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Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
I've noticed that now some timestamps have a full stop at the end. Like some of the submitted articles on the front page now say "2 hours ago.". What does that mean?
- hemmert 6y agoInteresting! Did a Google Image search for „Hacker News“, those full stops do not appear in any image. It must be rather newish.
- eznzt 6y agoIt's new. Noticed it when I woke up this morning (CET time)
- Icyphox 6y agoYeah, this one does. Some others on the frontpage don't. Interesting. If I were to hazard a guess -- it looks like a templating bug. Some template has a period in it.
- OJFord 6y agoExcept that this one does on the front page too, so it's not like 'front.template' has no full stop and 'submission.template' does. Similarly in 'threads' some comments do and others don't. 'tis mildly curious. Edit: I went back to front, and this submission now doesn't have it. :shrug:
- jeroenhd 6y agoLooks like jn6118 figured it out[1]; the dot seems to indicate that the comment is that user's latest post. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197967
- spicymaki 6y agoInteresting! Does not seem related to the time value. I saw one entry that said “15 hours ago” with and without a period. Seems like a bug to me.
- ffpip 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197967 The answer is there
- gen_greyface 6y agoI've never noticed that, you have a keen eye
- ant6n 6y agoNow it will never be unnoticed
- porpoise 6y agoIt could be a coded message intended for certain people, now you ruined it
- jpxw 6y agoThis is definitely new, I just noticed it too. Thought it was my HN client, checked when it was updated last - 2 years ago!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rendall 6y agoWell done! You have discovered part 1 of The Secret! Congratulations!! Clues to Part 2 of The Secret can be found in this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random Stakes are high! At the end of the trail of clues, the Council of Immortal Wizards will ask you to join their ranks, at which time they will confer immortality upon you. There are only 10E100-1 steps to go! Good luck!
- TimSchumann 6y agoThat random wikipedia link is awesome. Didn’t know you could do that.
- johnchristopher 6y agoWhat's the name of the effect that when you click on something random you still end up on something related to you and you think "it's not that random". Because I got that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbridge
- walto2 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
- porpoise 6y agoThe mental habit of seeing connections?
- dolmen 6y agoDot here.
- johnchristopher 6y agoI call that one "creativity" !
- 6y ago
- filleokus 6y agoFor me right now, only porpoise's and one of hemmert's comments are lacking the dot. Interesting...
- isatty 6y agoThat kinda rules out templating bugs I suppose
- porpoise 6y agoBecause we are the only two in this thread who are in on the conspiracy. Heh
- dolmen 6y agoYou are also the only one who has his/her username shown in green.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoYou’re also lacking the dot for me while everyone else has it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- iso1210 6y agoI don't see a dot on your comment
- scoot 6y agoGreen means a new account. Now, do I get a dot, or not?
- krapp 6y ago...and that was the day Hacker News gazed so deeply into its own navel that it collapsed into a singularity.
- pmontra 6y agoDifferent files / functions / methods / views (pick your name) on the server rendering timestamps in a different way?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- s5ma6n 6y agoMaybe it is due to load balancing and different templates/release versions used in nodes?
- metafunctor 6y agoLoad balancing, but only the some node(s) were updated with a new template? Automatic worker process cycling, only some processes have cycled and loaded a new template?
- IndrekR 6y agoWhy load balancing? HN used to run on a single computer with 16GB of RAM[1]. I think this may still be the case. Not so? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006
- jn6118 6y agoLooks like a dot means "most recent post for user". For those with only a single post, these users will have dots. For those with multiple posts, only the latest ones retain the dot.
- runald 6y agoThis one will not have a dot.
- jaifraic 6y agoI'm just gonna test this here.
- jaifraic 6y agoThis comment should have a dot. The above one not.
- willcipriano 6y agoDot comment?
- runald 6y agoThis one will have a dot. Edit: Seems to be true, but porpoise's comments is a clear counterexample.
- dottershmidt 6y agoIf you are to delete your last comment, the preceding comment will not reacquire its dot.
- Ellipsis753 6y agoThis is my most recent message. Does it have a dot?
- 6y ago
- throwablePie 6y agoAbsence of the period (aka full stop) after the timestamp appears to indicate that a commenter had previously (perhaps recently) posted a comment which was subsequently flagged. Or that the commenter is new (see below). Here's what I did: I used ctrl-f/cmd-f on a well-commented post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25190668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25190668) looking for the following search terms: ". [–]" and "o [–]" Then I reviewed some of the posters' recent commenting history. Those that had no period after the time-stamp had recent grayed-out comments. I did not find any commenters with a period who had recent grayed out posts. For instance, here's a page from esteemed commenter buran77's profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=buran77 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=buran77 . You'll notice that not only does buran77 have grayed out posts without the period-after-timestamp feature but so does grayed-out commenter elmo2you. The absence of the period also appears to apply to recently created accounts. See green commenter jn6118 in this thread. This appears to be a subtle indicator designed to be used in HN's comment moderation. If so, what can we glean from this quirk of HN's comment moderation procedures or policies?
- rntksi 6y agoI think jn6118's explanation is closer.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zaroth 6y agoIt’s HN’s equivalent of a tracking pixel.
- danso 6y agoOMG. I wonder how long it would've taken me to notice this and now I can never not notice it.
- tialaramex 6y agoThis reminds me of a time I wrote a Facebook post which tagged about a half-dozen couples I know. I consciously wrote all the het pairs as girl, boy e.g. "Sarah Smith, Dave Smith" not "Dave Smith, Sarah Smith" because on the one hand that's how I most often think of them, and I noticed our culture usually puts the man first so why not be contrary? Anyway, Facebook re-ordered them. And so I followed up with a post asking why that happens. It turns out some of my friends saw other orders, some got the order I intended. Intriguing. Fortunately one of the scientists thought of a perfectly rational and testable explanation, she tested it, and demonstrated it's apparently right. Facebook has some internal "How much you interact with this person" metric and it's using that for sorting. It has no way to know your relationship to Sarah and Dave in the real world, it's just putting Dave first (for example) because the two of you exchanged a dozen terrible fish puns last week, a measurable Facebook interaction, whereas that walk out by the lake with Sarah when her mother died isn't on Facebook.
- derefr 6y agoI imagine that algorithm isn't really trying to rank people you know vs. other people you know, but rather trying to list people you know ahead of acquaintances and friends-of-friends that you've happened to "interact" with once (in the sense that you just happened to be in the same comment thread at the same time, even if you weren't speaking to one-another.)
- singlow 6y agoIt is in fact traditional formal style, at least in the U.S., when writing the name of a married couple with a shared last name, to put the _woman's_ name first: "Jane and John Doe". In contrast, when using the titles it is the man's title first: "Mr. and Mrs. John Doe".
- skytreader 6y agoMakes sense as FB hyper optimizes for engagement. That said I wonder how the data is structured in their DB, how messy it is, how complicated a post can I make to foil their parsing. There was a rumor back in college when we cared about social clout that the handful of people you see on the Friends list on your profile are the people who most recently/frequently check your profile (i.e., viewing someone's profile is already an interaction metric for FB). This trained me to not visit other people's profiles. To this day (when that list is just "most recent friends added"), I visit profiles very rarely and only if there is really something I want to check. It's not so baseless either. Of course this might be some bias or another working but there was a time I fell behind certain commitments to a Dev Group I was helping organize and poof, the friends list on my profile started to show my co-organizers. Felt like they were checking on me, on why I'm behind my stuff, why I was taking time to echo replies. I was just busy; sorry it happens. :)
- dvh 6y agoTest
- ulucs 6y agoJust wait until you see the italic reply button
- mmastrac 6y agoI've been on HN for a while and I have never noticed either of these. Huh. But now I know the secret
- cdolan 6y agoWait why is this reply button italic, but others are not? Mind. Blown.
- gpmcadam 6y agoLooks like an escaping issue with the formatting. There's an italic HTML element at the end of that comment.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- O_H_E 6y agoDamn, Dang. Are you playing with us? :D haha The simple site is way deeper than we thought.
- na85 6y agoIs it possible to learn this power? edit: haha yes it is but not from a Jedi.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197967 is correct: it means it's the most recent post by that user. This is one of those things that pops into your head and takes 2 minutes to deploy, so I just did it. It was late last night and I forgot to not turn it on for everyone. Then I thought it would be fun to see what sort of discussion I'd wake up to. Not sure whether to keep it. Advantage: it's a concise way of displaying some surprisingly useful information—useful to mods, at least, but I think maybe also to readers. Disadvantage: it's obscure. The inconsistency will drive some people nuts. We'll have "Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?" threads for the rest of our lives. (No one reads the FAQ. The FAQ, you say? Why yes, at the bottom of every HN page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html...) It also leaks when a user posted something later and deleted it. We could fix that, but as so often in software, it would make the thing way more complicated. So I'll probably just drop it. Edit: dropping it.
- anticensor 6y agoWhy full stop and not interpunct?
- dang 6y agoI didn't think about it, but a full stop there seems subtler and more plain-text, which is more in HN's spirit.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoI forgot to not turn it on for everyone This makes me think you have a lot of moderation tools like this. Is there any way you could discuss the kinds of tools moderators have that most users don't see? It would be interesting to read about, though I guess it also would increase the chance of gaming the system...
- dang 6y agoYes, the moderation tools have developed a lot over the years. I have a Chrome extension written in Arc (it has gone through a number of Lispy incarnations over the years, but we implemented an Arc-to-JS transpiler to get the last version and it works nicely). I rely on it heavily to navigate around the site. Eventually I'd like to open-source it and/or make it an option for any user to wants to load that JS to do so.
- chenpengcheng 6y agoit is annoying. as a reader, who cares about the last time someone else commented. whatever, i found reddit better.