Ask HN: What is causing this bug in HN?

This may be old news to you, but there seems to be a bug in the comments count being displayed.

I was looking at an old news item that was on HN, and it was pushed way back. When I did get to the article (the item was in the 14 hundreds..), I noticed that the # of comments is displayed incorrectly - the number of comments is missing completely.

https://img.skitch.com/20101221-b5rea4wjxxkgqpyp2mst3ekswc.jpg

That question does have a bunch of comments..

https://img.skitch.com/20101221-8m4b9ffd8a9kuyjaaw8jnaiy1y.jpg

I am suspecting that the count function that counts the comments is slow in responding? Could this happen because the DB is taking too long to get the results back? Note that I did not find the counts to be incorrect - it just does not show up.

pg 15y

That's not a bug, that's an optimization. I think I made this change around 9 months ago.

bhudmanOP15y

I noticed that counts show up sometime, and sometimes it doesn't. Since this is not consistent behavior, I assumed this is a bug.

I'd be curious to know why this changes.. I am trying to find out the most common news source on HN based on comments.

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