

HN approaching millionith item? - cool-RR

I've just noticed that the `id` number in the url of HN posts is 9-ishly close to one million. I assume this includes every single comment, and not just submissions.<p>Am I misinterpreting the meaning of that number, or are we close to the 1,000,000th Hacker News post?
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pg
Close but not quite. We also use items for job postings, individual poll
choices, and for messages in the messaging system (which is mostly used with
people applying to YC). There probably aren't more than a thousand or so items
that aren't posts though.

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ars
Also, deleted comments probably don't get their id's reused.

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sutro
Put on several pots of coffee. Apparently this "arc" hot mess melts down into
Y2K-style Armageddon the moment any integer gets incremented above 999,999. So
we're going to have to port this site over to Cobol on Cogs before that can
happen. It's going to be a long weekend.

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jackowayed
Comments definitely count. Everything is an item (note how comments and posts
both have links that are /item?id=###), just some items happen to be replying
to other items.

That's actually one thing I really admired when I first saw HN from a
programming point-of-view. "Of course! Why should comments be any different
than posts? Posts are just comments that don't reply to anything!" The best
part of that is that when you do that, nested comments Just Happen, because
comments are commentable just like posts because they're all items.

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est
In case it worked:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000000>

and previously:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1>

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richardw
Doubt it's posts, if Slashdot just got to 100k posts:
[http://meta.slashdot.org/story/09/12/11/1615202/Slashdot-
Tur...](http://meta.slashdot.org/story/09/12/11/1615202/Slashdot-Turns-100000)

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wglb
Your are correct, as noted elsewhere.

However, HN is getting posts at quite a higher rate than slashdot, from casual
observation.

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e1ven
In Slashdot, they count Posts and stories differently. Slashdot just hit 100K
stories.

From what I understand, HN stores them together and uses a single idex (which
is approaching 1M), so the numbers are counts of separate things.

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jacquesm
If there would be a way to 'branch off' a comment by marking it with a title
of its own then every comment could be the start of a new thread and HN could
be this giant tree.

That way nothing would ever be 'off topic' other than the leaf that got turned
into a branch in its own right.

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windsurfer
I think votes increase the id. I'd need to check the source though.

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jacquesm
You don't need to check the source for that it makes absolutely no sense. That
would mean that with every vote all the content on the site would move around,
like a giant musical-webpages version.

Votes are at the cross of users and items, they live in their own space.
They're 'owned' by a user and they are pointing to the item that was voted on,
which contains a counter tallying up the total.

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sshconnection
1M GET!

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zandorg
10 GOTO 2M

