4 ms·

A precision of 100 ns is not bad, just inflexible; I didn't mean to imply otherwise. The epoch is weird, though. Here's a thought experiment: imagine that a hun

A precision of 100 ns is not bad, just inflexible; I didn't mean to imply otherwise. The epoch is weird, though. Here's a thought experiment: imagine that a hundred programmers are each asked to pick an epoch for a timestamp, and will be paid $1000 for each other programmer who chooses the same epoch, but they can't talk with each other to coordinate. Which would you pick? I would pick the Unix epoch, because I think others would do the same. Anything else is, in a certain important sense, weird.

ericb 5y ago
This is a great example of a Schelling Point! I'd also argue that you're right, and that as a principle, good UI/UX and software architecture should default to following natural Schelling Points.
zamadatix 5y ago
Yet that thought process wouldn't allow for the Unix epoch in the first place.
FactolSarin 5y ago
That doesn't make the epoch weird, just different. The Unix Epoch is itself weird. I personally like it mostly for being a neat little historical artifact, but it's not interesting in any sense. What epoch would your hypothetical programmers settle on if they all had their minds wiped of any existing epochs. I bet you'd see a lot of Jan 1 1900, 2000, or year 1. Very few would pick 1970. Other fun non-Jan 1 ideas might be December 26, 1791 (Charles Babbage's birthday) or February 5, 1944, (the date Colossus came online)
- bombcar 5y ago
  1970 makes sense if you’re picking an epoch and you are in the 70s - everything will happen “after” your start date but picking the actual current date doesn’t seem natural enough. It’s like picking 2020 as the beginning of an epoch now (of course we’d probably fall back to 2000 as that’s a big round number).
- mjevans 5y ago
  It makes a great deal of sense when thinking about the use case: recording a monotinic time in a computing environment with limited resources and extremely unlikely to ever see files from before midnight of new years eve 1970. With a great deal of existing routines that work with those values and a good number of existing files and storage applications based on the simple version, it makes even mores sense to extend that in an unsigned way with a larger bitfield for any timestamp. Though as recently came up, leap seconds and synchronization could use a few bits to describe which timestamp is in use.
- fsagx 5y ago
  Other fun non-Jan 1 ideas 1997-08-29T06:14:00Z
zvrba 5y ago
> Here's a thought experiment [...] I would pick the Unix epoch, because I think others would do the same. Ah yes, nobody will ever need to represent a date/time before 1970-01-01. As for your thought experiment: recently I had to pick a "NULL/no/unknown date" value to put into a non-nullable database column and I picked 1900-01-01. Unix epoch crossed my mind only briefly and I discarded it immediately because it's too arbitrary and, more importantly, too near valid dates that the user might use. (Use-case: materials from historical archives being ingested.) So my opinion is that the RFC authors should be commended for having the foresight of choosing an epoch that's widely more applicable and far less arbitrary (the 1st day of the calendar system that most of the world is using today) than the Unix epoch.
- michaelt 5y ago
  > Ah yes, nobody will ever need to represent a date/time before 1970-01-01. If only we had a way to represent numbers less than zero :)
  - account42 5y ago
    Will UUIDs with your favourite encoding for negative numbers put 1969-01-01 before or after 1970-01-01 with a lexicographical sort of the UUID bytes?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- scottlamb 5y ago
  > Ah yes, nobody will ever need to represent a date/time before 1970-01-01. More like: the few people interested in doing this can use UUIDv8 (unspecified time format). There are many, many reasons to store times before 1970 in computer systems, but I'm not sure any apply to these UUID formats. tl;dr of the "Background" section of the RFC: they're designing it so that two UUIDs with fresh timestamps will have values near each other in the database keyspace, which in many cases improves efficiency. If your timestamp isn't freshly generated, I don't know why you'd embed it in a UUID with these formats. It's arguably not a good practice to extract the timestamp from the UUID at all. Instead, I might just treat them once generated as opaque approximately-sorted bytes. More clear to have a separate fields for timestamps with particular importance. Though I might not feel too religious about that if tight on storage space.

ericb 5y ago

This is a great example of a Schelling Point! I'd also argue that you're right, and that as a principle, good UI/UX and software architecture should default to following natural Schelling Points.

zamadatix 5y ago

Yet that thought process wouldn't allow for the Unix epoch in the first place.

FactolSarin 5y ago

That doesn't make the epoch weird, just different. The Unix Epoch is itself weird. I personally like it mostly for being a neat little historical artifact, but it's not interesting in any sense. What epoch would your hypothetical programmers settle on if they all had their minds wiped of any existing epochs. I bet you'd see a lot of Jan 1 1900, 2000, or year 1. Very few would pick 1970. Other fun non-Jan 1 ideas might be December 26, 1791 (Charles Babbage's birthday) or February 5, 1944, (the date Colossus came online)

bombcar 5y ago
1970 makes sense if you’re picking an epoch and you are in the 70s - everything will happen “after” your start date but picking the actual current date doesn’t seem natural enough. It’s like picking 2020 as the beginning of an epoch now (of course we’d probably fall back to 2000 as that’s a big round number).
mjevans 5y ago
It makes a great deal of sense when thinking about the use case: recording a monotinic time in a computing environment with limited resources and extremely unlikely to ever see files from before midnight of new years eve 1970. With a great deal of existing routines that work with those values and a good number of existing files and storage applications based on the simple version, it makes even mores sense to extend that in an unsigned way with a larger bitfield for any timestamp. Though as recently came up, leap seconds and synchronization could use a few bits to describe which timestamp is in use.
fsagx 5y ago
Other fun non-Jan 1 ideas 1997-08-29T06:14:00Z

zvrba 5y ago

> Here's a thought experiment [...] I would pick the Unix epoch, because I think others would do the same. Ah yes, nobody will ever need to represent a date/time before 1970-01-01. As for your thought experiment: recently I had to pick a "NULL/no/unknown date" value to put into a non-nullable database column and I picked 1900-01-01. Unix epoch crossed my mind only briefly and I discarded it immediately because it's too arbitrary and, more importantly, too near valid dates that the user might use. (Use-case: materials from historical archives being ingested.) So my opinion is that the RFC authors should be commended for having the foresight of choosing an epoch that's widely more applicable and far less arbitrary (the 1st day of the calendar system that most of the world is using today) than the Unix epoch.

michaelt 5y ago
> Ah yes, nobody will ever need to represent a date/time before 1970-01-01. If only we had a way to represent numbers less than zero :)
- account42 5y ago
  Will UUIDs with your favourite encoding for negative numbers put 1969-01-01 before or after 1970-01-01 with a lexicographical sort of the UUID bytes?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
scottlamb 5y ago
> Ah yes, nobody will ever need to represent a date/time before 1970-01-01. More like: the few people interested in doing this can use UUIDv8 (unspecified time format). There are many, many reasons to store times before 1970 in computer systems, but I'm not sure any apply to these UUID formats. tl;dr of the "Background" section of the RFC: they're designing it so that two UUIDs with fresh timestamps will have values near each other in the database keyspace, which in many cases improves efficiency. If your timestamp isn't freshly generated, I don't know why you'd embed it in a UUID with these formats. It's arguably not a good practice to extract the timestamp from the UUID at all. Instead, I might just treat them once generated as opaque approximately-sorted bytes. More clear to have a separate fields for timestamps with particular importance. Though I might not feel too religious about that if tight on storage space.