Just wait until you see the italic reply button
Wait why is this reply button italic, but others are not? Mind. Blown.
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Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
101–110 of 129 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
#102It could be a coded message intended for certain people, now you ruined it
Zuckerberg, is in fact, a lizard.
Re: Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
#103This 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…
>> exchanged a dozen terrible fish puns last week
seems you have a sofishticated sense of humor
Re: Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
#104Just wait until you see the italic reply button
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Re: Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
#105Interesting! 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197967
The answer is there
Re: Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
#106Re: Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
#107https://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.
Re: Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
#108https://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 dis…
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...
Re: Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
#109https://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 dis…
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)
Re: Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
#110https://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 dis…
Just take it out of the element and add a tooltip to it.
The pedants will inspect the source code first before asking.