Ask HN: How to get timestamp from HN comments?

3 points

10 years ago

I am doing a small project that implies parsing the HN comments, and I would love to be able to read the time of the comments displayed. However the webpage only gives this information:

    <span class="age">
      <a href="item?id=____">X days|hours|minutes ago</a>
    </span>

Is it possible to retrieve the exact date somehow? I see that Firebase is doing it somehow [1], but it might be:

1. They have a special partnership which allows them to plug into their data in a different way

2. They are parsing threads every N (10?) minutes and rounding the seconds

I think it'd be ridiculous to have to load a full API request for each comment in my project to Firebase only to get their timestamp, so I'd love some advice on how to get that. If any HN developer sees this, could we get something like this (or any other standard way)?

    <span class="age" data-timestamp="Mon Oct 31 16:05:12 2016">
      <a href="item?id=____">X days|hours|minutes ago</a>
    </span>

[1] https://github.com/HackerNews/API

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