Hacker News Reader

Comment by svnt | Hacker News Reader

No, they don’t delete them, they just don’t keep them after 24 hours, and they keep them before that. No deleting.

  for message in messages:
    if message.t < 86400 
      keep(message)
    else
      continue 
      // let nature do its thing

View on HN

So you're saying it works as a reverse system where the default is not to save the chat? That's interesting, I would have assumed adding a database and writing to that database for storage would by necessity involve sending a command to delete in order to remove it from that storage or having some other action taken to wipe the data periodically. I get it if there is no history at all, but there clearly is here.

Where does keep(message) send things? Is that not stored anywhere?

Sorry if this is too complicated, I don't know a lot about chat technically so trying to wrap my head around this.

Sorry, that was a joke. They do have to save them somewhere and then delete them. Nature doesn’t help much. Maybe if you use enough non-ECC RAM or something.

haha ok thanks, I was really scratching my head to think about how that would possibly work. I was going back to idea of writing to a file that overwrote itself in sections but it's good to hear that was a joke.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com