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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

> Post published 4 hours ago

Am I the only one who dislikes these relative times and prefers absolute date stamps?

Especially "1 year ago" (for something that was 23 months ago)

Relative times are nice for recent times (e.g. "5 minutes ago" is better than "2025-12-18 13:03"), but they should "decay" into absolute times for anything that isn't fairly recent - like a week or two, perhaps.

It varies by use case. I can think about e.g. an SRS flash card where you next review is in 2 years. I honestly don‘t care if 2 years here means 21 months or 28 months, and I especially don‘t care if the next review is on 21st of February 2028 at 13:52. All I want to know is that the next review is so far in the future it may not actually happen.

That's a fair point. I'm thinking of the use case of formatting a past date on something like a social media post/comment. (For example, a comment on HN - which uses a rather long cutoff for relative dates.)

I agree with you, I also prefer absolute date stamps, including because it might be printed out, etc. However, the <time> command would allow that to work, if it is implemented in a way that allows that to work.

It is particularly annoying in a screenshot or printed document. I rarely print onto paper, but occasionally, I will "print" an interesting blog post into a PDF.

I like it but I think the granularity needs to be fixed. For example, the cutoff points should be 21+ months -> 2 years instead of 13+ months -> 1 year.

So basically you want the cutoff to be > 1.66 of the next unit before you display in that unit. That means 40 hours, 2 days; 11 days, 2 weeks; 6 weeks, 2 months; 20 months, 2 years.

I'm annoyed by things moving unbidden, especially in clickable interfaces. This element being all over Slack, chat apps, etc. means that things are always shifting around slightly and at unpredictable times.

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