[jerf]

Whenever I use relative dates, I usually draw the line at either one week or one month, after which I go to absolute dates. It can be cognitively challenging to see a date from two days ago and work out whether it was two days or one day, hey, today's Thursday right so that was Tuesday etc., whereas from 2012 a timestamp from 2009 isn't cognitively challenging to read as "years ago", and if you want the precision, it's there.

Personally when I've done it I often also simply always have the absolute time: "Wednesday, August 22nd at 8:22PM (a day ago)", with the order of the two elements chosen depending on which makes more sense.

[_delirium]

That'd be an improvement in HN, imo. Times like "12 minutes ago" or "3 hours ago" or even "9 days ago" are fine, but "1612 days ago" requires me to mentally convert to figure out when that actually was.