Hacker News ate my ID

4 pointsby sbp13 anni fa2 comments

Before the HN outage, I posted a link on Twitter to an entry I submitted, so that people could comment on it:

https://twitter.com/sbp/status/419852001732591617

By some chance, archive.is actually picked it up so I can prove what was there before:

http://archive.is/TKmvn

But now, when you click through to that entry, it's some completely random thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7016011

Compare that to the archive.is capture above.

So it appears that the site ate my submission, all the comments on it, and reused the ID for some other thing. I also lost all my glorious, glorious karma, so I'm back down to (1). I know.

Now this is kind of hilarious, but perhaps IDs should be incremented by some epsilon after any outage to at least prevent accidental link hijacking?

1 comments

sp33213 anni fa

Have you seen the explanation? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069013 A few hours of data was lost, so I'm guessing yours isn't the only reused ID. Your epsilon idea isn't bad though.

sbp13 anni fa

Yeah, I saw the explanation. It should be possible to calculate the average rate of submission, and therefore the ID allocation rate, and then increment by that plus some safety margin when restoring.

It's just ironic that the first time in nearly 1500 days of lurking on HN I actually decide to post, the site itself eats my submission.

[deleted]13 anni fa