4 ms·
Why? What's wrong with just the date?
by mvdtnz 3y ago
Why? What's wrong with just the date?
- SpaceNoodled 3y agoSometimes I turn my math brain off
- kube-system 3y agoSometimes relative time is more user friendly or more accurately answers a question.
- tome 3y agoIt significantly reduces mental exertion to have the calculation performed for you!
- pintxo 3y agoThe problem with this is that the dev cannot know which calculation I need!
- tome 3y agoRight, and that's the case with every feature implemented in software. Showing both the precise datetime of creation and a "human readable ago" seems to cover a lot of bases that users seem to like, though. Recall, we're commenting on a thread that's proposing removing a feature that already exists (so presumably people want it).
- myk9001 3y agoThe idea of rendering relative dates instead of the actual dates caught up about 10 maybe 15 years ago (a relative date here, yes). I think -- but don't take my word for it -- it was Jeff Atwood who started advocating for it. So we might be talking not about removing a feature, but correcting a mistake here :)
- mvdtnz 3y ago"Significantly"? Are you sure?
- myk9001 3y agoWhat are some situations where you find calculating the relative date useful? Personally, if I care about a timestamp at all it's because I want to compare it to another date (maybe a past date, maybe a present or future one): a deadline, an event, a birthday. Relative dates actually make such comparisons harder. On the other hand, seeing an actual date like 2022/10/03 it's dead simple to tell that was a year ago, it's equally easy to tell whether something happened this year, or last month, or two days ago, etc.
- johnnyanmac 3y agowe're talking about a casual context, so the average user doesn't need an exact time stamp on when a picture was taken. The average person doesn't talk in time stamps, so the paradigm was shifted to display how people communicated. Another nitpick is that relative dates solve the date format issue. No need to fuss over YYYY/MM/DD or DD/MM/YYYY or any other permutation, but we all can agree on when "7 months ago" was.
- pridkett 3y agoIn my mind 2020 was still last year. Having both relative and absolute is a nice reminder.
- bombcar 3y agoBut I really don't need to see 2000 (Twenty three years ago).
- xigoi 3y agoI don't usually remember what date it is.
- doomroot 3y agoBecause oftentimes you think in chunks of time not dates. If a meeting is in 3 hours in instantly know what kinds of things I can do before that meeting. If a meeting is at 4:45pm. I have to know the current time, calculate the difference then I can start planning my time.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoThere’s this wonderful thing called a “watch”…
- 0fox 3y agoThe main complaint in this thread seems to be that the chunks of time reported are misleading.
- mvdtnz 3y agoSeriously? Your complaint is that you have the extra mental overhead of having to know the time?
- johnnyanmac 3y agoFor the average person, yes. Less trivial is taking into account time zones. if you're traveling and have some jet lag, "10:30" may not actually mean 10:30 to your biological clock. but "in one hour" is universal (even if your body is confused).
- funcDropShadow 3y agoYou know, you can dumb down stuff too much. But if I am travelling it is even more error prone for my computer to compute the correct difference.
- watwut 3y agoI have current time constantly on the right bottom portion of the screen. I do know the time literally any time I want to.
- 3y ago
- jameshart 3y agoAn actual usecase: When I’m looking at when a merge request was merged in to master in gitlab, often the level of granularity I am interested in is ‘roughly how long ago’, or ‘what day in the last week was that?’ - the thing I am trying to figure out is just ‘did that go live last Tuesday or last Wednesday?’ I can recover that information from a date with a little mental arithmetic or a cross lookup to a calendar but it would be nice if the computer told me that. On the other hand, sometimes when I am looking for when a git merge request was merged in I am looking for ‘was it a few minutes before or a few minutes after this error started happening in production?’ And the precise timestamp is of intense interest. At that point seeing a bunch of merge requests tagged as ‘last Tuesday’ is incredibly unhelpful to me. But so would just an unadorned date be. In general I would lean towards providing the information in a raw form but also contextualized. But ‘just a date’ is often the worst of both worlds. Even worse if I don’t know which time zone the date is being reported relative to (people often display UTC dates without clarifying that, or even considering that dates need time zone adjusting too). My dream contextualized timestamp would be something like 2023/10/09 13:47:20 (Monday, 5 days ago)
- bombcar 3y agoIt would be nice if the OS/Browser could detect a date, and calculate those for you, wheresoever it saw it. Of course, this brings up that text date strings are often vague/could have multiple interpretations.
- dTP90pN 3y agoIf web developers would just start using `<time>`, we might someday reach such a reality.
- mvdtnz 3y agoObviously when I said "just the date" I mean the full date time stamp, which is the thing we're discussing.
- john_cogs 3y agoYou can set your preference to display exact times in GitLab. See my prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881456