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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

This was posted at 11:30AM on the 9th; the deadline was the 9th (some references below)... maybe the deadline was just "exactly X days from posting" and expired in the middle of the day?

As in, this might be neither malice nor incompetence: this could very well just be an implementation detail of the expiration system and how it displays the deadline, causing some people to be confused.

> 10,477 signatures required by August 9th to require President Obama to respond.

http://www.dailypaul.com/245374/sign-petition-to-require-tsa...

> If 25,000 people sign the petition before August 9, 2012, the White House will respond.

http://reason.com/24-7/2012/08/07/tsa-we-the-people-petition...

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If the deadline was "by August 9th", it's ambiguous whether that means "by 11:59 PM August 8th", or "by 11:59 PM August 9th".

If it's "11:59 PM August 8th", then it would probably be reasonable to hold it open until around noon on the 9th, to take into account places in the Pacific (Hawaii, UTC-10; American Samoa, UTC-11, etc)

I wonder what the actual website said. I checked the wayback machine but it doesn't have the page archived. If it says "by August 9th" that is very different than "before August 9th". One says it was removed early, the other says it was removed on schedule. Big difference.

EDIT: The petition site says, "SIGNATURES NEEDED BY AUGUST 17, 2012 TO REACH GOAL OF 25,000" for a current petition. So it is ambiguous. But I doubt any malfeasance. As the parent poster says, it is likely just a function of the website design.

The point I am making is that if a web site has a feature "post something for 30 days", it is fairly reasonable to implement that as "expires = now() + '30 days'::interval" in your database, and then to display a simplified timestamp like "'expires on ' || date_trunc('day', expires)" when telling people about the deadline.

Yes: it might be nice to say "expires at exactly 16:25:43.642109 UTC on Aug 9 2012", but for most use cases "expires on 8/9/2012" is considered fine. With this interpretation, even if the website said "August 9th", you can still argue that it was being fair and even correct, albeit confusing and bothersome in a way that will certainly have caused some people to think there was more time when there wasn't.

Which raises the question of why to cut it off in that way. Why would that kind of precision be necessary? Are we supposed to believe that the coder doesn't know how to do anything but Time.now+30.days?

Is this a serious question? Anyone who has been around "professional" software development for more than 30 minutes wouldn't be surprised by this at all.

Anybody who has been around professional (without quotes) software development wouldn't make as facile an analogy.

Its not difficult to believe that the requirement was vague and the coder did the simplest thing to meet it.

How is it simpler than Date.today+30.days?

Its not. Time.now + 30.days is exactly as simple.

What do you a req or spec for that feature would look like?

expire it 30 days from the time its created

as opposed to: expire it 30 days from the start of the day that its created

the former seems simpler to me and more likely

The Wayback Machine only displays sites after 6 months have passed.

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