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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

That's weird, I see the same (and I read that thread a few days ago). I see the top comment as from 4 hours ago but then in the user's history it's from 4 days ago.

I'm confused.

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the HN mods "re-upped" this submission, which works by pretending that it was submitted later (and hence the ranking calculation treats it as new etc). It also fudges how the timestamps appear on the page. (presumably because otherwise people would be confused why a post from an hour ago has comments made 4 days ago)

On the user pages this doesn't happen and it shows the original time.

> It also fudges how the timestamps appear on the page.

Oh that's interesting, thanks for the explanation! (and a bit weird too but not in a bad way)

Altering public timestamps, with the effect of claiming that a particular person said a particular thing on a different day than you know they actually did, is potentially very bad.

It is very bad, period. I love HN but I am seriously considering to not ever come here because of this. Please PG, can you not claim publicly that I say things at a given time, if I don't do that?

In case someone would like to know more, it's called the second-chance pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

I’ve seen this with other posts in the past. I’m glad somebody else is acknowledging it. I was having a major “Mandela effect” feeling when I noticed it.

we need a Streisand effect in the new submissions queue: if a whole bunch of people downvote it, it is by definition interesting.

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