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

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?

301 points | by eznzt 1221 days ago

22 comments

  • dang 1220 days ago
    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.

    • mwcampbell 1220 days ago
      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.
    • mef 1220 days ago
      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)

    • TheAdamAndChe 1220 days ago
      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...

      • dang 1220 days ago
        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.
        • behnamoh 1219 days ago
          You use Chrome? Not judging (I use it too), but it was good to know given the pro-FF community here.
          • dang 1217 days ago
            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.
    • AnonC 1220 days ago
      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.
      • dang 1219 days ago
        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.
    • apankrat 1220 days ago
      Just take it out of the <a> element and add a tooltip to it.

      The pedants will inspect the source code first before asking.

    • danso 1220 days ago
      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
    • alblue 1220 days ago
      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?

    • anticensor 1220 days ago
      Why full stop and not interpunct?
      • dang 1220 days ago
        I didn't think about it, but a full stop there seems subtler and more plain-text, which is more in HN's spirit.
  • jn6118 1220 days ago
    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.

    • runald 1220 days ago
      This one will have a dot.

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

      • dottershmidt 1220 days ago
        If you are to delete your last comment, the preceding comment will not reacquire its dot.
      • Ellipsis753 1220 days ago
        This is my most recent message. Does it have a dot?
        • wyldfire 1220 days ago
          Yes, but please don't participate in any more discussion on HN anymore otherwise this thread will all seem very confusing.
        • danso 1220 days ago
          Yes
    • nkurz 1220 days ago
      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.
    • perryprog 1220 days ago
      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
    • runald 1220 days ago
      This one will not have a dot.
      • jaifraic 1220 days ago
        I'm just gonna test this here.
        • jaifraic 1220 days ago
          This comment should have a dot. The above one not.
    • throwablePie 1220 days ago
      I think you are correct. That's something I failed to notice when I referenced your post.
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  • tialaramex 1220 days ago
    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.

    • skytreader 1220 days ago
      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. :)

      • cgriswald 1220 days ago
        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.
      • mcintyre1994 1220 days ago
        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.
    • human4fter4ll 1220 days ago
      >> exchanged a dozen terrible fish puns last week

      seems you have a sofishticated sense of humor

      • webmaven 1220 days ago
        > >> 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.

        • AnimalMuppet 1220 days ago
          Stop your carping...
          • human4fter4ll 1220 days ago
            that's enough fish puns. think we should scale back
            • AnimalMuppet 1220 days ago
              Whale, I enjoyed them. But you're right, they're causing the conversation to flounder...
              • webmaven 1216 days ago
                Oh, for Cod's hake, can't you do any betta than that?
    • derefr 1220 days ago
      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.)
    • singlow 1220 days ago
      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".
    • tomhoward 1220 days ago
      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.

      • toyg 1220 days ago
        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.
  • ulucs 1220 days ago
    Just wait until you see the italic reply button
    • cdolan 1220 days ago
      Wait why is this reply button italic, but others are not? Mind. Blown.
      • gpmcadam 1220 days ago
        Looks like an escaping issue with the formatting. There's an italic HTML element at the end of that comment.
    • na85 1220 days ago
      Is it possible to learn this power?

      edit: haha yes it is but not from a Jedi.

    • mmastrac 1220 days ago
      I've been on HN for a while and I have never noticed either of these. Huh.

      But now I know the secret

    • O_H_E 1220 days ago
      Damn, Dang. Are you playing with us? :D haha

      The simple site is way deeper than we thought.

  • gen_greyface 1220 days ago
    I've never noticed that, you have a keen eye
    • ant6n 1220 days ago
      Now it will never be unnoticed
  • hemmert 1220 days ago
    Interesting! Did a Google Image search for „Hacker News“, those full stops do not appear in any image. It must be rather newish.
    • eznzt 1220 days ago
      It's new. Noticed it when I woke up this morning (CET time)
  • Icyphox 1220 days ago
    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.

    • OJFord 1220 days ago
      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:

  • zaroth 1220 days ago
    It’s HN’s equivalent of a tracking pixel.
  • metafunctor 1220 days ago
    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?

    • IndrekR 1220 days ago
      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

      • ajdlinux 1220 days ago
        I thought 16GB sounded rather low - it's 8*16 = 128GB.
        • IndrekR 1220 days ago
          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.

  • jpxw 1220 days ago
    This is definitely new, I just noticed it too. Thought it was my HN client, checked when it was updated last - 2 years ago!
  • spicymaki 1220 days 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.
  • pmontra 1220 days ago
    Different files / functions / methods / views (pick your name) on the server rendering timestamps in a different way?
    • bromuro 1220 days ago
      Also my iOS client does it.
      • dewey 1220 days ago
        Don't these just work with web scraping most of the time? That would explain that.
  • filleokus 1220 days ago
    For me right now, only porpoise's and one of hemmert's comments are lacking the dot. Interesting...
    • porpoise 1220 days ago
      Because we are the only two in this thread who are in on the conspiracy. Heh
      • dolmen 1220 days ago
        You are also the only one who has his/her username shown in green.
        • scoot 1220 days ago
          Green means a new account.

          Now, do I get a dot, or not?

        • read_if_gay_ 1220 days ago
          You’re also lacking the dot for me while everyone else has it.
        • iso1210 1220 days ago
          I don't see a dot on your comment
    • isatty 1220 days ago
      That kinda rules out templating bugs I suppose
  • porpoise 1220 days ago
    It could be a coded message intended for certain people, now you ruined it
    • hemmert 1220 days ago
      A conspiracy...
      • 0-_-0 1220 days ago
        One of your comments was with and one without a dot, so it's not about who posted it.
    • rabuse 1220 days ago
      Zuckerberg, is in fact, a lizard.
  • danso 1220 days ago
    OMG. I wonder how long it would've taken me to notice this and now I can never not notice it.
  • s5ma6n 1220 days ago
    Maybe it is due to load balancing and different templates/release versions used in nodes?
  • chenpengcheng 1220 days ago
    it is annoying. as a reader, who cares about the last time someone else commented.

    whatever, i found reddit better.

  • dvh 1220 days ago
    Test
  • throwablePie 1220 days ago
    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?

    • rntksi 1220 days ago
      I think jn6118's explanation is closer.
  • krapp 1220 days ago
    ...and that was the day Hacker News gazed so deeply into its own navel that it collapsed into a singularity.