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Comment by yoavfr | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if that felt dirty - I thought about it as a signal that the data is live (it is!).

I think it's a perfect (and subtle) way to signal that refreshing is unnecessary to see the latest data without wasting UI space explicitly explaining it. It was my favorite thing about the UI and I will be borrowing it next time I design a real-time interface where the numbers matter more than the precise timing.

It's a lie, though. When I see it, I know the interface is lying to me, and then I trust it less henceforth.

I'll never build a lie into my work. It's not worth it.

really? it left a bad aftertaste for me

It's not that it's a fake number. They are saying the number is real, just it goes to current_value - 1, and then current value to indicate the value is updating live.

Not sure if that was clear.

Edit: I don't know if it's a real number but that's the claim in the comment above at least

I understand, it’s not about the number itself. My first thought when I opened the page was wow there was a update coincidentally right when I opened it. When refreshing again I felt like wtf I was being mislead

Yeah true, I was suspicious about that too.

Might make more sense to start at zero and then rapidly scale to the current number? To indicate fresh data is being loaded in without making it look like the reader happened to catch a new occurrence in real-time.

Would also be a fun way to animate the bar and animate the full being “sketched in”.

Love the design btw, very fun to build I imagine

API responses seem to be alternating between saying 19+20 and saying 0+0, at present.

I think the problem is people’s priors. This isn’t the first time we’re seeing data fake-arrive like this, and virtually always it’s done either to fake liveness or to lie about rate of change. So, it comes to mean not “live”, but “fake”, even though nefarious motives don’t make much sense in this fun context.

It’s a shame, I think it’s a clever thought, and it doesn’t feel great when good intentions are met with an assumption of maliciousness.

Weird the screen goes 18, 19, 21, then back to 18 and cycles again.

(On iPad Safari)

Probably brings up memories of travel sites saying "10 other people have this room in their cart"

Interestingly you're using long polling instead of WS or SSE, what was the reason behind that ?

I'd guess simplicity

Do you happen to have a counter how many times people create a webpage for data, intentionally show fake data, and submit that to HN?

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