Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

Notable how this is only possible because the website is a good "web citizen." It has urls that maintain their state over a decade. They contain a whole conversation. You don't have to log in to see anything. The value of old proper websites increases with our ability to process them.

Yes! See "Cool URIs Don't Change"^1 by Sir TBL himself.

1. https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

There are things that you have to log in to see, and the mods sometimes move conversations from one place to another, and also, for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp.

> for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp.

What do you mean?

> and the mods sometimes move conversations from one place to another

This only manipulates the children references though, never the item ID itself. So if you have the item ID of an item (submission, comment, poll, pollItem), it'll be available there as long as moderators don't remove it, which happens very seldom.

There is some action that moderators can take that throws one of yesterday's articles back on the front page and when that happens all the comments have the same timestamp.

Submissions put in the second-chance pool briefly appear (sometimes "again") on the frontpage, and the conversation timestamps are reset so it appears like they were written after the second-chance submission, not before.

I believe that this is called "the second chance pool." It is a bit strange when it unexpectedly happens to one's own post.

> because the website is a good "web citizen." It has urls that maintain their state over a decade.

It's a shame that maintaining the web is so hard that only a few websites are "good citizens". I wish the web was a -bit- way more like git. It should be easier to crawl the web and serve it.

Say, you browse and get things cached and shared, but only your "local bookmarks" persist. I guess it's like pinning in IPFS.

Yes, I wish we could serve static content more like bittorent, where your uri has an associate hash, and any intermediate router or cache could be an equivalent source of truth, with the final server only needing to play a role if nothing else has it.

It is not possible right now to make hosting democratized/distributed/robust because there's no way for people to donate their own resources in a seamless way to keeping things published. In an ideal world, the internet archive seamlessly drops in to serve any content that goes down in a fashion transparent to the user.

Let Reddit and friends continue to out themselves for who they are.

Keeps the spotlight on carefully protected communities like this one.

> It's a shame that maintaining the web is so hard that only a few websites are "good citizens"

It's not hard actually. There is a lack of will and forethought on the part of most maintainers. I suspect that monetization also plays a role.

I never noticed that. What a weird lie!

I suppose they want to make the comments seem "fresh" but it's a deliberate misrepresentation. You could probably even contrive a situation where it could be damaging, e.g. somebody says something before some relevant incident, but the website claims they said it afterwards.

This is IPFS

I think the reason is much simpler than that. Resetting the timestamp lets them easily resurface things on the frontpage, because the current time - posting time delta becomes a lot smaller, so it's again ranked higher. And avoiding adding a special case, lets the rest of the codebase work exactly like it was before, basically just need to add a "set submission time to now" function and you get the rest for free.

But, I'm just guessing here based on my own refactoring experience through the years, may be a completely different reason, or even by mistake? Who knows? :)

In my experience from the couple of times I clicked an IPFS link years ago, it loaded for a long time and never actually loaded anything, failing the first "I wish we could serve static content" part.

If you make it possible for people to donate bandwidth you might just discover no one wants to.

I think that many are able to toss a almost permanently online raspberry pi in their homes and that's probably enough for sustaining a decently good distributed CAS network that shares small text files.

The wanting to is in my mind harder. How do you convince people that having the network is valuable enough? It's easy to compare it with the web backed by few feuds that offer for the most part really good performance, availability and somewhat good discovery.