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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, I really dislike the style of date picker they are using. I always find them so cumbersome.

If you are designing a website/web app please use a html input type=date, at least on more modern devices and provide a fallback for older ones. The UX for date selection in modern browsers is very well thought through.

Apologies for being off topic.

EDIT:

This shouldn’t be the top comment, you should probably stop upvoting (currently 18)… I probably shouldn’t have posted it even.

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"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The website is made to show you how much time you have left, to highlight that time is precious. To get this reminder, you have to enter your date through a date picker. This date picker is cumbersome, and makes you waste time. I think this is not a tangential annoyance, but a central one. Those two things are in opposition, and this detracts a lot from the message of this website. If time is so precious, why is my time wasted by an unknown file picker with a foreign interface?

You have a point, but it's still pretty tangential at a macro level. The main macro-level thing is that the thread at the top of a page should be responding to the core of the story—or on rare occasions, be something surprising and even more interesting than the story.

The UX of a date picker on the page doesn't clear that bar. That doesn't mean it's unimportant, just that the top of an HN page is not the appropriate context for it. Unless, of course, the story is about the UX of date pickers!

That's fair, thanks for the clarification. Would that clear the bar if that post was a Show HN? I feel like one of the problem here is that the author isn't here to listen to the feedback anyways, so anything that is "feedback" isn't very interesting.

Hmm - that's a bit harder to say. It still shouldn't be the top comment in that case though.

Thanks again, and thanks for all your hard work on the moderation!

Apologies dang, I regret the post. Quite right pushing it to the bottom where it rightly should be.

The problem, of course, is more with the upvotes than the original comment. But we can't really address the problem at that level.

I suppose we could let people mark their own comments off topic, which would drop them to the bottom of the page...

When I saw that I immediately said, "There is no way I'm going to click that many times like a rat in a lab experiment" and closed the tab.

I almost gave up using it due to the year picker. If I can see the year I should be able to click it, but on this one you actually have to scroll down until it is no longer faded at all.

I’ve fixed it now

Unfortunately html input type=date rarely works in mobile browsers.

Don’t really want to continue an off topic discussion but it is widely supported and you can conditionally load a fall back easily.

https://caniuse.com/input-datetime

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