Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429068, which was posted earlier.
It's an artifact of HN's re-upping system, described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and links back from there. About the timestamps, there are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Sorry for the confusion—I know it's weird but the alternative turns out to be even more confusing and we've never figured out how to square that circle!
The relativized timestamps only appear on the frontpage and /item pages, so you can always go to links like https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=lairv or https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=anthropic.com to see the absolute order.