4 ms·

I prefer the HN method of 28 min, yesterday, 2 hours ago, etc... for HN. The older a comment or post, the less relevant it is to a particular discussion. This s

I prefer the HN method of 28 min, yesterday, 2 hours ago, etc... for HN. The older a comment or post, the less relevant it is to a particular discussion. This site is for real-time discussions of articles, so it is optimized for that use-case. The older a comment, the less relevant it is towards the immediate discussion. Thus, older comments have less precision, because those details don't matter for the discussion. I'd expect a site/application that is designed for students to manage homework would have different date/timestamp requirements.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
HN may be optimized for current discusions, but is also a repository of knowledge; I frequently land on years old threads from Google searches. For older times, an explicit ISO timestamp has at least two benefits: 1) I can compare it easily to other dates (e.g. is that comment older or more recent that event X, or software version Y), and 2) time of the day is a half-decent proxy for telling whether the US or Europe was awake then. And while you can justify the inprecise stamp on HN, there's no excuse for GMail and a score of other messaging software doing the same. When I'm looking at the date of an old e-mail, I almost always need the exact date and time. "2 weeks ago" is useless. "2019-09-27 08:43" tells me it happened before work, on a day after an important meeting, etc.
catalogia 7y ago
ISO8601 date/time can easily be transformed into the fuzzy format HN uses, but not vice versa since the fuzzy format is lossy. If HN sent dates to the client in ISO8601, the client could then transform that format into the format of their choosing with client-side javascript (either a userscript, or delivered to the user by HN.)
Jedd 7y ago
It's hard to be sure this isn't satire. You mentioned 'for HN' twice in the same sentence. Your 2nd, 4th, and 5th sentence all try to assert the same thing - older comments are less relevant than newer comments - despite there being no evidence, anywhere, that this is the case. Your 3rd sentence is partly true, though there's some historical record aspect to HN comment threads that you're discounting. Your second paragraph is a non sequitur. Sites that correlate points in time with timestamps are ubiquitous, and there's rarely a compelling case for using wildly different approaches to displaying same.
MertsA 7y ago
They could easily do it the Reddit way and still provide a timestamp but keep the simplicity and relative time format. Just have it pop up the timestamp on mouse hover. That's still very simple and can be effectively done using just CSS.
- cnst 7y ago
  You don't even need any CSS for that — the title attribute alone would be sufficient.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

HN may be optimized for current discusions, but is also a repository of knowledge; I frequently land on years old threads from Google searches. For older times, an explicit ISO timestamp has at least two benefits: 1) I can compare it easily to other dates (e.g. is that comment older or more recent that event X, or software version Y), and 2) time of the day is a half-decent proxy for telling whether the US or Europe was awake then. And while you can justify the inprecise stamp on HN, there's no excuse for GMail and a score of other messaging software doing the same. When I'm looking at the date of an old e-mail, I almost always need the exact date and time. "2 weeks ago" is useless. "2019-09-27 08:43" tells me it happened before work, on a day after an important meeting, etc.

catalogia 7y ago

ISO8601 date/time can easily be transformed into the fuzzy format HN uses, but not vice versa since the fuzzy format is lossy. If HN sent dates to the client in ISO8601, the client could then transform that format into the format of their choosing with client-side javascript (either a userscript, or delivered to the user by HN.)

Jedd 7y ago

It's hard to be sure this isn't satire. You mentioned 'for HN' twice in the same sentence. Your 2nd, 4th, and 5th sentence all try to assert the same thing - older comments are less relevant than newer comments - despite there being no evidence, anywhere, that this is the case. Your 3rd sentence is partly true, though there's some historical record aspect to HN comment threads that you're discounting. Your second paragraph is a non sequitur. Sites that correlate points in time with timestamps are ubiquitous, and there's rarely a compelling case for using wildly different approaches to displaying same.

MertsA 7y ago

They could easily do it the Reddit way and still provide a timestamp but keep the simplicity and relative time format. Just have it pop up the timestamp on mouse hover. That's still very simple and can be effectively done using just CSS.

cnst 7y ago
You don't even need any CSS for that — the title attribute alone would be sufficient.