Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?

301 pointseznzt111 comments

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?

View on HN

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.

I 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...

Yes, 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.

You use Chrome? Not judging (I use it too), but it was good to know given the pro-FF community here.

I use both, but at the time I first wrote this software it was easiest to make it be a Chrome extension. This was long before FF adopted Chrome's extensions API. It's on my list to see if I can get it running in FF but, like most things on that list, it never seems to get too close to the top.

I find these kinds of terse shorthand features valuable: they allow for a richer experience for users who care enough about HN to make the effort to understand the features that lie beyond the basic stuff, and for those who don't, they're basically invisible.

I think perhaps something to consider would be a `title` attribute on a span surrounding the full stop which says something like "most recent comment by this user", so that someone who mouses over the dot can get more information about what it means (thus hopefully avoiding the Ask HN threads)

Just take it out of the <a> element and add a tooltip to it.

The pedants will inspect the source code first before asking.

Why full stop and not interpunct?

I didn't think about it, but a full stop there seems subtler and more plain-text, which is more in HN's spirit.

The reason I noticed this feature is that it adds a pause when I'm reading through the HN front page with my screen reader. I don't really care either way, but it did make for a jarring change to the rhythm I'm used to when listening to that page.

For the front page, it doesn’t seem to add much insight to know that someone’s post is their most recent HN content. But in a thread of active discussion, in which a someone’s top-level comment gets highly upvoted and kicks off its own fascinating tangent...sure, it’d be neat to know (vaguely) at a glance if the commenter has or hasn’t yet been on HN since their thread went off

It triggers mild OCD reactions for me, since there is inconsistency between the formatting of posts, a bit like missing apostrophes do, and as noted in a sibling comment affects how screen readers cover it.

Perhaps keep it a mod only feature?

I don't prefer this feature to remain for end users (those who are not mods). If someone wants to know the most recent post by a user, they can visit their profile and find it. I do not see value in making that easier, and for a reason I cannot explain well, it also triggers a sense of exposing someone's habits, behavior, etc.

That's a subtle point but I think you may be making the right distinction here. There's a difference in both style and ethos between the regular view of the site and the kinds of things that moderators need to keep track of.

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.

This one will not have a dot.

I'm just gonna test this here.

This comment should have a dot. The above one not.

Dot comment?

This one will have a dot.

Edit: Seems to be true, but porpoise's comments is a clear counterexample.

If you are to delete your last comment, the preceding comment will not reacquire its dot.

This is my most recent message. Does it have a dot?

Yes

Yes, but please don't participate in any more discussion on HN anymore otherwise this thread will all seem very confusing.

Seconded; this can be seen on Hemmert's last two comments (both of which are on this post): https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hemmert

I think you are correct. That's something I failed to notice when I referenced your post.

I think this is right, where "most recent post" is chosen from both comments and submissions. Looking at top of the https://news.ycombinator.com/newest page illustrates this pattern. Almost every timestamp there ends with a dot, except for the cases where the submitter commented on their own submission, in which case that comment has the dot. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198319.

Well 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

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!

That random wikipedia link is awesome. Didn’t know you could do that.

What'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/Synchronicity

The mental habit of seeing connections?

Dot here.

I call that one "creativity" !

Apophenia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat_Bog_Soldiers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Hmm. I'm having a hard time relating the '1990 All-Pacific-10 Conference football team' to anything in my life though.

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon ?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Fre...

Serendipity?

Pareidolia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

That article "Microbridge" should really be deleted because it's not notable, but it looks like it was proposed in 2011 and failed so it isn't eligible for WP:PROD and needs to go through the full WP:AFD process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_and_delusions_of_referen...

I once saw a solo improv performance that was started off by using that to get a prompt for a story

Off topic: is it new for HN to elide urls this way? I’ve never noticed it before but it really annoys me. I like that HN is just text, and preprocessing it this way adds no usability. It makes it harder to copy a URL, if anything, and it certainly isn’t prettier.

It's nice on mobile to avoid left-right scroll for long urls. Copying the url is easy enough with right-click for desktop or long press for mobile.

Whats wrong with wrapping?

Personal preference I suppose. There are a lot of urls where the text of the url (or large parts of it) conveys no meaning. In that case it breaks up the comment without adding value. Sometimes you see people use a footnote format here because even the short url is in the way.

Not nice to me. I like to be able to see what the link is before I click it.

On mobile, in Firefox, do a long press and it'll show you the full target URL. Hoover on any desktop browser.

Haha, this was great. I arrived at an article about “John Frum” which did sound like a secret, and was quite the rabbit hole [1].

It got me worried about history. The whole story sounds like 90s zine fiction, which I think it is - there is no record I could find beyond the original story from 1995 on Harper’s Magazine [2], yet it is now in Wikipedia, stated as a fact.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum

[2] https://skeptichume.weebly.com/the-gospel-according-to-prum....

The wikipedia article includes references from a couple of decades earlier, at least; e.g.

> Nat. Geographic: May 1974. "Tanna (Island, New Hebrides, South Pacific Ocean) Awaits the Coming of John Frum (cargo cults of Melanesia since about 1940)".

(See https://georgehbalazs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/TANNA-A... for a scan of the full article.)

> It got me worried about history. The whole story sounds like 90s zine fiction, which I think it is - there is no record I could find beyond the original story from 1995 on Harper’s Magazine [2], yet it is now in Wikipedia, stated as a fact.

Did you look at the references section in the article?

This is a great documentary about the situation: https://johnfrummovie.com/

Oh god, I just watched a video about John Frum, and now this subthread, it briefly felt like a delusion.

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.

I 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.)

It 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".

Makes 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. :)

When we used to use Facebook in high school there were tonnes of fake apps that I assume just existed to suck up data that would claim to be able to show you who viewed your profile the most too. There was something floating around that you were meant to be able to put in the DevTools console for the same thing - this was probably before they had the big warning there and presumably also sucked up data or worse.

I'd seen it claimed repeatedly that when others view your profile it doesn't affect People You May Know. I don't believe the claims. Despite being in the same location three days a week for several weeks with my fellow classmates, it was only after I gave a presentation to the class and my (unusual, non-English, impossible to spell phonetically) last name appeared on screen that I started seeing my classmates in People You May Know. It was only female classmates and IIRC we didn't even have mutual friends. Like you, I've been selective about going to people's profiles since then.

>> exchanged a dozen terrible fish puns last week

seems you have a sofishticated sense of humor

> >> exchanged a dozen terrible fish puns last week

> seems you have a sofishticated sense of humor

Stop, or I'm going to have to kick you in the bass.

Stop your carping...

that's enough fish puns. think we should scale back

Whale, I enjoyed them. But you're right, they're causing the conversation to flounder...

Oh, for Cod's hake, can't you do any betta than that?

Not to detract from your main point, which is very sound, but on this:

> whereas that walk out by the lake with Sarah

If you both have the Facebook app with location tracking on, Facebook does know about this, which is why you sometimes get friend suggestions for people after you spent time near them (eg you were at the same party or they visited your house to do cleaning or plumbing), even if you have no mutual friends.

I’ve seen this and I was so spooked that I uninstalled the app. I am not naive enough to believe nobody else does it, but it was just too egregious.

Just wait until you see the italic reply button

I've been on HN for a while and I have never noticed either of these. Huh.
But now I know the secret

Wait why is this reply button italic, but others are not? Mind. Blown.

Looks like an escaping issue with the formatting. There's an italic HTML element at the end of that comment.

Damn, Dang. Are you playing with us? :D haha
The simple site is way deeper than we thought.

Is it possible to learn this power?
edit: haha yes it is but not from a Jedi.

I've never noticed that, you have a keen eye

Now it will never be unnoticed

Interesting! Did a Google Image search for „Hacker News“, those full stops do not appear in any image. It must be rather newish.

It's new. Noticed it when I woke up this morning (CET time)

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.

Except 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:

Looks 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

It’s HN’s equivalent of a tracking pixel.

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?

Why 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

I thought 16GB sounded rather low - it's 8*16 = 128GB.

I stand corrected, thanks!
I wonder what the resource usage is on that machine; and if it has had any updates in last 4 years.

This is definitely new, I just noticed it too. Thought it was my HN client, checked when it was updated last - 2 years ago!

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197967
The answer is there

Different files / functions / methods / views (pick your name) on the server rendering timestamps in a different way?

Also my iOS client does it.

Don't these just work with web scraping most of the time? That would explain that.

For me right now, only porpoise's and one of hemmert's comments are lacking the dot. Interesting...

That kinda rules out templating bugs I suppose

Because we are the only two in this thread who are in on the conspiracy. Heh

You are also the only one who has his/her username shown in green.

You’re also lacking the dot for me while everyone else has it.

I don't see a dot on your comment

Green means a new account.
Now, do I get a dot, or not?

It could be a coded message intended for certain people, now you ruined it

A conspiracy...

One of your comments was with and one without a dot, so it's not about who posted it.

Zuckerberg, is in fact, a lizard.

OMG. I wonder how long it would've taken me to notice this and now I can never not notice it.

Maybe it is due to load balancing and different templates/release versions used in nodes?

it is annoying. as a reader, who cares about the last time someone else commented.
whatever, i found reddit better.

Test

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?

I think jn6118's explanation is closer.

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

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