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Comment by weitzj | Hacker News Reader

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weitzj

Another feature request:

Always show the absolute date instead of ... 14 days ago. That drives me crazy a little bit.

I know I can hover over the date, but that takes again a mouse and 2-3 seconds.

This is especially annoying when I need to track some dates in a timesheet.

Maybe somebody has made a Chrome extension/JavaScript bookmark to circumvent this "feature".

View on HN

You can make the absolute date appear for each timestamp on a GitHub page by injecting this CSS onto the page, manually or with a browser extension such as Stylus:

    relative-time::before {
        content: attr(title);
        margin-right: 0.5em;
    }

The result is that all relative times have their absolute time prepended, like this:

> Nov 20, 2017, 2:11 PM EST an hour ago

For uBlock Origin users, you can inject this style by going go the UBO dashboard, navigating to the "My Filters" tab, and adding this line:

   github.com##relative-time::before:style(content: attr(title); margin-right: 0.5em;)

then hitting "Apply changes".

Relative dates are the worst. So many times I'll see screenshots (useless!), or an old browser tab which stops updating, or I need to see which of two items from last month is the most recent (perhaps only minutes separating them, but both items show up as "one month ago"). So many apps (and webapps) fail to offer absolute dates as an option. Looking at you, gitlab.

Looking at you, this very thread on HN as of 2017/11/20 6:19PM PST

romwell 2 hours ago

Stack Overflow does it well: recent posts are shown with relative times (e.g. 7 minutes ago), but beyond a certain point, the date is absolute. E.g. arbitrary question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47019433/expo-io-always-...

I like Discourse showing larger intervals:

Comment A

Comment B

2 years later

Comment C

Arbitrary example thread: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/parameterized-modules/2883...

GitHub does the same thing: https://imgur.com/aXw1bHR

Agreed, this should really be a toggle switch in the user profile. The information about the date doesn't change, just the displaying of it.

It should be a simple thing, and it'll cater to more people's workflows.

As an occasional workaround, if you leave your mouse cursor over the "14 days ago" text for a few seconds, then the absolute date will appear as mouseover text.

Not easy to cut-n-paste, but at least it can be shown as-is without needing to inject CSS or similar. :)

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