HACKER Q&A
📣 eznzt

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?

  👤 dang Accepted Answer ✓
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 times 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...)

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.

👤 jn6118
Looks 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.

👤 rendall
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👤 tialaramex
This 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.

👤 ulucs
Just wait until you see the italic reply button
👤 gen_greyface
I've never noticed that, you have a keen eye
👤 hemmert
Interesting! Did a Google Image search for „Hacker News“, those full stops do not appear in any image. It must be rather newish.
👤 Icyphox
Yeah, 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.

👤 zaroth
It’s HN’s equivalent of a tracking pixel.
👤 metafunctor
Load 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?

👤 jpxw
This is definitely new, I just noticed it too. Thought it was my HN client, checked when it was updated last - 2 years ago!
👤 spicymaki
Interesting! 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.
👤 pmontra
Different files / functions / methods / views (pick your name) on the server rendering timestamps in a different way?
👤 filleokus
For me right now, only porpoise's and one of hemmert's comments are lacking the dot. Interesting...
👤 porpoise
It could be a coded message intended for certain people, now you ruined it
👤 danso
OMG. I wonder how long it would've taken me to notice this and now I can never not notice it.
👤 s5ma6n
Maybe it is due to load balancing and different templates/release versions used in nodes?
👤 chenpengcheng
it is annoying. as a reader, who cares about the last time someone else commented.

whatever, i found reddit better.

👤 dvh
Test
👤 throwablePie
Absence 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) 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 . 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?

👤 krapp
...and that was the day Hacker News gazed so deeply into its own navel that it collapsed into a singularity.