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Comment by doomroot | Hacker News Reader

Because oftentimes you think in chunks of time not dates. If a meeting is in 3 hours in instantly know what kinds of things I can do before that meeting. If a meeting is at 4:45pm. I have to know the current time, calculate the difference then I can start planning my time.

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Seriously? Your complaint is that you have the extra mental overhead of having to know the time?

For the average person, yes.

Less trivial is taking into account time zones. if you're traveling and have some jet lag, "10:30" may not actually mean 10:30 to your biological clock. but "in one hour" is universal (even if your body is confused).

You know, you can dumb down stuff too much.

But if I am travelling it is even more error prone for my computer to compute the correct difference.

The main complaint in this thread seems to be that the chunks of time reported are misleading.

Almost every device you're viewing the web page on has the time showing in a corner (which, come to think of it, is surprising, by now I would've expected UX "people" to have ruined that too for everyone).

This is exactly the distinction that needs to be drawn:

Relative time is only useful within the next or past few hours. For pretty much everything else, the absolute time is more informative and clear.

I have current time constantly on the right bottom portion of the screen. I do know the time literally any time I want to.

There’s this wonderful thing called a “watch”…

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