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Comment by stinos | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: what's up with the (2 hours ago) notation? I've seen this before in a couple of git-related and other applications but personally never understood why one would pick this over date/hour. Is this a cultural thing? Do some people actually find this better (from the point of conveying timestamp information)? My main problem with it, apart from not having a high resolution, is that it usually just leads to me trying to calculate the actual date from it because that just works for me, being used to it. Same with e.g. Thunar: to me it's maddening that it defaults to displaying 'today/sunday/saturday' and then mixes that with plain dates for timestamps older than a week (or so). Can be me, but this is just so confusing and harder to parse?

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Honestly, when I enter a project page I glance these to quickly evaluate how active the development is. E.g. for Ruby library when I see "9 years ago" everywhere then likely the code needs some work to get it working with the latest Ruby version. But when there is just one "2 months ago" on `lib` directory it tells me somebody came back here to maintain the things. I am not sure if list of accurately formated timestamps would be quicker to scan.

Regarding unmaintained projects, usually my next step is to check recent PRs list or Network Graph page to see if there is some more active fork.

The fact that many people are surprised when they find out that "whoa; 2003, that's like 17 years ago" only pushes this idea.

It probably depends on your goal, though. Whether you want to know "the (relative) age of something", or "the point in time of some event". I think most often the first is the usecase, which is probably why most projects choose that.

That's one thing I really like about Common Lisp: a project can be untouched for over a decade and still work perfectly with the very latest versions of SBCL/LispWorks/Allegro/CLISP/whatever.

Sometimes a library can just be done.

> personally never understood why one would pick this over date/hour

Providing a timestamp gives you the same information with higher precision _provided you know when now is_. I can tell you what day of the week it is, but not what the day of the month it is. Sometimes day of the week even takes extra cycles.

Relative time tells me the order of magnitude since last update. Was it today (I can assume they have complete context) or yesterday (they probably need a little background to catch up).

Order of magnitude since last update is generally more useful to me than knowing the time since last update.

You’ve never worked across time zones have you? I find it’s a lot easier to say “that commit from 2 hours ago” than do the mental math during a code review or debug session. However I do think it should be opt in as I understand your POV and in my experience it’s never an issue until it’s a big one. In our ui we show ago, local and point of origin for all time zones we deal with in a popover.

You’ve never worked across time zones have you?

Actually I have, and then we all use GMT when communicating timestamps. But it's like another commenter mentions: yes, 'that commit from 2 hours ago' is still doable (though if it matters we communicate SHAs), but when it goes to 'a day ago' it doesn't really work out anymore.

"GMT"

That alone hints you're either working in the UK or you're confusing GMT with UTC, or both.

Or, nobody cares about fractions of a second when organising a meeting, so to all intents and purposes they are the same.

Point being, they are not the same. There is one hour difference between UK Time, GMT and UTC for half of the year, due to daylight saving time.

GMT stays the same throughout the year. The UK switches to BST for the summer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time

Crazy enough your statement is equally right and wrong. There is really a lot of confusion between GMT, BST, UK time and Greenwich time. ^^

Greenwich is a borough in East London, there is an old museum with the line on the ground that defined the meridian. You can visit if you come across London.

GMT, namely Greenwich Meridian Time is not actually the time of the meridian of Greenwich for half of the year. When you find yourself working with GMT, you really need to think about how you got there because it's wrong. 90% of the time you meant to use UTC and the other 10% you meant Europe/London timezone.

They weren't wrong at all; they were right.

I suspect you are the one who is confused: the UK is on BST in the summer, and GMT in the winter. GMT is identical to UTC to the nearest second. GMT is not defined as "the current time in Greenwich", and I suspect your confusion is because you think it's "Greenwich Meridian Time". It's actually "Greenwich Mean Time".

The maritime museum at Greenwich is pretty cool though, as is the old observatory. You can see Harrison's clocks there.

I don't understand why his statement was wrong. GMT does not change according to daylight savings time as far as I know?

GMT = Greenwich Meridian Time

The time at the greenwich meridian = not GMT

See the problem here? I know it sounds like a bad pun but it's a real problem that every developer in the UK struggled with. To make thing worse, Greenwich the location is right next to the financial district of London where thousands of developers make financial software that are one hour wrong.

I have to say that the level of confidence you have while being so misinformed is rather comical.

I lived in Greenwich, I don't remember entering a new space-time continuum when getting off the DLR at Cutty Sark. You know, compasses spinning eratically, GPS going haywire, cuckoo clocks spinning out of control, because the bubble around the Greenwich Meridian transcends the mortal plane.

GMT is the timezone we have between the end of October and the end of March. Between the end of March and the end of October, it shifts an hour ahead and becomes BST, or GMT/UTC+1.

Greenwich is also South East London, not East London, as it is south of the Thames.

See, you agree that Greenwich is not under GMT time half of the year.

That's all I am saying. You don't have to resort to name calling.

People use GMT because it's an unchanging timezone that's good for world-wide coordination. That it differs by fractional seconds from UTC is irrelevant in most cases.

Nobody but you seems to care about what time it is in Greenwich, including, it seems, other people who've lived in Greenwich. So GMT is fine.

Not really, it's just an utterly absurd thing to hang up on. Did you know that Greenwich, NY is also never under GMT for the whole year?

GMT = Greenwich Mean Time, not Meridian Time.

It's the "Mean Solar Time[1]" at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, not the legal time observed there.

The legal time switches back and forth between GMT and BST, but the mean solar time doesn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time#Mean_solar_time

> I find it’s a lot easier to say “that commit from 2 hours ago” than do the mental math during a code review or debug session

Unless you have half a dozen commits from 2 hours ago, which is pretty common in active repositories. It's never been very hard for me to tell whether a time stamp was a month ago, a day ago, or a few minutes ago, but it's impossible to figure out the roughly what time the commit from "1 day ago" was.

I work across time zones daily. If I'm using a UI, I expect dates to be displayed in my time zone. If I'm communicating with someone in another time zone, then I'll use relative time. However, in their head, they're still going to be converting that to local time. I don't see why you wouldn't just want to skip the middle man.

The time displayed by git or other programs could simply be converted to the timezone you feel comfortable with?

This is always such a ball of yarn, but working in a UI where both “absolute” and “relative to the locale of where it happened” are important contextual information, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is actually quite sensible to show both UTC and “local to where the event occurred” time at the same time, every time.

From my experience, implementation of time zone conversions is too often wrong. I work with many time zones, and strongly prefer either GMT+0 or “x hours ago”.

Agree. Timezone issues aside (which this does simplify), I'd like to see both "N hours ago", plus the actual date and time it happened (in my local timezone).

With hours it's not so bad, but gets worse with longer time periods. I find it incredibly aggravating when services say "N days ago", or "N weeks ago", because this simply serves to obscure when an event actually occurred. Just give me the damn date and time in my local timezone!

Just hover over "...ago" to get a full date.

I hovered my finger over my tablet screen but nothing happened...

I just hovered over the "6 hours ago" in

> imhoguy 6 hours ago | parent

but nothing happened :P

HN for one does not support that. :/

I agree: to me this is like a car giving you driving directions by saying "turn north" instead of "turn left"; there are people who legitimately find either way to be easier, and if you give them the wrong way they are just going to have to convert it... I find absolutely dates and times to be super intuitive, and I have most of my life laid out in my head with absolute dates, and find relative dates and times to be infuriating. This is the kind of thing that should just always be a setting.

Isn't your analogy flipped the other way around?

"North" is technically correct but an absolute reference, just like a date.

While "Left" is relative just like "two hours ago"

With the relative reference you don't need to know which direction you are heading, or what time it is right now.

On a tangent, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language "The language is notable for its use of pure geographic directions (north, south, east, west) rather than egocentric directions (left, right, forward, backward),[7] though such "purity" is disputed.[8] Still, it has given its speakers a remarkable sense of direction."

This isn't actually a tangent, and is a reason I knew there were people who prefer absolute direction.

It was a demonstration of the premise of relative vs. absolute, not an attempt to argue that one is somehow more obvious and should be considered better to everyone (which I disagree with).

I hate it. “17 days ago” - yeah, thanks, now let me manually figure out _when_ that was. I can see how some folks would like “30 minutes ago” but why not give both (a timestamp and relative offset)?

My thinking: The actual timestamp should be in a tooltip/hover if you are going to default to relative dates like this.

Even then it's wasting my time. The "17 days ago" is basically never what I want.

It's pain in the ass when you troubleshoot CI problems as well. Was the issue before or after this particular commit? Can't tell, have to check in some other tool.

It depends whether you want to see age or point in time, a.k.a do you want to compare it to now or to some other specific time.

I personally take longer to parse an ISO formatted timestamp when all I want to know is age (i.e. difference from now). An "x [unit] ago" is much faster for me.

The absolute timestamp is probably more handy when I have other dates to compare it to, because I could line them up vertically and visually diff the digits.

I think it boils down to the fact that I don't have enough working memory to precisely memorize all numbers in a complete timestamp.

It's especially frustrating when you need to compare two timestamps.

The problem also exists on HN. For example, in a discussion you might want to check who said something first. But if both comments say "3 days ago", then that's kinda difficult (unless you want to wait until one of them flips to 4 days ago).

Pro-tip: If you go to https://hn.algolia.com/ and search for the comments there, you should be able to see their exact timestamps.

I've never had a problem with HN's relative time. Exact ordering and times of events don't matter to me for comments on HN - their order is not relatively important aside from parent-child relationships. Times do matter when I'm debugging a release that made it to prod with a bug or if I'm comparing events that happen in time.

It does depend on the context but I mostly use the '2 hours ago notation'.

Sure, if you're looking for a specific timestamp or something that happened 2 months ago, it's not useful and then I switch to the timestamp format.

Majority of the time I care about stuff like what happened today, yesterday just to get the rough idea.

What bugs me with this is the resolution that is usually truncated.

"2 hours ago" might be fine enough. 2 days ago (instead of a longer "2 days 3 hours ago") maybe not, especially when I quickly want to see what's freshest or oldest and everything just says "2 days ago".

Context matters.

If I want to know the age of something, i want "x time ago" to quickly determine age. For many OSS projects this is nice because I can quickly see how active a project is/has been.

Depends, for some things (e.g. the timestamp of a blog post) it just doesn't need to be precise.

This thing has the advantage that you don't need to know the current time and subtract the timestamp from it to see it is 2h old.

For a lot of other stuff it doesn't make any sense at all. E.g. when you have a lot of things all with "2 hours ago" the precision is too low, when you are more interested in the time of day something was happening etc.

It's timezone independent... I think it makes sense when hour time scales make sense. For days/week dates work just fine

I've updated branch suggestions to now show both relative and absolute times. Cheers!

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