Absurd News

"1h ago" covers thirty minutes and "2h ago" covers sixty

The timestamps here are built by converting an age to a unit and rounding: minutes under an hour, hours under a day, days after that. Round-then-label looks obvious and produces buckets of uneven width.

The first bucket in each unit starts at the boundary but is cut off halfway to the next value, because rounding sends 90 minutes to "2h" rather than "1h". So the first hour and the first day are each half the width of everything that follows. The minute labels, by contrast, are exact to the minute — all sixty of them — and the hour labels average 57.5 minutes rather than 60.

And two labels mean the same thing

A story 1,439 minutes old reads one way. One minute later it reads another, and both are the same elapsed time to within a minute.

It is the switch to days happening at 1,440 minutes while the hours label is still counting up to 24 that does it. Capping the hours at 23 removes the overlap entirely and changes nothing else.

None of which is wrong exactly — a relative timestamp is meant to be approximate, and nobody reads "3h ago" as a claim about the minute. But the approximation is uneven in a way the labels do not admit, and the one place it matters is sorting by eye: two stories both marked a day old can be twenty-three hours apart.

The headlines get trimmed, but only when it is safe

Feed titles routinely end with the outlet's name after a dash. The source is shown separately here, so the suffix is redundant and gets removed — but only when it matches the source exactly.

The exactness is what makes it safe. A headline that merely ends in a dash phrase keeps it, a different outlet named inside the headline keeps it, and a feed that supplies no source name has nothing stripped at all. The alternative — cutting at the last dash — would quietly eat the end of every headline written with one.