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Ask HN: What causes HN post relative age vs. timestamp discrepancy?

1 points by myfonj ↗ HN
Looking at the HN front page, some human-readable age labels ("10 hours ago") correspond with timestamp in title attribute

    <span class="age" title="2023-10-02T03:10:59">10 hours ago</span>
    (provided now = 2023-10-02T13:11:33)
but others are off, sometimes even by days.

For example current front page, archived "2023-10-02T09:36:17" [1] features post

    Astronomers discover thousands of red galaxy hearts with powerful radio signals
    4 hours ago (title="2023-09-29T15:07:25")
"4 hours" ago would be something in "2023-10-02", but title timestamp goes two days farther. (Skimmed output of makeshift browser dev tools console analytical script [2])

Is it intentional?

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20231002093617/https://news.ycombinator.com/news

[2] https://gist.github.com/myfonj/7c551e381e3a03362b7e4c92d4c8120d

4 comments

[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 34.9 ms ] thread
Nicksil
Perhaps due to the merging of threads moderators do for various reasons?
myfonj
Interesting idea; I'd thought that such merging is quite rare. Still quite a conundrum why to pick the newer date for the human readable "age", and the older date for the timestamp.

At this moment I see discrepancies on the front page, rounded and sorted (hours):

- 63, 64, 62, 57, 56, - 30, 27, 22, 22, 12, - 9, 8, - 1, 0.5, 0.5, 0.4, 0.4, 0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.2, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.04, 0.03, 0.01, 0.01, 0.01

So 12 out of 30 are strangely shifted by more than an hour.

gus_massa
Sometime the mods cherry pick some posts a give them a "second chance", and they are send to the front page for a short time with a fake time. More details in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
myfonj
Interesting, thanks for the pointer.

At this moment "Second-Chance Pool" [1] has 9 discrepancies with more than 2 hours difference, 20 hours max. That's pretty much on par with the front page, where max difference is 30 hours atm. Invited [2] has 24 discrepancies with more than 2 hours difference. So there is some difference. (Still not sure about conclusion; if title was "true" post date and relative text was "fake / edited", I'd expect that all 30 items on these pages would be off.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/pool [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/invited