One of my pet peeves with HN. Eventually, every post ends up as "X years ago". I wish I knew when in that year.

Hm, HN seems to show the exact year for me, see https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2018-10-08 and this submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18169243

Or the top voted story on Oct 8, 2007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64795

You're right. The issue is with months. Once it gets to a year, HN shows the date. It's not as bad as I mistakenly recalled/extrapolated.

I'm pretty sure it used to just show eg "3 years ago". I was surprised to read the exact date in the above.

Created used to show the number of days (I remember passing 3650), and now it shows the date. So the change was within the last year.

Thank you for giving me hope in my memory. Checking the Wayback Machine, it seems that putting absolute dates was a change that came some time after 2017. In 2017, HN post id=1 was dated "4027 days ago"[1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171019104348/https://news.ycom...

Eh, I think it's fine if said timestamp starts off as relative, but becomes an absolute timestamp after a while. For instance, quite a few forums I use have the timestamp for today's posts as 'posted today at [time], but it changes to 'posted yesterday at [time]' when its a day old, then eventualy to 'posted on [date] at [time] once it's about a week ago or so.

I like the relative "x hours ago" because it spares me computing the difference, but I want to have the absolute too.

Facebook used to do it well, with fuzzy time displayed but absolute time in the alt-text, visible on hover.

I would do "17 minutes ago on Oct 9, 4:00 PM UTC-4". Come back to this comment 10 years later and you will still know when I wrote it :)

Oops, I'm one of these people. However the URL slug always shows the year but yeah, I can see how that would be annoying.