However, it's important to correct inaccuracies like the one mentioned here: >>39231537 . Robin89, can you please fix the text? I know it was just a mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong.
Also, it would make it easier for me to respond to the questions here if you'd link the HN IDs on your page to the actual HN threads. Currently they link to social-protocols.org. Obviously you can link to whatever you want but I'm having trouble tracing the questions here. Everyone has their own list of "what happened to story X, Y, Z, and what about W and V and J too" and while I'm happy to answer all those in principle, there are physical limits on how many I can work through.
I'm going to be in meetings for most of the next few hours but I'll try to answer questions in this thread later, assuming I don't drown in it.
Which are they? It's important to include links so that (a) we can say what's going on, and (b) so readers can make up their own minds.
You might be talking about stories that went in to the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at >>26998308 ), which get a random placement on HN's front page.
I have heard that sometimes the submission time is reset, such as when returning from the second chance pool. This could also create an unnatural ranking order, so the original time before the reset should be listed as well.
Yes, the timestamp munging is an artifact of HN's re-upping system, described at >>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....
The original times are always available because the modified time is used only on the frontpage and the article's /item page. If you find the article on /from or /submitted, for example, the timestamp will be the original. The two timestamps converge over time.