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garbagetime | 3 years ago

Simple explanation, I'm afraid: I was dumb.

There are no exceptions (...at least, none that I'm currently aware of). Dang's "missing comment" actually is on his page, just not where I was looking.

The comment was new, but it was a descendant of one of dang's older comments, so it appears further back in his profile than where I looked.

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sillysaurusx|3 years ago

It’s a surprisingly easy mistake to make. I thought it might be that, so I triple checked, and still missed it. So you’re not alone.

One time many years ago, I almost emailed a bug report claiming the very same thing. Luckily I noticed right beforehand.

It speaks to Dan’s dedication that he did so much for the site in a single day that both of us missed his comment buried in the avalanche. :)

In fairness, the discussion was a little confusing, since it was combining a few different topics (showdead, OPs thread, flagging, and admin’ing) so a mixup probably isn’t too surprising.

HN is completely fascinating, and I appreciated the analytical eye you were bringing to it. If you keep doing that, you’ll notice a ton of surprising little details over time. Minimaxir tried to document them in “undocumented features of hacker news” and the list is still far from complete. Plus it’s cool that the site is ever-evolving.

One of my favorite new features is that if you go to an old submission, e.g, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 (or thereabouts), all the users’ names will show up in green if they were a new account at the time. I.e. it preserves the historical fact of someone being a new user in a given comment thread.

It’s such a small detail, yet there are quite literally thousands of such small details that all add up to something wonderful.

Regardless, have a good weekend, and cheers for the chat.

breck|3 years ago

> Simple explanation, I'm afraid: I was dumb.

Probably 20% of the time I send an angry email to dang (generally about censorship), it turns out I did something dumb and read the site wrong.

I double check and triple check, but still often make silly mistakes. (He is always gracious about my mistakes).