Yes, it was there for at least two hours, I think I can attest to that. In a full day. You guys really made a brilliant job of showing the moderation here isn't partisan.
But not after that. (Timestamps are bit ambiguous, but it seems like California time. Or failing that, Texas time, one hour apart.)
This matches the "including 4 hours after we reduced the penalty" statement.
My conclusion is that you set it to be enabled on the front page for four hours in the middle of the night, California time. So was it also not immediately set when you updated that comment - presumably?
3866 10-second intervals means the story spent almost 11 hours on the front page. I posted that we'd reduced the penalty on the story at 1479955509. So by my calculation, it spent over 9 hours on the front page after we reduced the penalty. But perhaps I've made an error and you'll find it. Also, we don't "set" things to be on the front page for a given number of hours. If I say we reduced a penalty, that's what I mean: we reduced the penalty, and the usual software mechanisms (time decay, votes and flags) resumed their usual course.
Now I need to ask you for something in return. You frequently post comments making false insinuations about the moderation here. I'm fine with answering questions and dispelling doubts, but only for people who are asking in good faith. I'm losing that feeling in your case, because these comments of yours are both common and nasty. Would you please stop doing this? Apart from it being a bummer at our end, it undermines the integrity of the community. Good-faith users have a right to know that we don't do the things you routinely accuse us of, but the cost of replying to such accusations is orders of magnitude greater than that of slinging them in the first place, so there's a huge asymmetry here.
Thank you. This reassures my faith in you in this area.
Regarding the favor in return:
I think like 80% of our encounters have not been regarding "false insinuations about the moderation here" but rather, relatively speaking, more straight-forwarded cases of me edging my contributions towards the types of content that you don't desire to have on your site. Which I suppose is your prerogative, but not something I necessarily agree with.
Beyond that: I could and should try to limit these kinds of (moderation) queries to when I think it really matters, and only then. This would have been one of those cases that really mattered, so I am glad that you did clarify this.
I think at least in the beginning I was kinda surprised that there was someone who was actually bothering to respond to my often flippant remarks - I was used to Reddit.
I'm glad to read this and super glad it worked in this case.
It would be great if you would do those things. Even just not being flippant would help a lot. In return, we're more than happy to answer questions (edit: and also to fix mistakes and reverse bad calls when we make them). We don't see all the comments, though, so to make sure we see a question it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com.
(I'm in Europe, so I was checking the frontpage many times while you guys were asleep.)
Eventually it did make it, that was quite a lot of hours later, and it only lasted for a handful of hours.
Edit: it strikes me now that there is a need for an hourly HN frontpage archive. Does this exist?