4 ms·
Can we talk about all the problems with dates formated as "today", "tomorrow" or "2 hours ago" when trying to figure out how far apport two log-events happened?
by Moru 2y ago
Can we talk about all the problems with dates formated as "today", "tomorrow" or "2 hours ago" when trying to figure out how far apport two log-events happened? I at least want an OPTION to set that I want all dates down to the second exactly when they happened... And in a standard format with Y-M-D H:m:s that can sort naturally. The most significant part first, the least significant last.
- noja 2y agoYeah at least I want a mouseover to see the real timestamp, and the column to be sortable.
- stephen_g 2y agoThe absolute worst are ones like “last month”, “last week” or “earlier this week” - almost absolutely useless! Especially for logs of things that happened at work, I extremely frequently want to know the day and date something happened, but that style obscures that sometimes to the point where you can’t even tell which week it was!
- Moru 2y agoAnd if you save something and need to look it up a year later it's even less useful. Last week computed from save date? File save date changed because zip-file didn't save the date? Well, now it's worse than useless, now it's missleading.
- bigiain 2y agoI consider those as "management oriented time deltas". Usually specifically requested by Project Managers because they're so imprecise that they can avoid being held responsible for anything...
- Aardwolf 2y agoI also hate "1 year ago" when it was actually 23 months ago
- tonyhart7 2y agothis is what I hate about youtube, when you look at the title and says 1 year ago and its just 1 month away for 2 years lol
- SirFatty 2y agoExactly what I was going to post... In the earlier days of YT, I don't think that was how it worked, but that could just be my faulty memory.
- johnisgood 2y agoAt least it gives you the date when you hover over with your cursor.
- apple4ever 2y agoOh yeah I've run into that a bunch too. The problem is they don't want to do "1.5 years ago" or something like that, and the rounding is really bad.
- LorenPechtel 2y agoMost of the time it's the human-friendly version. The detail should be available, though.
- pastage 2y agoI agreed I have gone so far as to replace strings in HTML with the date in the <time> tag, but it is not always available in that tag especially now with Javascript frameworks taking over. Further your wording makes it clear to me why date formatting is hard, what is most significant is clearly subjective.
- andreareina 2y ago"Most significant" in this context is in analogy to most significant bit/digit, which is objective. In this case, the year.
- bigiain 2y ago> in a standard format with Y-M-D H:m:s Make sure that has a timezone (or better still, is explicitly in UTC). Also, bytes are cheap these days, let's have millisecond precision seconds there too. Lets go full ISO 8601 and use yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss.sssZ at least this way you have a recognised standard to appeal to if some other code or library can't parse your datetimes. (One reason I'd accept _not_ using ISO8601 dates is if your database uses a datetime format that's equally human readable and unambiguous, MySQL users might use YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss or YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss.sss with an assumed and well documented UTC timezone.)
- boopdewoop 2y agoWhy not just use epoch? render it however you like. - Posted at 1724222105
- lionkor 2y agoI prefer human readable datetime for debugging, because there are a lot of programs which have timings and timeouts for certain operations. Being able to quickly observe that a timeout happened in 500 ms instead of 1.5s would be interesting, epoch does not show you this information. Similar with quickly jumping to a certain day.
- Dylan16807 2y ago> Being able to quickly observe that a timeout happened in 500 ms instead of 1.5s would be interesting, epoch does not show you this information. 1724222105000 and 1724222105.000000 are common forms that solve that problem.
- mjevans 2y agohttps://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/ https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/ RFC3339 allows (space) to replace the T, which is about 1000 times more readable for a human. ISO8601 and RFC3339 both agree the time part of should include E.G. a Z for the Zulu (UTC) timezone abbreviation. I'm of the mindset that unspecified timezones (the MySQL format mentioned YYYY-MM-DD hh;mm:ss etc) are 'undefined behavior' and therefore context dependent. For user facing applications they should be the local 'normal persons' timezone, while for operator (E.G. SQL console) and programmed interface facing tasks should be either UTC of TAI time, as expected by the system.
- maxglute 2y agoYeah I wish all time is given in some standardized iso/unix time and then have user reformat depending on on browser or OS settings.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]