HACKER Q&A
📣 myfonj

What causes HN post relative age vs. timestamp discrepancy?


Looking at the HN front page, some human-readable age labels ("10 hours ago") correspond with timestamp in title attribute

    10 hours ago
    (provided now = 2023-10-02T13:11:33)
but others are off, sometimes even by days.

For example current front page, archived "2023-10-02T09:36:17" [1] features post

    Astronomers discover thousands of red galaxy hearts with powerful radio signals
    4 hours ago (title="2023-09-29T15:07:25")
"4 hours" ago would be something in "2023-10-02", but title timestamp goes two days farther. (Skimmed output of makeshift browser dev tools console analytical script [2])

Is it intentional?

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20231002093617/https://news.ycombinator.com/news

[2] https://gist.github.com/myfonj/7c551e381e3a03362b7e4c92d4c8120d


  👤 Nicksil Accepted Answer ✓
Perhaps due to the merging of threads moderators do for various reasons?

👤 gus_massa
Sometime the mods cherry pick some posts a give them a "second chance", and they are send to the front page for a short time with a fake time. More details in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308