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Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

(karpathy.bearblog.dev)
615 points __rito__ | 8 comments | 10 Dec 25 17:23 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom

Related from yesterday: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632
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moultano ◴[10 Dec 25 18:28 UTC] No.46221469[source]▶
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.
replies(3): >>46221619 #>>46221904 #>>46222624 #
1. jeffbee ◴[10 Dec 25 18:57 UTC] No.46221904[source]▶
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.
replies(2): >>46221986 #>>46222046 #
2. latexr ◴[10 Dec 25 19:02 UTC] No.46221986[source]▶
> for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp.

What do you mean?

replies(2): >>46222053 #>>46222062 #
3. embedding-shape ◴[10 Dec 25 19:05 UTC] No.46222046[source]▶
> 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.

4. jeffbee ◴[10 Dec 25 19:05 UTC] No.46222053[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>46222344 #
5. embedding-shape ◴[10 Dec 25 19:06 UTC] No.46222062[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>46223655 #
6. consumer451 ◴[10 Dec 25 19:26 UTC] No.46222344{3}[source]▶
I believe that this is called "the second chance pool." It is a bit strange when it unexpectedly happens to one's own post.
7. Y_Y ◴[10 Dec 25 20:52 UTC] No.46223655{3}[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>46225008 #
8. embedding-shape ◴[10 Dec 25 22:42 UTC] No.46225008{4}[source]▶
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? :)