7 ms·

Honest question: what's up with the (2 hours ago) notation? I've seen this before in a couple of git-related and other applications but personally never underst

by stinos 6y ago

Honest question: what's up with the (2 hours ago) notation? I've seen this before in a couple of git-related and other applications but personally never understood why one would pick this over date/hour. Is this a cultural thing? Do some people actually find this better (from the point of conveying timestamp information)? My main problem with it, apart from not having a high resolution, is that it usually just leads to me trying to calculate the actual date from it because that just works for me, being used to it. Same with e.g. Thunar: to me it's maddening that it defaults to displaying 'today/sunday/saturday' and then mixes that with plain dates for timestamps older than a week (or so). Can be me, but this is just so confusing and harder to parse?

atoav 6y ago
Depends, for some things (e.g. the timestamp of a blog post) it just doesn't need to be precise. This thing has the advantage that you don't need to know the current time and subtract the timestamp from it to see it is 2h old. For a lot of other stuff it doesn't make any sense at all. E.g. when you have a lot of things all with "2 hours ago" the precision is too low, when you are more interested in the time of day something was happening etc.
bbbobbb 6y ago
It does depend on the context but I mostly use the '2 hours ago notation'. Sure, if you're looking for a specific timestamp or something that happened 2 months ago, it's not useful and then I switch to the timestamp format. Majority of the time I care about stuff like what happened today, yesterday just to get the rough idea.
nxpnsv 6y ago
It's timezone independent... I think it makes sense when hour time scales make sense. For days/week dates work just fine
saurik 6y ago
I agree: to me this is like a car giving you driving directions by saying "turn north" instead of "turn left"; there are people who legitimately find either way to be easier, and if you give them the wrong way they are just going to have to convert it... I find absolutely dates and times to be super intuitive, and I have most of my life laid out in my head with absolute dates, and find relative dates and times to be infuriating. This is the kind of thing that should just always be a setting.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jeddy3 6y ago
  Isn't your analogy flipped the other way around? "North" is technically correct but an absolute reference, just like a date. While "Left" is relative just like "two hours ago" With the relative reference you don't need to know which direction you are heading, or what time it is right now.
  - eesmith 6y ago
    On a tangent, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language "The language is notable for its use of pure geographic directions (north, south, east, west) rather than egocentric directions (left, right, forward, backward),[7] though such "purity" is disputed.[8] Still, it has given its speakers a remarkable sense of direction."
    - saurik 6y ago
      This isn't actually a tangent, and is a reason I knew there were people who prefer absolute direction.
      - eesmith 6y ago
        I think of it as a tangent because for the people I pointed to it's not a preference. It's not "easier" but rather, there is no other option but absolute directions. On another tangent, there are some fields which use relative date almost exclusively, like Ma used in paleontology and geology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#SI_prefix_multipliers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#SI_prefix_multipliers and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myr . And "BP" is used in archeology and some other fields as a date before 1950 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present .
  - saurik 6y ago
    It was a demonstration of the premise of relative vs. absolute, not an attempt to argue that one is somehow more obvious and should be considered better to everyone (which I disagree with).
grandchild 6y ago
It depends whether you want to see age or point in time, a.k.a do you want to compare it to now or to some other specific time. I personally take longer to parse an ISO formatted timestamp when all I want to know is age (i.e. difference from now). An "x [unit] ago" is much faster for me. The absolute timestamp is probably more handy when I have other dates to compare it to, because I could line them up vertically and visually diff the digits. I think it boils down to the fact that I don't have enough working memory to precisely memorize all numbers in a complete timestamp.
oakmad 6y ago
You’ve never worked across time zones have you? I find it’s a lot easier to say “that commit from 2 hours ago” than do the mental math during a code review or debug session. However I do think it should be opt in as I understand your POV and in my experience it’s never an issue until it’s a big one. In our ui we show ago, local and point of origin for all time zones we deal with in a popover.
- stinos 6y ago
  You’ve never worked across time zones have you? Actually I have, and then we all use GMT when communicating timestamps. But it's like another commenter mentions: yes, 'that commit from 2 hours ago' is still doable (though if it matters we communicate SHAs), but when it goes to 'a day ago' it doesn't really work out anymore.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    "GMT" That alone hints you're either working in the UK or you're confusing GMT with UTC, or both.
    - phaemon 6y ago
      Or, nobody cares about fractions of a second when organising a meeting, so to all intents and purposes they are the same.
      - user5994461 6y ago
        Point being, they are not the same. There is one hour difference between UK Time, GMT and UTC for half of the year, due to daylight saving time.
        alanpearce 6y ago
        GMT stays the same throughout the year. The UK switches to BST for the summer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time
szszrk 6y ago
It's pain in the ass when you troubleshoot CI problems as well. Was the issue before or after this particular commit? Can't tell, have to check in some other tool.
imhoguy 6y ago
Honestly, when I enter a project page I glance these to quickly evaluate how active the development is. E.g. for Ruby library when I see "9 years ago" everywhere then likely the code needs some work to get it working with the latest Ruby version. But when there is just one "2 months ago" on `lib` directory it tells me somebody came back here to maintain the things. I am not sure if list of accurately formated timestamps would be quicker to scan. Regarding unmaintained projects, usually my next step is to check recent PRs list or Network Graph page to see if there is some more active fork.
- berkes 6y ago
  The fact that many people are surprised when they find out that "whoa; 2003, that's like 17 years ago" only pushes this idea. It probably depends on your goal, though. Whether you want to know "the (relative) age of something", or "the point in time of some event". I think most often the first is the usecase, which is probably why most projects choose that.
- zeveb 6y ago
  That's one thing I really like about Common Lisp: a project can be untouched for over a decade and still work perfectly with the very latest versions of SBCL/LispWorks/Allegro/CLISP/whatever. Sometimes a library can just be done.
bartread 6y ago
Agree. Timezone issues aside (which this does simplify), I'd like to see both "N hours ago", plus the actual date and time it happened (in my local timezone). With hours it's not so bad, but gets worse with longer time periods. I find it incredibly aggravating when services say "N days ago", or "N weeks ago", because this simply serves to obscure when an event actually occurred. Just give me the damn date and time in my local timezone!
- imhoguy 6y ago
  Just hover over "...ago" to get a full date.
  - johnisgood 6y ago
    HN for one does not support that. :/
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    I hovered my finger over my tablet screen but nothing happened...
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    I just hovered over the "6 hours ago" in > imhoguy 6 hours ago | parent but nothing happened :P
agrajag 6y ago
> personally never understood why one would pick this over date/hour Providing a timestamp gives you the same information with higher precision _provided you know when now is_. I can tell you what day of the week it is, but not what the day of the month it is. Sometimes day of the week even takes extra cycles. Relative time tells me the order of magnitude since last update. Was it today (I can assume they have complete context) or yesterday (they probably need a little background to catch up). Order of magnitude since last update is generally more useful to me than knowing the time since last update.
ClikeX 6y ago
Context matters. If I want to know the age of something, i want "x time ago" to quickly determine age. For many OSS projects this is nice because I can quickly see how active a project is/has been.
rndgermandude 6y ago
What bugs me with this is the resolution that is usually truncated. "2 hours ago" might be fine enough. 2 days ago (instead of a longer "2 days 3 hours ago") maybe not, especially when I quickly want to see what's freshest or oldest and everything just says "2 days ago".
sethammons 6y ago
I hate it. “17 days ago” - yeah, thanks, now let me manually figure out _when_ that was. I can see how some folks would like “30 minutes ago” but why not give both (a timestamp and relative offset)?
- zie 6y ago
  My thinking: The actual timestamp should be in a tooltip/hover if you are going to default to relative dates like this.
  - donio 6y ago
    Even then it's wasting my time. The "17 days ago" is basically never what I want.
amelius 6y ago
It's especially frustrating when you need to compare two timestamps. The problem also exists on HN. For example, in a discussion you might want to check who said something first. But if both comments say "3 days ago", then that's kinda difficult (unless you want to wait until one of them flips to 4 days ago).
- cpach 6y ago
  Pro-tip: If you go to https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ and search for the comments there, you should be able to see their exact timestamps.
- sethammons 6y ago
  I've never had a problem with HN's relative time. Exact ordering and times of events don't matter to me for comments on HN - their order is not relatively important aside from parent-child relationships. Times do matter when I'm debugging a release that made it to prod with a bug or if I'm comparing events that happen in time.
chriswalz 6y ago
I've updated branch suggestions to now show both relative and absolute times. Cheers!

by stinos 6y ago

atoav 6y ago

Depends, for some things (e.g. the timestamp of a blog post) it just doesn't need to be precise. This thing has the advantage that you don't need to know the current time and subtract the timestamp from it to see it is 2h old. For a lot of other stuff it doesn't make any sense at all. E.g. when you have a lot of things all with "2 hours ago" the precision is too low, when you are more interested in the time of day something was happening etc.

bbbobbb 6y ago

It does depend on the context but I mostly use the '2 hours ago notation'. Sure, if you're looking for a specific timestamp or something that happened 2 months ago, it's not useful and then I switch to the timestamp format. Majority of the time I care about stuff like what happened today, yesterday just to get the rough idea.

nxpnsv 6y ago

It's timezone independent... I think it makes sense when hour time scales make sense. For days/week dates work just fine

saurik 6y ago

I agree: to me this is like a car giving you driving directions by saying "turn north" instead of "turn left"; there are people who legitimately find either way to be easier, and if you give them the wrong way they are just going to have to convert it... I find absolutely dates and times to be super intuitive, and I have most of my life laid out in my head with absolute dates, and find relative dates and times to be infuriating. This is the kind of thing that should just always be a setting.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jeddy3 6y ago
Isn't your analogy flipped the other way around? "North" is technically correct but an absolute reference, just like a date. While "Left" is relative just like "two hours ago" With the relative reference you don't need to know which direction you are heading, or what time it is right now.
- eesmith 6y ago
  On a tangent, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language "The language is notable for its use of pure geographic directions (north, south, east, west) rather than egocentric directions (left, right, forward, backward),[7] though such "purity" is disputed.[8] Still, it has given its speakers a remarkable sense of direction."
  - saurik 6y ago
    This isn't actually a tangent, and is a reason I knew there were people who prefer absolute direction.
    - eesmith 6y ago
      I think of it as a tangent because for the people I pointed to it's not a preference. It's not "easier" but rather, there is no other option but absolute directions. On another tangent, there are some fields which use relative date almost exclusively, like Ma used in paleontology and geology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#SI_prefix_multipliers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#SI_prefix_multipliers and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myr . And "BP" is used in archeology and some other fields as a date before 1950 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present .
- saurik 6y ago
  It was a demonstration of the premise of relative vs. absolute, not an attempt to argue that one is somehow more obvious and should be considered better to everyone (which I disagree with).

grandchild 6y ago

It depends whether you want to see age or point in time, a.k.a do you want to compare it to now or to some other specific time. I personally take longer to parse an ISO formatted timestamp when all I want to know is age (i.e. difference from now). An "x [unit] ago" is much faster for me. The absolute timestamp is probably more handy when I have other dates to compare it to, because I could line them up vertically and visually diff the digits. I think it boils down to the fact that I don't have enough working memory to precisely memorize all numbers in a complete timestamp.

oakmad 6y ago

You’ve never worked across time zones have you? I find it’s a lot easier to say “that commit from 2 hours ago” than do the mental math during a code review or debug session. However I do think it should be opt in as I understand your POV and in my experience it’s never an issue until it’s a big one. In our ui we show ago, local and point of origin for all time zones we deal with in a popover.

stinos 6y ago
You’ve never worked across time zones have you? Actually I have, and then we all use GMT when communicating timestamps. But it's like another commenter mentions: yes, 'that commit from 2 hours ago' is still doable (though if it matters we communicate SHAs), but when it goes to 'a day ago' it doesn't really work out anymore.
- user5994461 6y ago
  "GMT" That alone hints you're either working in the UK or you're confusing GMT with UTC, or both.
  - phaemon 6y ago
    Or, nobody cares about fractions of a second when organising a meeting, so to all intents and purposes they are the same.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      Point being, they are not the same. There is one hour difference between UK Time, GMT and UTC for half of the year, due to daylight saving time.
      - alanpearce 6y ago
        GMT stays the same throughout the year. The UK switches to BST for the summer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time

szszrk 6y ago

It's pain in the ass when you troubleshoot CI problems as well. Was the issue before or after this particular commit? Can't tell, have to check in some other tool.

imhoguy 6y ago

Honestly, when I enter a project page I glance these to quickly evaluate how active the development is. E.g. for Ruby library when I see "9 years ago" everywhere then likely the code needs some work to get it working with the latest Ruby version. But when there is just one "2 months ago" on `lib` directory it tells me somebody came back here to maintain the things. I am not sure if list of accurately formated timestamps would be quicker to scan. Regarding unmaintained projects, usually my next step is to check recent PRs list or Network Graph page to see if there is some more active fork.

berkes 6y ago
The fact that many people are surprised when they find out that "whoa; 2003, that's like 17 years ago" only pushes this idea. It probably depends on your goal, though. Whether you want to know "the (relative) age of something", or "the point in time of some event". I think most often the first is the usecase, which is probably why most projects choose that.
zeveb 6y ago
That's one thing I really like about Common Lisp: a project can be untouched for over a decade and still work perfectly with the very latest versions of SBCL/LispWorks/Allegro/CLISP/whatever. Sometimes a library can just be done.

bartread 6y ago

Agree. Timezone issues aside (which this does simplify), I'd like to see both "N hours ago", plus the actual date and time it happened (in my local timezone). With hours it's not so bad, but gets worse with longer time periods. I find it incredibly aggravating when services say "N days ago", or "N weeks ago", because this simply serves to obscure when an event actually occurred. Just give me the damn date and time in my local timezone!

imhoguy 6y ago
Just hover over "...ago" to get a full date.
- johnisgood 6y ago
  HN for one does not support that. :/
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  I hovered my finger over my tablet screen but nothing happened...
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  I just hovered over the "6 hours ago" in > imhoguy 6 hours ago | parent but nothing happened :P

agrajag 6y ago

> personally never understood why one would pick this over date/hour Providing a timestamp gives you the same information with higher precision _provided you know when now is_. I can tell you what day of the week it is, but not what the day of the month it is. Sometimes day of the week even takes extra cycles. Relative time tells me the order of magnitude since last update. Was it today (I can assume they have complete context) or yesterday (they probably need a little background to catch up). Order of magnitude since last update is generally more useful to me than knowing the time since last update.

ClikeX 6y ago

Context matters. If I want to know the age of something, i want "x time ago" to quickly determine age. For many OSS projects this is nice because I can quickly see how active a project is/has been.

rndgermandude 6y ago

What bugs me with this is the resolution that is usually truncated. "2 hours ago" might be fine enough. 2 days ago (instead of a longer "2 days 3 hours ago") maybe not, especially when I quickly want to see what's freshest or oldest and everything just says "2 days ago".

sethammons 6y ago

I hate it. “17 days ago” - yeah, thanks, now let me manually figure out _when_ that was. I can see how some folks would like “30 minutes ago” but why not give both (a timestamp and relative offset)?

zie 6y ago
My thinking: The actual timestamp should be in a tooltip/hover if you are going to default to relative dates like this.
- donio 6y ago
  Even then it's wasting my time. The "17 days ago" is basically never what I want.

amelius 6y ago

It's especially frustrating when you need to compare two timestamps. The problem also exists on HN. For example, in a discussion you might want to check who said something first. But if both comments say "3 days ago", then that's kinda difficult (unless you want to wait until one of them flips to 4 days ago).

cpach 6y ago
Pro-tip: If you go to https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ and search for the comments there, you should be able to see their exact timestamps.
sethammons 6y ago
I've never had a problem with HN's relative time. Exact ordering and times of events don't matter to me for comments on HN - their order is not relatively important aside from parent-child relationships. Times do matter when I'm debugging a release that made it to prod with a bug or if I'm comparing events that happen in time.

chriswalz 6y ago

I've updated branch suggestions to now show both relative and absolute times. Cheers!