It's really something I do for my job, I just put them here as well. I think I often get penalized by the HN algorithms because a post can get edited 4-5 times.
> I’ve often thought a git diff style view would be interesting.
I used to think so to but I no longer think having the history of a comment has much value.
If someone is consistently making dishonest edits people will call them out on it without needing to point to an integrated version history.
Mist edits are made probably to fix grammatical and factual mistakes. Who cares about the history for that.
What I do wish for instead would be that you could request deletion of a response to your comment after you’d remedied some error that they pointed out because once fixed that comment is no longer needed. So A writes a comment, B corrects them. A fixed their comment and attributes B then sends a deletion request to B.
However at that point perhaps full collaborative editing would be useful, like they have on the Stack Exchange sites and Wikipedia. Then comment history would be useful so that you could inspect individual comments and revert them.
I have a specific type of collaborative editing in mind for sites like HN, and Reddit, namely that threads of multiple comments would be summarized and condensed into single comments so that they are fast to read through for people that visit the thread in the future. Again, contributors would be attributed and would get a share of the karma when the summary is upvoted corresponding to how much information they contributed.
Of course that is a nice idea in theory but probably not realistically doable. It would be impossible to find enough people that are both willing to do this work and at the same time do so with an “objective” eye, and to not even get paid for it.
Encyclopedic articles and Q&A sites are a good fit as we’ve seen with Wikipedia and the Stack Exchange sites. For general discussions I think it would not.
I really enjoy your posts too, thanks! Stupid questions: can you explain 'wall street estimates'? I've heard it a million times, and I get that there are people at the company that make estimates and also analysts at financial firms (investment banks?) that supposedly take a stab at what the earnings per share will be, but-- who are they? What determines if somebody 'counts' as an analyst? How are estimates recorded so that they show up in yahoo finance? What are the motivations and abilities those analysts have to be right?
There are a number of providers that aggregate analysts forecasts (including financial information giants like Bloomberg, Factset and Thomson Reuters and small companies specialised in this business).
Sometimes the investor relations departments give an “official” consensus that they use as reference (at least some ex-US companies do so). For example, see the link to the Vara-provided consensus at https://www.investor.bayer.de/en/stock/analysts/consensus/
The whole business of beating consensus is a bit of a farce, as the forecasts are continously revised (sometimes the company will directly tell analysts that expectations have to come down). So it can happen that the results are 1% above the current forecast, but the current forecast is 10% below where it was one month ago.
For example, looking at the evolution of Q2 estimates for Tesla:
One year ago, the EPS forecast was -0.37.
Two months ago it was -2.19, last month -2.26.
Now it stands at -2.29, and it may be revised down now that Q1 results are available.
As we get closer to the end of the quarter the trend may continue. If, for example, right before the earnings announcement the consensus estimate is -3.25 and the actual EPS is -2.90 then it will be a strong beat...
That's like asking what counts as art. There are some major museums who hire curators, who in turn buy art. Similarly, there are some large financial companies that publish advice, who hire analysts. You "count" if people listen to you.
In theory there's a strict separation between trading and research departments. (People on the trading floor cannot even enter the area where research sits.) This doesn't mean that there isn't some conflict of interest, but the industry and regulators are aware of it and at least in principle there are ways to mitigate it.
Any conflict of interest could be seen as an illegal pump-and-dump scheme. It's a fuzzy line, but disclosing one's positions helps avoid the wrath of the SEC.
"What determines if somebody 'counts' as an analyst? How are estimates recorded so that they show up in yahoo finance?"
I'm no insider, but I feel like a lot of this comes down to Bloomberg terminal. That seems to be where lots of people get their aggregates of estimates, at least as a common starting point.
It's really something I do for my job, I just put them here as well. I think I often get penalized by the HN algorithms because a post can get edited 4-5 times.