes at a time. Which would be obnoxious. EDIT: One also has to keep in mind that the way HN handles your posts is also a bit different from most other sites. (At least the ones I've been to.) The ability to see who has replied to you anywhere on the site means that you can carry on conversations over a longer period than your attention fixates on the parent thread. I've seen replies to my posts made days after the fact. That just doesn't happen in most of the interfaces I've seen.