Show HN: Inhuman Time – change “3 days ago” to actual time on GitHub
github.comHow did this "days ago" date trend ever get started? It's absolutely horrible.
Another trend I've seen is to spell out the full name of the month but then leave out the year. Gee, thanks for making me hover over every single date just to see what it actually is.
It’s what most people want and what people have to keep calculating when you give them time stamps. If you are in a decision making position you’d want to do the same research to see what your users want.
I like to make it show the time stamp on hover / tap.
I can believe that in the general population that is what people want.
However, for the population of GitHub users, I am certain a significantly higher percentage desire precise timestamps. Maybe even in ISO 8601 / IETF RFC 3339.
Are you claiming that even among GitHub users the percentage desiring "days ago" is overwhelming? Based on what data?
> I like to make it show the time stamp on hover / tap.
This is exactly what GitHub does (on hover). I'm not sure how they calculate what format to show it in on hover. For me, it's a good balance of getting a feel for the time at a glance while allowing you to see actual time on hover when you need it.
If it doesn't explicitly mention the year, it's the current one. I think it's pretty great and reduces mental burden.
Maybe it reduces mental burden when looking at one or a few items, but it sure doesn't help when scanning a list of items.
I think relative time is good for things less than a week old, but anything other than that will use the full date. Discord's solution to it is really nice imo.
When ruby on rails launched it had a presentation thingy to do it. Then it started appearing everywhere.
I disagree, relative time is awesome.
> `31 Oct 2022, 5:34 pm IST`.
Not inhuman enough. 12-hour time format is way too human, only used in spoken colloquial language outside the US.
Ideally it should be 2022-10-31T12:34Z.
Haha, fair enough. I wanted to add a choice of formats, and this gives me ideas. Thanks!
24 hour time at the very least! Down with am/pm!
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1179/
To me it always seemed wrong OS vendors support and encourage hundreds of "locales" instead of pushing the international standards like this into wider adoption. So far there even is no international locale option and, except on Windows, no easy way to tweak your locale.
Living in the EU I still use the US locale for apps and libs to work the default way, except on Windows (where this has always been easy) I have always been manually tweaking it to use the metric system and the ISO date and time format. The only annoyance in this case is printing apps defaulting to Letter rather than A4 paper, using national locales causes much more annoyances.
Hey HN, this is a quick tiny browser extension to change human time displays to inhuman ones, on GitHub.
Changes human time displays to inhuman ones on GitHub. For example, a time displayed as `3 days ago`, will be changed to `31 Oct 2022, 5:34 pm IST`.
The advantage of this, is say if you are viewing a page of releases for example, and all releases show `3 days ago`, since they are all off by a few minutes or hours, it can be really frustrating to have to hover over each of them to find out the exact time of each release.
This applies in commits page, releases page, updates pages etc.
One annoying result of this "days ago" trend is how it obviously doesn't for screenshots of articles / tweets / etc.
Would be nice to have this feature on every site, not only GitHub. Is there such extension?
Yeah, I wish that were the case too. But supporting all websites is a little hard. I don't intend to stop with just GitHub though, but will be adding more slowly over time.
I'd also love a browser extension that would unshorten strings that are too.......
Most annoying design antipattern ever implemented.
It always frustrates me when Twitter and actual news sites use this awful now-based time format