Ask HN: Is Hacker News API returning wrong “time”?

14 points by Elect2 6y ago ↗ HN

Example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268584 it shows "4 hour ago"(by time I posted this question)

API: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/21268584.json unix time:1571218522, and it is 3 days ago.

8 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 31.2 ms ] thread

I dont understand why the item page shows “5 hours ago”, but if you filter by domain : https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sivers.org, the same item is labeled “3 days ago”, so the API is rather correct. Maybe the timestamp shown on the item page is incorrect, or that the url was re-submitted?

Eldt 6y ago ↗

I think there are posts that are automatically reposted according to some algorithm - could this be such a post?

Elect2 6y ago ↗

Recently developing a tool and I found this happed very common.

You can see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268584 is "5 hours ago", but from my tool(https://hn.okphp.com/?k=digital,postgres ) it is "3 days ago"(my tool is using official api timestamp)

Elect2 6y ago ↗

I guess it is caused by re-posting. But the api returns the "time" the link first posted.

minimaxir 6y ago ↗

The way moderator post repromoting via the second-chance pool works will cause such a discrepancy in the API.

It is not ideal.

jey 6y ago ↗

More info: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

weinzierl 6y ago ↗

I noticed that when one of my posts is resubmitted (via second-chance pool) it seems to appear with the time of the resubmit and not the time I posted it originally. I observed this on the website, I never checked the API and maybe this is unrelated to the original question from above. It may even be intentional but probably not many posters know about it.

dang 6y ago ↗

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...