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

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

#91

Post by wruza »

jiofih wrote: post #63
rendall wrote: post #9

Well done! You have discovered part 1 of The Secret! Congratulations!! Clues to Part 2 of The Secret can be found in this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random Stakes are high! At the end of the trail of clues, the Council of Immortal Wizards will ask you to join their ranks, at which time they will confer immortality upon you. There are only 10E100-1 steps to go! Good luck!

Haha, this was great. I arrived at an article about “John Frum” which did sound like a secret, and was quite the rabbit hole [1]. It got me worried about history. The whole story sounds like 90s zine fiction, which I think it is - there is no record I could find beyond the original story from 1995 on Harper’s Magazine [2], yet it is now in Wikipedia, stated as a fact. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum [2] h…

Oh god, I just watched a video about John Frum, and now this subthread, it briefly felt like a delusion.

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

#95

Post by skytreader »

tialaramex wrote: post #85

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 ask…

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. :)

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

#98

Post by mcintyre1994 »

skytreader wrote: post #95
tialaramex wrote: post #85

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 ask…

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…

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.

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

#99

Post by gpmcadam »

cdolan wrote: post #94
_v7gu wrote: post #92

Just wait until you see the italic reply button

Wait why is this reply button italic, but others are not? Mind. Blown.

Looks like an escaping issue with the formatting. There's an italic HTML element at the end of that comment.
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