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Comment by jan_g | Hacker News Reader

> Copying a millisecond-from-epoch number, visiting a website that can convert it to human-readable date, pasting the number, and hitting enter

I use the builtin `date` utility for this specific task, instead of querying another webpage to translate it.

    $ date -r 1577733633
    Mon Dec 30 20:20:33 CET 2019

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Also worth noting that you can pipe the result to `pbcopy` to put it in your clipboard. Super useful if you haven't seen it before.

    $ date -r 1577733633 | pbcopy

I think the example was silly, but think about finding the epoch in, say, a log file. With this system you could just click and see the human readable. With the date command you'd have to switch to terminal, type "date -r", paste, enter.

    date -r 1577733633
    date: 1577733633: No such file or directory

...

   -r, --reference=FILE
          display the last modification time of FILE

...

Is OSX's date command different from Linux?

macOS has BSD date and Linux ships with GNU.

Found it, for GNU it's `date -d @1577733633`

Yes! I was doing that for a while with a command-line tool. I couldn't make up my mind which way was faster. They were both required some sort of motor skill (e.g. switch to terminal, paste, enter) to perform the flows quickly.

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