HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why does page 2 of HN have discussions from 2 years ago?

36 points by acak ↗ HN
Here is a screenshot page 2 of HN's current stories as of today (May 25th, 2012) 11:00 PM CST:

http://i.imgur.com/5u2Q6.png

Discussions # 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 and 56 on page 2 are from several days ago (some even 2+ years old).

What kind of ranking algorithm is being applied? Is there some kind of personalization of stories?

And here's one as of 11:08 PM CST:

http://imgur.com/515ki

Was there some switch announced on the purpose of the More link on the HN front page?

17 comments

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 34.8 ms ] thread
alanh
Bottom of page 1 had a year-old story a couple days ago, too. Definitely interesting and unusual.
pg
A bug. Things should improve now.
tomasien
PG you're so fucking cool.
tar
I am fairly new here but I think aimless fanboyism is frowned upon here.
batista
I also frown upon aimless recital of the "rules" of what's frowned upon "these here parts".
michael_fine
No. It's not aimless. HN is a place to share links and discuss things that hackers would find interesting. It's a carefully run community, and we try to keep in cordial and respectful, all while being entirely relevant.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
tomasien
I hope the urge to fix this was still as strong in your as it is whenever someone reports a bug in something I'm responsible for.
shaggyfrog
Fixing bugs at 11pm on a Friday night? True hackerism.

edit: Christ, downvotes? I meant that sincerely. It's not like I'm not up at midnight coding myself. Sheesh.

raldi
What was the nature of the bug?
[dead] shareme
is it a tasty bug or just some withered moth caught in the vac tubes?
cperciva
Probably the server was restarted. Odd things tend to happen when things aren't cached as expected.
jerrya
Check your ping time. Try a traceroute.
[dead] archetypical
Could be all the blocked websites and hell banned HN accounts haunting the system. Or bad karma for having a karma scoring system?
omegant
I had noticed that stories where lasting several days in the front page. I thought that some kind of weird traffic plumbeting was happening.

It is an old bug or a recent change that caused this?

chaud
Only on HN will people think a bug that has appeared several times is an unannounced feature.
brudgers
I experience it often on the ask page.

Since the old threads often have a meaningful number of upvotes and can address topics in which I am interested, sometimes find these threads relevant.

It's not a bug, it's not a feature, it's a side effect.