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Use Timestamps

jankremer.eu

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Re: Use Timestamps

#101

Post by midasuni »

orthoxerox wrote: post #94
contravariant wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should even use terrestrial time, just in case.

Space colonization is going to be a pain. We've just managed to get sensible datetime APIs with instants and zoned timestamps, but they only work when time is the same everywhere. As soon as relativity comes into play we'll have to come up with a different approach.

Nothing in the solar system has a relative speed different enough to earth to make common timestamps different - the difference is well below leap second impacts.

As for simultaneity we already have to deal with that at the millisecond level. An event logged at 16:00:01.000 as far as LA is concerned maybe logged at 16:00:01.080 in London, or maybe at 16:00:00.920

Re: Use Timestamps

#102

Post by midasuni »

MRtecno98 wrote: post #99
orthoxerox wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space colonization is going to be a pain. We've just managed to get sensible datetime APIs with instants and zoned timestamps, but they only work when time is the same everywhere. As soon as relativity comes into play we'll have to come up with a different approach.

Relativity is the least of your concerns when different planets have different length "hours"

All planets (in the same plane of relativity) agree on the length of a second. The length of a day varies - both on earth and on mars, and is meaningless for people in orbit, but a second is a second.

Re: Use Timestamps

#103

Post by jmclnx »

ckdot2 wrote: post #98

Use human readable dates: Every blog post should include a human readable date. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline. Timestamps are hard to read. Use date and time: Every blog post should include the time it has been created. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline. I was reading Jan Kremers post about blog timestamps and it was not immediately clear to me what ti…

I went back to RCS ($Id$) for my blog text files, so by default I get it all in UTC. That is the one thing I hate about git, it does not allow you to tag the file with ci information. So RCS tags my entries automatically.

But a non issue to me these days, I moved away from git due to changes Microsoft made after it purchased github. I am back "home" to RCS and anon ftp.

Re: Use Timestamps

#104

Post by didntcheck »

pelorat wrote: post #86

A and element exists in HTML, but why don't an element exists that will format a date and time written in a specific format to the format of what the user want? I'm talking about automatic TZ conversion.

It's been a while since I did any frontend work, but I recall that the Date Javascript object does do that. I was able to just send a UTC timestamp from the backend, then do something like (I've not tested this right now)

  new Date(timestampMs).toLocaleString()
and it just worked. Correct timezone and locale. Not sure why that simple approach isn't more widely used

Re: Use Timestamps

#105

Post by didntcheck »

majke wrote: post #77

Dan Luu famously doesn't have timestamps on the blog posts, like https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/ There is date on the index page Jan - 2016, however it's not obvious from the content page. I think the argument is that the content should be corrected if it's outdated. So, it shouldn't matter when it was written.

In that case he should put a "last updated" on each posts. Plus that would offer even more incentive to keep things up to date, since you're giving yourself a public "mark of shame" if you don't

Re: Use Timestamps

#106

Post by pirates »

jraph wrote: post #96
lijok wrote: post #91

Few things irk me as much as systems that show you "N hours/minutes/seconds ago" instead of the timestamp. GitHub for example, of all systems, should know better. Trying to write up a report of any sort and not having access to accurate timestamps is very annoying.

I'm with you. It's usually possible to hover the thing to have the actual timestamp show in a tooltip, but this is so clunky.

I haven’t checked github, but on gitlab this is a user preference setting that you can change. But I do wish that the full timestamps were the default.

Re: Use Timestamps

#108

Post by crazygringo »

I mean, of course.

But the whole point of people/companies not putting timestamps on articles and posts is precisely to hide how very old their content is, because they are (rightly) afraid people will click away.

It's not laziness or ignorance, it's generally intentional. So it's not like this advice is going to change their minds.

Re: Use Timestamps

#109

Post by ricardobeat »

I agree, but this is a result of both SEO and humans prioritizing “fresh” over “old” content, which led to the removal of timestamps - or in the case of news websites, eternally rolling artificial “last updated” timestamps on decade-old articles.

Re: Use Timestamps

#110

Post by Archelaos »

skrebbel wrote: post #30

I’ve found that internal documentation is a great place to put timestamps. People often complain that eg architecture pictures or design documents tend to go out of date, as if that’s somehow a big enough problem to not make them. Instead, consider making whatever documentation seems useful at a given moment and timestamp it with a clear, prominent “this was accurate on yyyy-mm-dd”. It will still be useful a year lat…

I can only endorse this, but would like to add that I always put my name and email address and a version number on top of the document. The additional version number is useful for keeping track of changes. Often I indicate what changed since the last version of the documentation or I have a separate HISTORY.txt file in the documentation folder including all versions, dates an a brief comment, what has changed.

If a question comes up later, I can first ask the questioner which date or version of the documentation they are relying on. More than once, the problem has been solved simply by sending the person the current documentation again.

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