Comment by rebane2001
6 days ago
wait what the heck yeah, this is the same post as from a few days ago, i guess the comment and post timestamps got glitched??
6 days ago
wait what the heck yeah, this is the same post as from a few days ago, i guess the comment and post timestamps got glitched??
That'a thing HN's second chance pool does. If you mouseover the "3 hours ago" or whatever on a comment, it will tell you the actual post timestamp.
That is insanely bad borderline hostile UI.
Before we started doing it this way, the threads would fill up with far more off-topic comments ("why is this 3 day old post on the frontpage?" and so on). That was a much bigger problem. Relativizing the timestamps to reflect the re-up time was our attempt to address that. Overall, it has worked ok—that is, while it does still lead to offtopic confusion and complaints in the threads (boo) there is far less of it than there was before (yay).
I'm open to suggestions of how to do it better! But you also need to consider the cost of adding explicit details to the UI. If we did that every time something like this came up, HN would have become an unreadable mess a long time ago.
5 replies →
There have been almost zero visible changes to the HN codebase in over a decade, but the one thing I would love to see them add is a little flag on the heading of the post to say it is 2nd Chance Pool to avoid all these comments every time this happens and everyone is confused :)
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