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Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what a coincidence that someone curiously hit precisely the timestamp of this, and knew to use a site where question and answer would be rewarded with attention and votes.

(I am coming around to a suspicion that a lot of "wow, that's cool"-type SO questions/answers are more or less fabricated to show off something the person knows, rather than genuine knowledge-seeking, in case you can't tell)

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Jon Skeet (the person that answered the question) works for Google, has more than one blog, and rep caps on stackoverflow daily from old answers because he's answered so many questions there. He's written multiple books on Java and C#. He's plenty visible. Not to mention that the question is over two years old.

There's no conspiracy here.

Plus, if you look at the guy who asked the question, he's a programmer from China, so it's not hard to imagine that had something to do with the fact that these dates popped up in development.

It's considered perfectly legitimate on SO to ask and answer your own question, so there would be no need to use seperate accounts.

I can imagine that a question like this could arise as a narrowed-down test case for a bug found in production.

There's even a feature where you can post the question and the answer at the same time now I believe!

Over the years I've evolved the strategy of asking very specific questions like that on forums. Precise code snippets seem to get precise answers. Broader code with the same problem attract many times more answers, but they are almost all junk.

When I stumble on some unusual behavior I pare it down to the simplest case possible, then ask about that problem. If I don't, the top several answers will invariably be "Why are you writing in X?! Y is so much better for this" and critiquing other parts of the code that aren't causing the odd behavior.

Or, if you really like acronyms: SSCCE http://sscce.org/

Short, Self Contained, Correct (Compilable), Example

This applies to answers on SO/lists/forums/etc, as well as questions. Everyone benefits from clear communication and examples.

Maybe, but why not let it go or even reward it? I find that it often does bring specialized information. If this person had waited for someone to ask the question, it could have remained unanswered. While now, the information is out if anyone needs it.

In short, I find this kind of fabricated Q/A an acceptable workaround the "burden" of the highly specialized knowledge bearer who would like to share it and get rewarded.

Possibly, but OTOH, when you actually have a problem where the dates are off, it's pretty easy to use binary searching to narrow the range down. The hard part is figure out why the error range causes an error.

Not to mention this question requires someone to be in the Chinese locale, and the asker is actually Chinese.

If you're working with historical time-series data you could easily be doing millions of time comparisons. so it's almost inevitable that people are going to hit edge cases like this.

You're right, especially considering he wrote noda time, the .NET port of joda time.

You're right, and it's actively encouraged by the site.

Alternatively, there are many times when I've started writing an SO question and came to the answer during the course of writing it (using SO as a rubber duck). I don't find it odd that I would ask it, answer it myself, and post it anyway if it's something odd like this.

Any two timestamps which surround this point in time will show the same discrepancy, when evaluated in this time zone. He could have started off comparing 2013 and 1822 for all we know.

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