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

Post by tyingq » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #48

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!

Off topic: is it new for HN to elide urls this way? I’ve never noticed it before but it really annoys me. I like that HN is just text, and preprocessing it this way adds no usability. It makes it harder to copy a URL, if anything, and it certainly isn’t prettier.

Post by johnchristopher » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 1:29 PM UTC

porpoise wrote: post #22

johnchristopher wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the name of the effect that when you click on something random you still end up on something related to you and you think "it's not that random". Because I got that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbridge

The mental habit of seeing connections?

Post by jaifraic » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

runald wrote: post #37

jn6118 wrote: post #31

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.

This one will not have a dot.

Post by willcipriano » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 1:33 PM UTC

jaifraic wrote: post #56

jaifraic wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just gonna test this here.

This comment should have a dot. The above one not.

Post by rntksi » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

throwablePie wrote: post #35

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 th…