Hacker News Reader

Compare LWN and Hacker News. Both are very simple, but the comment section of Hacker News has an emphasis on content, and metadata is showed in a very simple and toned down way. ("7 minutes ago" vs TIMESTAMP).

On LWN there is unnecessary and redundant metadata accentuated!

Everything on HN is clearly thought out, and almost nothing on LWN is.

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Some of us vastly prefer a time stamp to an utterly useless relative measurement displayed.

> Some of us vastly prefer a time stamp to an utterly useless relative measurement displayed.

Ditto. Maybe I loaded the page yesterday. What does '1 hour ago' mean? Was it updated by JavaScript? Is it an hour from now, or from yesterday, or what?

Give me a timestamp, and I know.

It gets even less useful as time goes on. Eventually it'll say one year ago. A timestamp would give the exact time rather than a huge range.

I find most timestamps useless. It's rare that they include the time zone, so I'm always left wondering if they mean my browser detected time zone (through some JS), the TZ that the server uses, UTC, or whatever.

"N minutes ago" is compact and does not require any client-side JS to provide an unambiguous value.

At least LWN includes the timezone, which is a step ahead of most of the sites I've used.

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