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Ask HN: How can a HN comment parent id be higher than it's id?
I'm doing some looking into HN data and I notice times where the parent field is higher than the comment id. Assuming this is a simple autoincrement id, the comment id should always be higher.
Any ideas how this happens? is this from merging stories? something else?
- angersock 9y agoParent is updated, perhaps?
- yehosef 9y agoI hope not - usually updates don't require a new primary id.
- gus_massa 9y agoSometimes the mods merge the comments of a story and a close repost. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15137168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15137168 I'm not sure if that cover all your cases.
- yehosef 9y agoCould be - but I see examples without [dupe] in the title. But that's probably it. Its interesting because I see plenty of times where they don't do this..
- gus_massa 9y agoIt's a manual decision [I guess they have a magical button to do the merge.] so sometimes they don't find out abbot the dupe or they may decide no to merge them, so it's quite random and arbitrary, but it looks very difficult to automate.