Comment by kiwih
4 months ago
Strange question - has the "submitted at" times been edited on this post and all the comments here? I swear I read everything on this submission, including the comments, several days ago, but nothing here is longer than a few hours.
Actually, google search agrees with me - if you search for the title here + hackernews, it says that it saw this post and several of the comments 6 days ago (apologies that I can't link to the cache as this is no longer a feature of Google).
Why are all the post and comment times here saying less than a few hours ago?
Falsifying timestamps is a kludge that HN uses when moderators give a post a second chance to gain traction on the front page.
(Personally, I have a strong aversion to falsifying public information like this, and I hope that they will prioritize implementing this better.)
This might explain why I see a post, then have trouble finding it the next day. It sounds like it can move around in the order of things.
That might be a different mechanism.
Unlike Reddit, the ordering of HN posts isn't only a function of the numbers of votes, number of comments, and time. Some other moderation activity can cause a front page post to suddenly be buried many pages deep.
It's been second chanced and "shadow time altered" (probably).
You can see from the ID number that this post really is much older than seven hours.
( bonus l33tc0d3 qu3est: knock up something to probe and plot posts per unit time, etc. ( I'm taking my dad to the shop instead ) )
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 * https://news.ycombinator.com/pool