Bugged out publish date on Hacker News

Chris

I noticed this for a Hacker News article, the publish date shown is Jan 1, 1970.

Article link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192118

I know there are other discussions about on-going improvements to search result date. I made this a separate discussion because a date of Jan 1, 1970 seems to indicate that code broke somewhere. Jan 1, 1970 is 0 in UTC, that almost always means something broke.

I'm making the assumption that something on Kagi's side broke, I checked the hackernews page for anywhere it has a UTC date set to 0 and I didn't see anything. In fact, hackernews.com is pretty minimal, the only place that I can see that it indicates date is:

<span class="age" title="2024-08-08T14:46:48">
    <a href="item?id=41192118">4 days ago</a>
</span>

For this article, the date should've been Aug 8, 2024.

silvenga

I have to wonder if HN is trying to hide the dates 🤣

Not following any HTML specification here - no meta tags, no date tags, no date in the URL, no update date in the headers, and not even specifying the date in a text node (but in a freaking attribute...).

Google does appear to have a date in it's index, although, the timezone appears wrong.

I would almost say the correct behavior here is to not show a date at all (since the date is likely completely unknown, hence displaying the Unix epoch).

Value7609

silvenga It's already a wonder that HN is still up! HN is a program written in a custom lisp running on a single core server, it's probably better to add as few extra tags to the HTML output.

Source: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=author%3Adang+%22single+core%22&sort=byDate&type=all (dang is the moderator of HN)

silvenga

Value7609 I mean, it's not about adding an extra tag, but using the correct tag for the existing node. e.g. using the date tag instead of a span (which screen readers use, plus Google and Bing).

It would just be

<date class="age" datetime="2024-08-08T14:46:48">
    <a href="item?id=41192118">4 days ago</a>
</date>

And it would be better for everyone involved 😆

So, in my mind, it's either a "they want to hide the dates" or "they are developers that hasn't kept up-to-date with HTML from the past 10 years". That said, HN is neither XHTML, HTML5, HTML4, or HTML3 compliant... so maybe it is a lack of knowledge (or care)...

silvenga

Ignoring the bad result, I saw this for another site:

There are publish dates on this page from what I can tell.