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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

I like it iff I can hover over the human readable version to get the actual timestamp.

Better the opposite - date by default and on hover human readable. People would more likely want to copy the actual date than the human readable delta.

Agree to disagree :) The "human readable" is better at a glance, and timestamps are better when I care about the specifics.

> People would more likely want to copy the actual date than the human readable delta.

I agree that this is true when copying, but text is primarily for reading, not copying.

I find dates more readable as an ordered list of numbers. A thread can be quickly scrolled down through while seeing >2001 then eventually >2024 at the same x-position on the page. Same goes with the month then day.

Anyway, in the context of a comment/activity thread, how long ago from today that an entry was tends to be less important than the age of the comment relative to the other comments.

If all the comments are 1 year ago then it is not very informative on the relative order

> I get dozens of mails per day, having just “yesterday” for 50 messages in a row is useless.

How is this "better at a glance"?!

Like I said, agree to disagree, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks and all that, but to me, after a day, the most pertinent at-a-glance information there is "this was received yesterday". I definitely think it's more useful for more recent things that can say "37 minutes ago" or "3 hours ago", but to me, "yesterday" is also useful. (I might prefer it if it said "yesterday morning" and "yesterday evening" or something like that, but I rarely care about the exact time, after a day.)

This can have problems on mobile

Yes, but I think the solutions work fine; tap, hard press, whatever.

Don't get me wrong, I share the annoyance with interfaces where I have no way to find the actual timestamp. It's better to only have a timestamp than to only have the "human readable" version with no way to get the timestamp. But (in my opinion) the best is to have the human readable version, with a way to get at the timestamp.

I think the problem is that the mechanism to trigger mouse-hover is not clear on a touchscreen - there are several different ways that need to be remembered and tried, as evidenced by your comment.

I wonder if a solution on touch is a (?) icon next to the human date? Or is that too much clutter?

I like ? icons that can be either hovered or clicked on to reveal a popup with additional info.

Yes, but I think the venn diagram of people who really want to see a timestamp and people who are willing and able try a few different things to find it is pretty close to being a circle.

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