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One pet peeve of mine is "human readable dates", especially for a directory listing. If I'm scanning for something I copied into a folder yesterday amongst othe

One pet peeve of mine is "human readable dates", especially for a directory listing. If I'm scanning for something I copied into a folder yesterday amongst other things, I don't want everything to show "1 day ago" if I'm looking for something I did around 11am. I want the dates and times. That goes for forums like HN. Show me the date/time and also "7 hours ago" or whatever if you have to. I've never understood taking that information away. I wonder if it's a consequence of infinite scroll or something.

keybored 2y ago
One thing I really like about all of the ago formats: - What it says: 1 year ago - What it is: 1 year and 10 months ago
fuzztester 2y ago
Yes, I hate that approach too. I think it started with either Web 2.0 startups (I was working with one at the time, that implemented that in their product), or with Google and suchlike companies around that time, in their general web apps or social media web apps. I agree, they should provide the detailed time, then provide the days ago thing too, if they want to.
crabsand 2y ago
The same I feel, so I didn't bother to print human readable dates in my open source mlops project. xvc file list[0] prints times in the same format even if it changed a minute or a year ago. [0]: https://docs.xvc.dev/ref/xvc-file-list https://docs.xvc.dev/ref/xvc-file-list
hhh 2y ago
You can hover over the time on HN and get a timestamp.
- tirpen 2y ago
  Not if you are on a phone or similar device, which lots of people are. Important info like that should never be only accessible by hovering a mouse pointer that may or may not exist.
dlivingston 2y ago
I agree. GitHub does this too on commits. "foo.cpp modified last year." It makes no sense, at least without the ability to view additional datetime information.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  Yes. If we are in the middle of the current year, modified last year could mean anything from half a year ago to one and a half years ago.
- TheBengaluruGuy 2y ago
  Often I want to see exact what time I made a commit to correlate it with some error code and it’s only giving it by day. Such a bummern
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  You can hover over the date for an exact timestamp. Maybe someone can write a userscript to replace the relative dates to exact ones.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    the point is that you should not need to hover over the dates to get the exact ones. it hinders fast viewing of the data, when it is more than a small amount.
    - buzzerbetrayed 2y ago
      Depends on the application and your personal preference. It's way "faster" for me to see a HN comment was posted "1 hour ago" than it is for me to see the absolute time string and do the math myself. Further, I don't care about the exact time a HN comment was made. I care about roughly how long ago it was posted so I know if the conversation is still going.
      - teytra 2y ago
quirino 2y ago
I wonder if sites could use the HTML <time> tag for this. They could choose the human readable format but still give us the time so that it could be replaced or overlayed with some extension. I always try to use it when writing HTML. (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/time https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...)
tjoff 2y ago
Yeah that is such an amazing anti-feature. And how do you deal with changes? Like, when does 1 day ago become 2 days ago? According to google it becomes two days ago after 48 hours. That means if you look at your phone after 47 hours it will say 1 day ago and you'll be tricked into it happening yesterday. Human readable my ass. Or, you know the specific day because it was the day after your friends birthday or whatever. And you try to find a specific item, but you have to sift through an entire months of shit because all the information you get is "three months ago".
- pas 2y ago
  The intent make sense (humans are better at durations than with absolute timestamps), but the lack of granularity is ridiculous. It should be "1d 20h ago" or based on the dates in question maybe more or less granual. (It's a hard UX problem, but that just means that the program ought to know what the user wants. What's important to them. Are the searching for something? What patterns to highlight? Ie. if there's a directory with a 1000 files but only 2 old ones maybe put some emphasis on them, etc.)
- xp84 2y ago
  I utterly hate this on iOS. Suddenly after an hour or something, you irretrievably lose the time on a notification. There’s not even some fiddly power user way to force it to show you.
wocram 2y ago
This is a setting, you can change it to any other date format you want.
- SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
  Yep, `--time-style`.

keybored 2y ago

One thing I really like about all of the ago formats: - What it says: 1 year ago - What it is: 1 year and 10 months ago

fuzztester 2y ago

Yes, I hate that approach too. I think it started with either Web 2.0 startups (I was working with one at the time, that implemented that in their product), or with Google and suchlike companies around that time, in their general web apps or social media web apps. I agree, they should provide the detailed time, then provide the days ago thing too, if they want to.

crabsand 2y ago

The same I feel, so I didn't bother to print human readable dates in my open source mlops project. xvc file list[0] prints times in the same format even if it changed a minute or a year ago. [0]: https://docs.xvc.dev/ref/xvc-file-list https://docs.xvc.dev/ref/xvc-file-list

hhh 2y ago

You can hover over the time on HN and get a timestamp.

tirpen 2y ago
Not if you are on a phone or similar device, which lots of people are. Important info like that should never be only accessible by hovering a mouse pointer that may or may not exist.

dlivingston 2y ago

I agree. GitHub does this too on commits. "foo.cpp modified last year." It makes no sense, at least without the ability to view additional datetime information.

fuzztester 2y ago
Yes. If we are in the middle of the current year, modified last year could mean anything from half a year ago to one and a half years ago.
TheBengaluruGuy 2y ago
Often I want to see exact what time I made a commit to correlate it with some error code and it’s only giving it by day. Such a bummern
fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
You can hover over the date for an exact timestamp. Maybe someone can write a userscript to replace the relative dates to exact ones.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  the point is that you should not need to hover over the dates to get the exact ones. it hinders fast viewing of the data, when it is more than a small amount.
  - buzzerbetrayed 2y ago
    Depends on the application and your personal preference. It's way "faster" for me to see a HN comment was posted "1 hour ago" than it is for me to see the absolute time string and do the math myself. Further, I don't care about the exact time a HN comment was made. I care about roughly how long ago it was posted so I know if the conversation is still going.
    - teytra 2y ago

quirino 2y ago

I wonder if sites could use the HTML <time> tag for this. They could choose the human readable format but still give us the time so that it could be replaced or overlayed with some extension. I always try to use it when writing HTML. (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/time https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...)

tjoff 2y ago

Yeah that is such an amazing anti-feature. And how do you deal with changes? Like, when does 1 day ago become 2 days ago? According to google it becomes two days ago after 48 hours. That means if you look at your phone after 47 hours it will say 1 day ago and you'll be tricked into it happening yesterday. Human readable my ass. Or, you know the specific day because it was the day after your friends birthday or whatever. And you try to find a specific item, but you have to sift through an entire months of shit because all the information you get is "three months ago".

pas 2y ago
The intent make sense (humans are better at durations than with absolute timestamps), but the lack of granularity is ridiculous. It should be "1d 20h ago" or based on the dates in question maybe more or less granual. (It's a hard UX problem, but that just means that the program ought to know what the user wants. What's important to them. Are the searching for something? What patterns to highlight? Ie. if there's a directory with a 1000 files but only 2 old ones maybe put some emphasis on them, etc.)
xp84 2y ago
I utterly hate this on iOS. Suddenly after an hour or something, you irretrievably lose the time on a notification. There’s not even some fiddly power user way to force it to show you.

wocram 2y ago

This is a setting, you can change it to any other date format you want.

SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
Yep, `--time-style`.