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Tell HN: My usability pet peeve – am/pm times with a leading zero
I don't know why I've started noticing this a lot more recently on websites, but it seems to be getting more common to see times-of-day stated in the am/pm format but still using a leading zero on the hour. E.g. "03:00 pm" instead of "15:00" or "3:00 pm". My brain has got so used to parsing the 24-hour clock such that I see a leading zero and assume it's a morning time, then there is the moment of cognitive dissonance when I spot the "pm" and have to recalculate in my mind (especially if the time in question is in a foreign time zone). Does anyone else anecdotally get this? Has anyone measured whether it is a problem on a larger scale?
- filleokus 7y agoA similar issue, but perhaps not as bad, is the incorrect use of currency identifiers, like "SEK 100" ("$10"), or incorrect decimal symbols. Another interesting case I've seen sometimes is when people are helpful and convert from imperial to metric units, but don't change the underlying value. Stuff like comparisons, "price per 28.3 grams" ("price per oz"). Units and locales are hard.
- StavrosK 7y agoWhat, you don't measure things in multiples of 28.3 grams?
- hexo 7y agoWe have standardized 13.37 gram units here
- taneq 7y ago> Stuff like comparisons, "price per 28.3 grams" ("price per oz") This stuff happens all the time. PCB components with 2.54mm pin spacing. Dressed pine only available in 900mm, 1800mm, and 2400mm lengths. Heck, even 600mL iced coffees...
- tluyben2 7y agoMy pet peeve is am/pm time; I have no clue why people use it vs 24 hour clocks. Even worse when people leave off the am/pm; 'the meeting is today at 2!'.
- StavrosK 7y agoIf that's what irks you, you've never had to schedule a meeting with someone who thinks their timezone is GMT when it's actually BST.
- tluyben2 7y agoYeah, another pet peeve is not using UTC for everything everywhere in business situations. I have i3wm running with my local time + UTC time in the bottom, so I mail people with 'the meeting is 14:00 UTC'.
- StavrosK 7y agoYes! Or people in another timezone telling you "the meeting is at noon today". Just goddamn tell me "it's in three hours from now", or at least give me UTC, why do you have to make me convert from your timezone? But no, if I tell people "the meeting is at 7pm EEST", I'm being difficult.
- MisterTea 7y agoIf this is work related surly there would be no ambiguity when reading 2 as 2pm or 1400.
- logicchains 7y agoMaybe depends on the industry?
- tluyben2 7y agoThere is; I work with teams / partners in the US/EU/AU. Ofcourse I can just check the person who writes it and jump to their time frame, but why not just say 14:00 and preferably a timezone.
- majewsky 7y agoI always quip that if I were to achieve world domination, my first decree would be about harmonizing all these bullshit idiosyncrasies that we developers have to deal with. 24-hour format everywhere. Metric system everywhere. Celsius everywhere. And so on.
- jazoom 7y agoGo straight for Kelvin
- lioeters 7y agoHow would you unify timezones? That's a ball of idosyncrasies if I've ever seen one..
- majewsky 7y agoThat's a really good question. I omitted timezones from my list because I don't have a proposal at hand there. Same for "first day of the week": For me it's obviously Monday, but I think the Jews have a religiously-grounded opinion on it being Sunday. That's a hornet's nest I'd rather not stir up until I've actually achieved world dominion. :)
- szatkus 7y agoDon't forget about short and long scale.
- d_runs_far 7y agoNot sure if you're old enough to remember this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- majewsky 7y agoI do! But no. Just no.
- StavrosK 7y ago15:00 am
- majewsky 7y agohttps://xkcd.com/1179/ https://xkcd.com/1179/
- PunksATawnyFill 7y agoEven worse: Apple's "time-zone support" in their iOS calendar, which changes the times of your appointments behind your back. If you buy plane tickets and then enter the dates and times in Calendar... Apple will change them without telling you if you travel through time zones. AS IF ANYONE ENTERS TIMES LIKE THAT. If I have a meeting in London next week at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, I'm not going to sit here in the U.S. and do the math so I can enter the meeting time at some crazy hour to "fool" Calendar. DEAR APPLE: WE WANT THE ALARM TO GO OFF WHEN THE CLOCK ON THE PHONE SAYS THE TIME FOR WHICH I SET THE ALARM. This is NOT an option on iPhones currently. Unfuckingbelievable: https://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic-time-zone-support-sets.html https://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic-time-...
- richrichardsson 7y agoGoogle Calendar is also guilty of this nonsense, I missed a flight exactly for this reason.
- jazoom 7y agoI came very close to missing a flight because of this too. It's ridiculous.
- devadvance 7y agoAt least for Google Calendar, it's pretty easy to avoid the mental math by using the built-in time zones. You can select the time zone when creating the event[0]. [0] https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064 https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064
- reaperducer 7y agoiOS does this, too. There's and entry for "time zone" immediately beneath the time setting spinny thing.
- raxxorrax 7y agoheh, that would never have happened on my lineage smart brick, were the alarm app just goes to sleep as well. Certainly a most non-invasive app.. But yeah, this seems to be a bad design decision. Let us meet in 4 hours in a different time zone doesn't seem to be a likely scenario. And even then it wouldn't make that much sense.
- dusted 7y agodecimal time
- ggambetta 7y agoLately I've tended to use military time even in very informal circumstances, although only in written form. E.g. I'd text my GF "dinner w/friends Saturday 2000?".
- Spooky23 7y agoThe biggest temporal fail of the web is date. For some topics, it’s impossible to tell whether the author was working in 2012 or 2019.
- theandrewbailey 7y agoEspecially on blogs where the design only gives the month and day, and it's impossible to find out which year, because that's the only date to be seen on the page.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- alexvoda 7y agoThis is potatoes. Want to rage? Read this: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/d77ee438-9789-4d04-ab93-5df001bf539d/set-language-british-causes-date-format-to-change-to-yyyyddmm?forum=sqlsetupandupgrade https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/d77... Who in their right mind thought YYYY-DD-MM is a good idea. (It's "smart", recognizes the YYYY part and moves it to the end and interprets as DD-MM-YYYY) The ISO standard specifically used "-" as the delimiter for the standard date format because no one was using it. And MS had to ruin it.
- troels 7y agowtf Brought to you by the same folks who figured that locale settings should determine how CSV is generated/interpreted.
- taneq 7y ago> Who in their right mind Probably the same people who thought MM/DD/YYYY was sensible?
- StavrosK 7y agoAt least that's far back enough that they aren't around for us to be angry at.
- fouc 7y agoI don't see a problem with "03:00 pm" because I spot the : immediately. I see 2 digits and then 2 digits, so it's consistent.