10 ms·

Unrelated aside: I submitted this story yesterday... How is it only now showing up as '1 hour ago' as of midnight a day later?

Tomte 11y ago
HN is auto-reposting some stories that its selection algorithm sees as valuable, but that didn't get attention. There is also another variant: dang is sometimes sending out special links to repost stories that were manually vetted as good, but ignored. Those get special treatment, for example, they cannot be flagged down (easily at least, maybe at all).
- dang 11y ago
  We're sending fewer of those emails now because a lot of users don't like the repost aspect. But we still do send some, e.g. if the post is older than a day or two, or if it's a Show HN and we want to make sure the submitter is aware that the story may get a discussion after all.
  - shasheene 11y ago
    I'm not really comfortable with the alteration of timestamps. Much prefer they reflect reality. Pushing a new timestamp to a list for every edit/resubmission makes me more comfortable, and keeps the immutability aspect (a trustable record of history). I'd also prefer being able to see the full edit history of comments, so assign weights to my views accordingly (a grain of salt).
    - dang 11y ago
      I completely understand. In fact we expected to hear this from a lot more users. But if the feedback we see is representative, people care a lot more about not having duplicates. I should add, for anyone who hasn't read the post I linked to above, that the original timestamp is always available from the user's /submitted list (linked to from their profile) and the /from list for the site (linked to from the domain name in the title line for a story). The relative (re-upped) timestamp is only shown on the front page and the /item page. Over time, the two converge, since the re-upped submissions to date have all been recent, i.e. less than a day or two old. The intention is definitely not to make the original timestamp (or any other information) unavailable, and we'd be happy to hear suggestions for how to handle it differently. Showing the history of comment edits is another matter. Sometimes people post things that they shouldn't post, and it seems decent to give them a way out by deleting the comment or editing out the sensitive or egregious bit. I think that's a fair privilege to trust users with—it's part of having a real community and good conversation, and although a few do abuse it, it really is surprisingly few. Except for a few perfect souls, we all blurt out things we shouldn't, so we all benefit from this. And we'd hate for bad real-life things to happen to people over what they post here.
      - geerlingguy 11y ago
        Thanks for this detail; it makes sense to me, and I do see the original time stamp in other listings, so that's helpful!
      - ethbro 11y ago
        Just wanted to say thanks for the continued tweaks! Use and metrics are great, but here's a +1 human comment on the effort put into improving things for everyone.
dang 11y ago
It's our latest experiment in giving good submissions a second chance at the front page. I've written about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537417 and in earlier posts linked from there.

Tomte 11y ago

HN is auto-reposting some stories that its selection algorithm sees as valuable, but that didn't get attention. There is also another variant: dang is sometimes sending out special links to repost stories that were manually vetted as good, but ignored. Those get special treatment, for example, they cannot be flagged down (easily at least, maybe at all).

dang 11y ago
We're sending fewer of those emails now because a lot of users don't like the repost aspect. But we still do send some, e.g. if the post is older than a day or two, or if it's a Show HN and we want to make sure the submitter is aware that the story may get a discussion after all.
- shasheene 11y ago
  I'm not really comfortable with the alteration of timestamps. Much prefer they reflect reality. Pushing a new timestamp to a list for every edit/resubmission makes me more comfortable, and keeps the immutability aspect (a trustable record of history). I'd also prefer being able to see the full edit history of comments, so assign weights to my views accordingly (a grain of salt).
  - dang 11y ago
    I completely understand. In fact we expected to hear this from a lot more users. But if the feedback we see is representative, people care a lot more about not having duplicates. I should add, for anyone who hasn't read the post I linked to above, that the original timestamp is always available from the user's /submitted list (linked to from their profile) and the /from list for the site (linked to from the domain name in the title line for a story). The relative (re-upped) timestamp is only shown on the front page and the /item page. Over time, the two converge, since the re-upped submissions to date have all been recent, i.e. less than a day or two old. The intention is definitely not to make the original timestamp (or any other information) unavailable, and we'd be happy to hear suggestions for how to handle it differently. Showing the history of comment edits is another matter. Sometimes people post things that they shouldn't post, and it seems decent to give them a way out by deleting the comment or editing out the sensitive or egregious bit. I think that's a fair privilege to trust users with—it's part of having a real community and good conversation, and although a few do abuse it, it really is surprisingly few. Except for a few perfect souls, we all blurt out things we shouldn't, so we all benefit from this. And we'd hate for bad real-life things to happen to people over what they post here.
    - geerlingguy 11y ago
      Thanks for this detail; it makes sense to me, and I do see the original time stamp in other listings, so that's helpful!
    - ethbro 11y ago
      Just wanted to say thanks for the continued tweaks! Use and metrics are great, but here's a +1 human comment on the effort put into improving things for everyone.

dang 11y ago

It's our latest experiment in giving good submissions a second chance at the front page. I've written about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537417 and in earlier posts linked from there.