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Comment by steveax | Hacker News Reader

I really hate the "humanized" dates in the github website interface. "3 days ago" is not useful to me when I'm comparing dates.

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Yes. Worst case is not printing the year, even for items which are from a previous year. ISO 8601 is the international standard on how to write dates and times. Get used to it. XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1179/

Japan has a strange tradition of dates and times such as 7-3 2530. Tokyo TV schedules have values like that. "2530" means 0130 on the next day. Businesses that close after midnight may give their closing time as "2600". This comes from a strange combination of military time plus a historical tradition that days start at dawn. At least it's unambiguous.

I really like this idea. In fact just yesterday I was thinking about it makes much more sense to group activities that happen after midnight with the "previous" day.

I'd be a lot more OK if all "humanized" dates could be toggled to an ISO date with a button click.

It's so true though, if trying to scrutinize the history of a repo I find I frequently need to clone it locally just to access the info I need in any kind of decent interface.

I responded to the parent comment about this [0], and it seems like something you might be interested in as well.

Web developers should be using time elements, which include the ISO-8601 datetime.

If web developers do this, there's no reason you couldn't make a simple browser extension that allows you to toggle times from humanized to ISO-8601.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9824147

I know it's not perfect, but in case you're not aware... Although Github shows you relative time, they use time [0] elements and set the title (which you can see if you hover over the time) to show more detail, e.g. "Jul 2, 2015, 9:13 PM PDT". In addition to that, they set datetime as ISO-8601, e.g. "2015-07-03T04:13:48Z".

If you wanted, you could make a script to always display the expanded information.

A lot of websites do this, and I think it works out very well. It means you can hover over the time if you want something more precise, but the default level of information shown to you is minimized. This is useful for reducing clutter and information overload.

It really depends on what information you're trying to convey, and where it falls within the hierarchy.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...

Yep, I know about the title attribute and the hover display. I still disagree with the choice. Why make the user hover to get the precise date? The worst offender is the commits screen. I know that each day's commits section has the full date, but if the commits for a day are longer than the viewport, I find myself scrolling up to find the exact date of the commit (much easier than hitting the small target of the humanized date and waiting for the hover state to appear). I understand that humanized dates are better than ISO-8601 for some things, but commit dates, no, not IMO. "About a month ago" is useless to me.

"3 days ago" is not useful to me when I'm comparing dates.

I'd say it depends what you're doing. It's easier to compare lengths of time than dates - the difference between "3 days ago" and "5 days ago" is more obvious than the difference between "01/07/2015" and "28/06/2015". That said, if you want to know what happened on a specific date (eg commits that happened on 28/06/2015) then the time passed isn't useful. Ideally you should be able to toggle between the two.

steveax 3 hours ago

I find this quite annoying when I have to look up something I wrote months ago on HN.

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