8 ms·
Use Timestamps
- bell-cot 3y agoYes, but...in an attention economy, timestamps are beneficial to readers and detrimental to authors.
- user261 3y agoAh! yes. The 5th force of nature and strongest of them all -- Force of Incentives.
- mog_dev 3y agoI don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.
- smarkov 3y agoPeople with technical skills can't accept that, but the ones without them that make up the majority couldn't care less. The vast majority of people don't know how to read or utilize anything past the domain name, hence why you constantly see people copy paste 300 characters long URLs of images from Google. Hell, a good amount of people don't even look at the domain name which is why phishing is so common.
- avodonosov 3y agoThen browsers should make the url more visible and distinctive. Colorize URL elements, etc.
- didntcheck 3y agoFor what purpose?
- avodonosov 3y agosee my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38275836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38275836
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cxr 3y agoURLs are not strictly technological oddities. Their closest equivalents are footnotes/citations. Marginalizing URLs as something that only "people with technical skills" do (and/or should?) care about is no different from any other phenomenon where you take some boring, everyday, mostly unremarkable practice that doesn't involve the use of a computer and then change it where the moment someone gets a whiff of the presence of a computer in the pipeline they throw up their hands and say, "I don't know"/"I don't get this"/"I'm not a computer person". It's really the doing of both non-technical people and technical people in and adjacent to the modern software industry alike that most people consider URLs gobbledygook instead of what they are: identifiers for a given work. It's especially perverse that the practices of both classes are responsible for most URLs being unsuitable for use Works Cited pages. That could definitely use some fixing, but we do such a poor job (in the US at least) already at explaining, during high school when it's supposed to be covered, the value of proper sourcing and citing that even smart kids come away thinking in terms of superficialities like the rigidity of formats and citation style rather than the actual fundamentals of scholarship. URLs are not exceptional in that regard.
- laserbeam 3y agoPhones have small screens, and most browsers only show the URL on demand when you do a gesture. Also, you generally can't fit the whole URL while in landscape on a phone. You need to scroll it sideways if you want to find something in it. I don't think we can expect URLs to be read in full by people on phones :(.
- avodonosov 3y agoOn demand is ok. But there should be an easy and convenient way to see. > You need to scroll it sideways if you want to find something in it. > I don't think we can expect URLs to be read in full by people on phones :(. That's because it's implemented inconveniently, a single line. When user taps the address bar, the browser could expand it into an URL editor, conveniently wrapping lines by url parameter boundaries, etc
- jankremer 3y agoI don’t think it is even possible to display the full URL by default in Safari on iOS.
- hk__2 3y agoI don’t know which model you have, but on mine you wouldn’t even have the space to display more than a 5-6 characters after the domain name.
- shric 3y agoFunnily, the post's example.of https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/ means I can see clearly the date and nothing more in my Firefox/Android URL bar
- bitzun 3y agoFirefox seems to always display the url after the protocol, even on mobile. I don't like the protocol omission, but I've grown to tolerate it.
- b112 3y agoOr mayhap, been forced to tolerate it? By UI freakazoids? (A scream goes out)Function before form, always!
- kstenerud 3y agoMeh, everything's converged on https now, unless you're loading from file (in which case you probably know already). With any other scheme, the browser is going to pop up a massive DANGER WILL ROBINSON that you have to click through. The scheme is rather pointless to display in a browser bar nowadays.
- account42 3y agoHaving a separate scheme for HTTPS was a mistake anyway. TLS should be a transport detail that doesn't change the URL at all just like DNSSEC, IPv6 and QUIC don't change the URL. The browser can still display the negotiated encryption and you need HSTS anyway to fully protect against downgrade attacks - and as older ciphers are broken even that is not going to be enough.
- IlliOnato 3y agoI agree 1000%.
- usrbinbash 3y agoPeople without a technical background could accept a browser that doesn't display an URL at all. Just put a nice big Button with the Google-Logo somewhere, which for many people is "The internet" and they are happy. And anyone claiming otherwise should riddle me this: How do most non-technical people in the world access "awesomepageireallylike.something"? That's right, they click into the address bar, start typing until the string they remebered appears, and then click on that. And what is that? Exactly: A Google search.
- avodonosov 3y agoURL is a central concept in web browsing. Hiding it from users goes against the main usability principle that the user should understand what's going on. One does not need a technical background to understand URLs. Browser hiding URLs is like an OS hiding file system structure from users, because files and directories are "too technioal" for them.
- usrbinbash 3y ago> that the user should understand what's going on Sure he should. But design maxime of a lot of contemporary software does exactly the opposite: Hiding as much of the "icky techy stuff" from the user as possible. > One does not need a technical background to understand URLs. That's true, but doesn't change the fact that most people don't. For example, how many people know that the domain of an URL is organised right-to-left? I met people in tech, including programmers, who never figured that out. > Browser hiding URLs is like an OS hiding file system structure from users, because files and directories are "too technioal" for them. I agree. And now open a contemporary smart phone interface, and show me, without any special tooling, the actual, "physical" file system. And these things are probably the most successful consumer computing platforms ever.
- avodonosov 3y ago> And now open a contemporary smart phone interface, and show me, without any special tooling, the actual, "physical" file system. Yes, I had phones in mind when writting the above :) > And these things are probably the most successful consumer computing platforms ever. Users don't have better choice in this market.
- rendaw 3y agoI don't like what Google's trying to do, but I don't think the address bar is good at of the roles it currently sits in (establishing trust, encoding state), and stands in the way of attempting new modes.
- AndroTux 3y agoWhy? Most urls nowadays are unreadable and nonsensical anyway. The only thing that really matters is the domain, and that’s displayed for you in a (hopefully) better way than many users would be able to parse themselves. Of course, you should always have the option to see the full URL, but why exactly do you need that clutter on display the whole time? It’s like complaining that the browser renders HTML instead of printing it all as unformatted text.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI don't see the address of buildings I'm in even when I stand in front of it on the street.
- guhidalg 3y agoTrue, and isn't the web amazing? If your website is nice, you always know exactly where you are by looking up! If only our buildings were this nice... But seriously, what are you trying to say, that we need to make software match our contemporary physical experience? No, we can do better.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- offices 3y agoI ran into this the first time I tried to cite an essay that was dependent on many internet sources. A shocking amount of it was 'date unknown'.
- darkwater 3y agoAmen to that! It's really frustrating when a date is not put there, especially on tech topics. If no tech version is written explicitly either, you are left wondering "will this still apply to my case or is it something super-old?" But beside selfish use-cases like looking for an answer to a problem, it is something that was already solved in the previous form of knowledge distribution: books. Why do we always take one step back when moving forward?
- hk__2 3y ago> But beside selfish use-cases like looking for an answer to a problem, it is something that was already solved in the previous form of knowledge distribution: books. Why do we always take one step back when moving forward? Note that with book you have the publication date, but you don’t know when each chapter was written. This doesn’t matter for most books, but for highly technical subjects it may matter.
- darkwater 3y agoThat's a fair point but I would expect - at least from high quality book - that all the book chapters are up to date when first published.
- nicky0 3y agoBut muh SEO
- user261 3y agoIt's something that I agree with and increasingly I add dates in my notes. In addition to that, using one single format is really important. if the article was published on say November 2nd. I wouldn't know if it was 11th February or 2nd November. DD MMM YYYY is safest. The 3Ms being Jan, Feb, Mar....
- eckesicle 3y agoThere’s some unexpected behaviour with MMM as a formatter, which is that it’s not always 3 characters long and differ subtle by locale. Notably on the JVM if your locale is en-GB every month is 3 chars: Jan, Feb, Mar, etc. until you get to September which is Sept. In en-US it’s just Sep. Of course, if you don’t specify the locale in code, it will choose the system default leading to lovely region specific exceptions for your servers in Ireland and England.
- bitcharmer 3y agoYYYY-MM-DD is the only correct format and I will die on this hill The most nonsensical approach is what the Americans use but let's not go there : - )
- noitpmeder 3y agoThe fact that this sorts correctly seals the deal. There is no better option.
- Veserv 3y ago
- bartvk 3y ago>should include a timestamp. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline. This was one of the ideas in the General Semantics philisophy. You don't much hear about it nowadays, it's a pre-war thing. One of the tenants was that you should date expressions. For example, if referring to a person, you'd write "Roosevelt, 1930" because a year later, Roosevelt may behave like a different person altogether.
- dom96 3y agoThat's a nice idea. I can think of at least one person that this would be useful for (Elon Musk, 2023).
- orthoxerox 3y agoYou need timestamps with time zone to track Elon.
- contravariant 3y agoMaybe we should even use terrestrial time, just in case.
- orthoxerox 3y agoSpace colonization is going to be a pain. We've just managed to get sensible datetime APIs with instants and zoned timestamps, but they only work when time is the same everywhere. As soon as relativity comes into play we'll have to come up with a different approach.
- jenadine 3y agoI think it depends on the kind of article. Some articles are timeless. So that's why I put the date at the end.
- biorach 3y ago> Some articles are timeless Probably a lot fewer than you'd think. And certainly not every article you write.
- 7373737373 3y agoI'm surprised that this isn't the case for many scientific papers
- malablaster 3y agoUdemy is really annoying for this. They intentionally hide the release date of courses.
- jimlikeslimes 3y agoI ran into a fun bug last week. I wrote a piece of .Net Core software that accepts a batch of transactions. The transactions are shovelled into Sql Server without much processing. Each transaction had a timestamp set to DateTime.UtcNow in C#. I didn't expect the transactions to end up with duplicate timestamps but DateTime.UtcNow only has a resolution of between 0.5 and 15 milliseconds. So in a tight loop I got duplicates and couldn't determine the order my transactions were processed when querying the db, which is important! In the end I used Sql Server's SYSUTCDATETIME which is precise to 100 nanoseconds. More importantly I gave all transactions in the batch the same timestamp, added a batch order int column, and a unique contraint on the timestamp, batchOrder columns. Turns out DateTime.UtcNow is not really designed to give you a precise value for a messaging or transaction system! More of a sometime that day, probably. Edit: don't trust timestamps, especially from different sources.
- Philip-J-Fry 3y agoTimestamps no matter how precise don't show you the true order. If ordinality is so important then you should be using something else that guarantees ordinality, like an incrementing ID or something, not timestamps.
- jimlikeslimes 3y agoYes I think in the end I'll likely go for an GUID Id column, an integer InsertOrder column, and a timestamp which is non-essential meta-data.
- skitter 3y agoTimestamps aren't necessarily monotonic anyways – what if the system time changes?
- marginalia_nu 3y agoNot everything is written at a given point in time and then forgotten about. There are many texts that are continuously updated over years and even decades.
- Heinrich_zHM 3y agoYou can include an edit timestamp.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThis still sort of codifies the edit is a discrete event, and not an ongoing process.
- jorams 3y agoThat's a good thing, because that final edit is a discrete event. At some point this ongoing process will end and the edits will stop. The people engaged in the process will likely forget or not be available to add a final timestamp, but an aging edit timestamp will automatically indicate this moment in time.
- account42 3y agoIt is always and ongoing process until it isn't. Knowing if/when the transition happened is useful.
- quickthrower2 3y agoA bit like a file with a created and updated timestamp then?
- jankremer 3y agoI think timestamps are even more important in that case.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoWhich timestamp is relevant on the body of a Wikipedia article that has been maintained for 15 years, with edits ranging from entire new sections being written to minor corrections of grammatical errors.
- worksonmine 3y ago> Safari, like most modern browsers hide most of the URL by default. What other modern browser does this? Tested both Firefox and Chromium and neither did.
- jankremer 3y agoThanks, I might need to correct that statement.
- skrebbel 3y agoI’ve found that internal documentation is a great place to put timestamps. People often complain that eg architecture pictures or design documents tend to go out of date, as if that’s somehow a big enough problem to not make them. Instead, consider making whatever documentation seems useful at a given moment and timestamp it with a clear, prominent “this was accurate on yyyy-mm-dd”. It will still be useful a year later, because people are actually very good at dealing with “ok this detail might have changed since then so I’m not going to let that confuse me when mapping the doc/diagram to the code” kind of stuff. When things have diverged too much, just make a new one. And timestamp it!
- skrebbel 3y agoAddendum: don’t rely on your git/wiki/document-system for tracking the timestamp. “This was accurate on $DATE” has a very different meaning than “this document was last edited on $DATE”. It might be 2 years out of date but someone fixed a typo last week. Just put a sentence/textbox somewhere with the date. If someone does a proper update, they will proudly edit that sentence too.
- dspillett 3y ago> It might be 2 years out of date but someone fixed a typo last week Or it might have had a fuller update last week, but from older information (perhaps going from years old to months old) because it is information that has a high processing latency (like census data). Though in this case the date probably belongs in the text with the timestamp representing the edit date, either way both times should be made clear.
- LelouBil 3y agoFrench government websites do this for help articles, they have a "last edited" and a "last verified" date on each article
- skrebbel 3y agoLove it!
- withinboredom 3y agoIf I don't see a date, I just don't read it.
- jankremer 3y agoThat was my problem with the article about nix. I wouldn’t have read it if it was 10 years old (and probably out of date).
- quickthrower2 3y agoNeeds a (2023)
- jankremer 3y agoTrue. Although there is the timestamp on the website and the one on HN.
- readthenotes1 3y agoOf course using a timestamp can also cause troubles. Newsmax reported that PBS knew about the assault on the capitol before it even happened because they put a timestamp on their web page for the Trump congregation when they first published it early in the morning. They then proceeded to update the page without updating the timestamp, making it look like they predicted the invasion hours in advance
- ta8903 3y agoAren't news organizations supposed to put an updated timestamp on edits anyways?
- lofaszvanitt 3y agoI already start to visualize the new crawler service that will put a date on articles that first appear on the web. Since everyone suck up to the seo demon. Yes, I want to be the first, yes, look how shiny I am and I was published right now, not 3 years back. Instead of making a new feature: hello, I'm the shiny new search, and what I offer is that whenever I have found 250 articles that perfectly solve your problem for a search term, I round robin these on the "first page" and you decide which one to choose from the offered ones. This way everyone has an equal opportunity to get some views plus nobody has to do these mating dances to get on the front page. What a brave new world!
- kookamamie 3y agoIronically the blog post is missing a timestamp.
- karl42 3y agoIt shows "2023-11-15" below the title for me.
- mat0 3y agoThat wouldn't be considered a timestamp in my book. For starters, it doesn't have time information, only date information. Quickly asking ChatGPT it gives this answer: In computing, timestamps are commonly expressed in formats like "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss" (year-month-day hour:minute:second). When pressed about this particular time detail, ChatGPT elaborates: While "YYYY-MM-DD" is a common date format, it's not complete for a timestamp, which typically includes both date and time information. A complete timestamp might look like "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss" to include hours, minutes, and seconds. So, no, this post doesn't contain a timestamp, and it already fails in its own advice.
- leejo 3y agoThe blog post contains a timestamp in the RSS feed. In fact, the referenced post by Julia Evans also contains a timestamp in its RSS feed as well. However, the post is making the point that the date should be in the post as viewed by the human reader as clearly as possible, which isn't the case in the the referenced post by Julia Evans. In the third paragraph the author notes that "Only when I copied the URL to complain about it I discovered the date there". So there is no confusion on the author's part about what a timestamp is versus what a date is.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoAre you really referencing ChatGPT as an authority on factual matters?
- xenic 3y agothe post contains not one but two timestamps; <meta property="article:modified_time" content="2023-11-15T13:40:37+01:00"> <meta property="article:published_time" content="2023-11-15T10:12:30+01:00">
- nicbou 3y agoI always use timestamps. Not just on blog posts, but on files, notes and sketches. For public stuff, dates help others judge whether the information still applies. This matters for most types of information, but particularly technical advice. I write about German bureaucracy and a lot of the information from a few years ago is outdated. For private stuff, dates gice you a sense of time. A good example is if you've been writing about a weird lump on your neck hurting for over 4 weeks, or realise that you were stressing about the same things a year ago. Sometimes it's just nice to see "on this day" trivia about yourself. If you have the date, you can correlate data from different sources onto a single timeline. I made a nice project out of that: https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline
- majke 3y agoDan Luu famously doesn't have timestamps on the blog posts, like https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/ https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/ There is date on the index page Jan - 2016, however it's not obvious from the content page. I think the argument is that the content should be corrected if it's outdated. So, it shouldn't matter when it was written.
- lxgr 3y agoThat’s ambitious, but entirely unrealistic in many cases. For one thing, people do screenshot/download/archive web sites; these copies don’t get updated, and it can be important to know when they were last updated (as opposed to when the snapshot was created by a third party).
- didntcheck 3y agoIn that case he should put a "last updated" on each posts. Plus that would offer even more incentive to keep things up to date, since you're giving yourself a public "mark of shame" if you don't
- earthboundkid 3y agoIt's extremely annoying because his posts get reposted to social media a lot and you suddenly have to go on a treasure hunt to figure out if he's revisiting old topics, or you read it five years ago.
- adrianvoica 3y agoYes. Yes. Yes. A million times, yes. I can't stress this enough: always put visible timestamps on all content (be it web or otherwise, online or offline) and current version number for any kind of software (apps, libraries, frameworks, etc.) on their info / landing / documentation pages. It should be immediately visible if a certain content is dated or not. Some examples of software-related landing pages: https://sindresorhus.com/caprine/ https://sindresorhus.com/caprine/ (Caprine app) - shows current version number https://riot.js.org/ https://riot.js.org/ (Riot.js framework) - shows NPM badge with latest version number ... it's not so hard now, is it?
- pelorat 3y agoA <time> and <datetime> element exists in HTML, but why don't an element exists that will format a date and time written in a specific format to the format of what the user want? I'm talking about automatic TZ conversion.
- lxgr 3y agoCan the browser always infer what the user wants? For example, sometimes I mostly care about when, in relation to my local time (and in particular how long ago) something was written; other times, the local time of the event happening is relevant too (e.g. “did this happen before or after markets close in the country where it happened”).
- didntcheck 3y agoIt's been a while since I did any frontend work, but I recall that the Date Javascript object does do that. I was able to just send a UTC timestamp from the backend, then do something like (I've not tested this right now) new Date(timestampMs).toLocaleString() and it just worked. Correct timezone and locale. Not sure why that simple approach isn't more widely used
- dusted 3y agoUse timestamps, and also, don't hide URLs from the user.
- lijok 3y agoFew things irk me as much as systems that show you "N hours/minutes/seconds ago" instead of the timestamp. GitHub for example, of all systems, should know better. Trying to write up a report of any sort and not having access to accurate timestamps is very annoying.
- jraph 3y agoI'm with you. It's usually possible to hover the thing to have the actual timestamp show in a tooltip, but this is so clunky.
- pirates 3y agoI haven’t checked github, but on gitlab this is a user preference setting that you can change. But I do wish that the full timestamps were the default.
- thraxil 3y agoYep, my theory is that often that's done as a way to sidestep difficult issues around dealing with time zones. "2 hours ago" doesn't require you to think about whether your user is in the same time zone as your database.
- gbalduzzi 3y agoYou still have to calculate the distance between a date on the DB and a date on the client, the timezone difficult issues are not sidestepped at all
- thraxil 3y agoYour server and DB are both UTC. If not, that's something you just need to fix. The server can then calculate the difference trivially. Then you no longer need to do anything on the client. Eg, this is what Django's timesince or timeuntil filters do: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/templates/builtins/#std-templatefilter-timesince https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/templates/builtins...
- jraph 3y agoWhen I was doing research, I was bothered by the date not being anywhere in papers (PDFs). You'd have to search the title of the paper with the names of the authors on the internet, figure out which version you are reading and find out the year of the publication using dblp [1] or finding out in which journal or conference it was published. Yet, it's so important to actually know when something was written. [1] https://dblp.org/ https://dblp.org/
- estebarb 3y agoI don't know of any paper template that includes the date. Usually it is only found if the preprint paper adds it (like arxiv) or in the copyright notice, that not all papers include. With topics like ML and NLP that move fast, even the day/month becomes important, not just the year.
- ckdot2 3y agoUse human readable dates: Every blog post should include a human readable date. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline. Timestamps are hard to read. Use date and time: Every blog post should include the time it has been created. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline. I was reading Jan Kremers post about blog timestamps and it was not immediately clear to me what time the post was created. Only when I did a look into the HTML source I discovered the time there.
- jmclnx 3y agoI went back to RCS ($Id$) for my blog text files, so by default I get it all in UTC. That is the one thing I hate about git, it does not allow you to tag the file with ci information. So RCS tags my entries automatically. But a non issue to me these days, I moved away from git due to changes Microsoft made after it purchased github. I am back "home" to RCS and anon ftp.
- crazygringo 3y agoI mean, of course. But the whole point of people/companies not putting timestamps on articles and posts is precisely to hide how very old their content is, because they are (rightly) afraid people will click away. It's not laziness or ignorance, it's generally intentional. So it's not like this advice is going to change their minds.
- ricardobeat 3y agoI agree, but this is a result of both SEO and humans prioritizing “fresh” over “old” content, which led to the removal of timestamps - or in the case of news websites, eternally rolling artificial “last updated” timestamps on decade-old articles.
- karmakaze 3y agoGive context in titles. (The post is a size of a tweet about using them on publications.) Don't make me click to see if I might be interested in opening this content. Dropping timestamps is very akin to using terse catchy titles, it draws in the unsuspecting and gives content wider/longer exposure.
- alanbernstein 3y agoNormally I would agree with you, but the "In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline." is implied by the generality of the title.
- karmakaze 3y agoI was thinking of distributed systems vs vector-clocks etc. If it had said "publication date", which is really what's being asked that would be clear enough.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoNah, I thought it would be about storing dates in databases. Implication is inaccurate, inaccurate is bad, like "a year ago" in timestamps.
- zaxomi 3y agoThere is more than one WordPress theme that shows the time of day,month and day of month, but not the year.
- snisarenko 3y agoTotally agree with the author here. But I'll go one step further. Anywhere a time or date is shown, it should also show corresponding time zone. It's maddening to see a time in any UX and not know what time zone it's in. And YES, a date shown on its own needs a time zone!
- joshmanders 3y agoWhy? Is it pertinent that you know that the thing was posted in CST and not UTC? Genuinely curious as to why knowing the timezone instead of approximate date matters so much.
- snisarenko 3y agoEven for blogs it might matter if they are talking about breaking news. A timezone can roll a date forward/backwards one day. I am talking about having a UX date/time standard for all of UX, not just blogs. There is UX where knowing timezone is critical, ex: when analyzing logs, breaking news etc. To keep things simple it would be great if everyone agreed to always attach TZ info to any date or time shown. Furthermore, any blog/article that might not appear important at the time it's posted, might become important DUE to breaking news. So just put timezones everywhere an be done with it :)
- earthboundkid 3y agoDan Luu, please, I'm begging you.
- Robin_Message 3y ago> was reading Julia Evans post about nothing [my emphasis] Off-topic, but is this a typo of "Nix" or a passive-aggressive jab at Julia for blogging about the tedium of actually getting anything to actual work in modern development?
- arp242 3y agoIt's gone now – Probably either accidental translation from German or intentional word joke ("nothing" in German and Dutch is pronounced similar to "nix");
- butz 3y agoAlso, use correct lang attribute value for text, otherwise your website is being offered to be translated into English.