20 ms·

This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowl

by octobus2021 4y ago

This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; - May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off) but I consider omitting the whole DST thing a major missed opportunity. :) Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have. I believe they still maintain some Internet presence but mostly gave up on promoting it. Good luck breaking 1000+yo habits.

edflsafoiewq 4y ago
In Hebrew the weekdays are named "First", "Second", etc. making "Shabbat" ie Saturday, the last day of the week.
- walrus01 4y ago
  This is along the same general idea as the Persian/Farsi day names, you've got Jummah which is the western Friday (Islamic day of rest), then the rest of the days are named shanbe, yakshanbe, doshanbe, sehshanbe, and so on. shanbe = day (first day of the week after Jummah) yak = one do = two seh = three Literally just day one, day two, day three. You count upwards in day number until you reach six, then it's Jummah again and it resets. The city of Dushanbe, Tajikistan being part of the historical extent of the Persian empire and language is literally just named second day.
- Cyph0n 4y ago
  The same roughly applies to Arabic: Sunday (derived from one) to Thursday (derived from five). The word for Friday seems to be derived from “gathering” (probably due to weekly Islamic mass) and Saturday seems to derived from “sleep” (?).
_glass 4y ago
- Sunday is the first day of the week (even by name, literally the first day) in Israel/Hebrew. - In Germany we use the 12h format in day to day conversation - Swatch time was so cool when I was a teenager
googlryas 4y ago
I'd love to hear the logic of why Monday should be the first day of the week.
- 988747 4y ago
  Well, since Saturday and Sunday are called "weekEND", so it logically follows that Monday is a "week start". Most people think about it like this: Monday is a start of a new work-week, and then you get two days of rest at the end of the week.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    But there are two ends of any line, one on each side. Not two ends, both of which are on the same side.
    - layer8 4y ago
      In a ring buffer, you have a start and an end pointer, not two end pointers.
      - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
        If we think of it like iterators in C++, though, begin() is Monday, and end() is the next Monday.
        Quekid5 4y ago
        One-past-the-end is the way.
        layer8 4y ago
        If Saturday is weekend, then Sunday is one-past-the-end. ;)
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Exactly. A sausage has two ends, the beginning end and the end end, and so shall the week
Yhippa 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time I believe the old Sega Dreamcast used this as its standard time in the menu system. Maybe that was for the online service. I would love to move to something like that permanently. Little ambiguity as to when people could meet across time zones.
- octobus2021 4y ago
  Yeah, that was the idea, they invented it to make things easier for people around the world communicating over the Internet. They even launched a series of watches which displayed Swatch time. It was so cool, too bad it never took off :(
- ISL 4y ago
  It's not obvious why a new system is needed. UTC, TAI, or unix-time are sufficient. The primary defect I see in the SIT proposal is that it isn't obviously based on the SI, but rather tied to the Earth. Defining a new unit that is 86.4 seconds long feels troublesome for everyone.
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    Or, more closely, Julian day number.
    - kybernetikos 4y ago
      Yeah, I played around with a decimal time: https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ but eventually realised that my seconds, minutes and hour equivalents were just names for some of the decimal places of the Julian day number.
  - shadowofneptune 4y ago
    I don't see what makes the second less tied to the Earth than the day. The SI system is for scientific purposes, it doesn't have units important for civil purposes like liters. If you were to completely redefine civil timekeeping (good luck!), the day feels like a better unit to focus on.
myth2018 4y ago
> however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; That happens in Portuguese (brazilian, at least). Digital clocks go through 0-23 hours, but the second half is _sometimes_ named as 1-11 afternoon/night (whatever fits your taste). Hour 0 is never referred to as 12, though: it's always 0 or "half night"
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  > "half night" Minor nit, but probably important since the equivalent vocabule exists in English: "midnight".
  - myth2018 4y ago
    true that. Thanks
Swizec 4y ago
> US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; Maybe this is because I grew up when analog clocks were common, but it would feel extremely weird to say “15 o’clock” in speech instead of “3pm”. Even though it’s written down as 15. I think you’re right that younger generations that grew up with digital are more likely to answer “fifteen oh seven” when you ask the time whereas I’d be more likely to read the same time and say “ten past three” (Slovenian background)
less_less 4y ago
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; It's not the only one. In Portuguese, the names of Monday .. Friday are literally "second .. sixth fair [day]", with Saturday and Sunday being "sábado" (sabbath) and "domingo" (lord's day). I'm not sure which other countries follow the convention, but it's the numbering used in the Bible so I would be surprised if there aren't others.
- zakki 4y ago
  In Indonesia looks like Sunday is taken from Portuguese name with modifications: Domingo - Mingo - Minggu
fortran77 4y ago
Israel (where I spend several months/year) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week. The workweek is Sunday through Thursday. Weekend is Friday and Saturday. I suspect many Islamic countries are the same way.
- octobus2021 4y ago
  I had no clue, if the work week is Sunday though Thursday, it makes perfect sense. Learned something new today :)
- 988747 4y ago
  Saudi Arabia used to have Thursday and Friday as weekend. They changed that recently (2013) to Friday and Saturday, because that gives them a bigger overlap with the rest of the world, which is good for business.
retrac 4y ago
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week /Officially/ almost everyone has standardized on ISO 8601 where Monday = 1 and Sunday = 7. But unofficially, not really. The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada, and probably some other parts of the English-speaking world. A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. But yes, the other is more common. Most of the Slavic languages, and Chinese, among others, use indexed from Monday = 1. Then there's Swahili: Saturday = 1 and Friday = 7. Though personally, I believe Sunday is the 0th day of the week.
- shakezula 4y ago
  > Sunday = 1 Animals. Absolutely barbaric. Everybody knows we should index lists starting at 0. /s
  - stnikolauswagne 4y ago
    Time to start a movement to consider saturday the as the beginning of the week!
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Well by struct tm, Sunday is 0. And months start at 0. And the day of the month starts at 1!
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      I remember years ago that Larry Wall said about Perl 5->6 upgrade: "We can fix some broken things." This was an item on his big list.
  - rieTohgh6 4y ago
    I remember seeing API that accepted both 0 and 7 as Sunday.
plebianRube 4y ago
Sunday is the first day of the week in crontab. First index in the array, 0.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Sunday is the last day of the week in crontab. Last index in the array, 7.
  - plebianRube 4y ago
    7 also resolves to Sunday, but doesn't take away from the fact that the first index [0] is Sunday.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
eastbound 4y ago
Yes. It should end with “…and this is the best system we’ve found, because all other ones were ditched for being too complicated.”
dan-robertson 4y ago
There was a more significant effort to decimalise time (and the calendar to some extent) after the French Revolution, along with introducing the metric system everywhere. People hated it and they eventually switched back. A bit of related trivia is that France only accepted the Greenwich Meridian on maps/charts on the condition that the international meridian conference (of 1884) also concluded that the convened nations also resolved that decimal time was a good idea and they should work towards it.
narag 4y ago
Honestly I didn't find it funny, maybe because it ignores the reasons of the inconsistencies, that by the way are perfectly understandable looking at space. Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases. Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because Romans used to go to war in the Spring. Asimov had an excellent chapter on calendar in his divulgative book The Universe, explaining why it's not so easy to design a regular "logical" calendar.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  - decremental 4y ago
    It was fine with me. Learned something.
  - gerdesj 4y ago
    Why is it unacceptable to you for someone to explain why they do not find something funny? We are really not all the same. HN is a big old forum and there is no such thing as a normal response. That person was describing their personal reaction to ... something. I don't think that proscribing dogma is helpful in response.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      > Why is it unacceptable to you for someone to explain why they do not find something funny? I mean, it's not "unacceptable", free speech and all. It's just silly to jump in and "well actually" a joke, especially when the explanation is kind of why the joke was funny.
      - gerdesj 4y ago
        Different people see humour in different ways or even not at all. Do I really need to spell it out?
happyopossum 4y ago
Both of your first points are factually incorrect - I’d have to imagine some bubble-bias involved, but many countries aside from the US use the 12 hour clock and start their calendars on Sunday.
- octobus2021 4y ago
  I did say "per my knowledge" so my point stands :)
NorwegianDude 4y ago
Legit question. What is a weekend in the US? Is a weekend in the US Friday - Saturday? Most places consider the week to end with Sunday and the weekend is usually considered to be from after work on Friday(or technically Saturday) until Monday starts. But when an American says "right over the weekend", do they mean Sunday, since the US week starts on Sunday? Or does the week actually start on Monday as in most places? I'm from this planet, and even I am confused with all of us, but especially with Americans.
- sethhochberg 4y ago
  “Weekend” in the US typically refers to Saturday / Sunday. Monday through Friday is the workweek.
- masklinn 4y ago
  The american weekend is sat-sun. Work week starts on the second day of the week. Because reasons.
- octobus2021 4y ago
  That was my point, if the workweek in US is Monday through Friday, and US weekend is Saturday and Sunday, there's NO REASON WHATSOEVER to call Sunday "the first day of the week"...
  - tolmasky 4y ago
    The year also starts and ends with winter. The day starts and ends with night. So growing up it seemed to fit that the week would start and end with weekend.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    There’s no reason whatsoever (other than historical) for any of the inconsistencies explored in the tweet thread. Why should the start of the week be any different?
  - pteraspidomorph 4y ago
    It's biblical. Saturday is the sabbath, the 7th day rest day, which would make sunday the first day. Later, christians decided to hold mass on sunday instead, because it was when Jesus resurrected. Eventually you end up with saturday and sunday as rest days, even though one is biblically the first and one is biblically the last day of the week. But both are the "weekend".
lloeki 4y ago
> May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off) Reading through to the last bits I was foreseeing the launch of a specific space faring vehicle except it would have failed in some way because of non-metric units (purposefully not saying of which kind) thus closing by leaving a loose thread up another level of insanity.
rspeed 4y ago
I had a hell of a time trying to find a pill planner that didn't start on Sunday. I was ready to 3D print one when I found one that's circular.
shadowofneptune 4y ago
The Swatch time is a variation on the fractional day. Astronomers use it, with .00 being noon and .50 being midnight. You can extend it to any precision you like, 1/100,000th of a day makes for a good 'decimal second.' I like knowing what percentage of the day is over, a friend of mine says it'd drive her crazy knowing exactly how much time gets wasted.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  Why does midnight matter? And since we don’t use local noon, why does noon matter?
  - shadowofneptune 4y ago
    It matters in the astronomer's case (which does use local noon) because that's when they do their work. For the version where .00 is midnight in the local time zone, well... it's how we live our lives! I'd argue the week is more important than the months for the same reason.
magic_hamster 4y ago
Sunday is the first day of the week in Israel, not just on paper but very much in practice. I know this because Israelis I worked with will be unavailable on Friday but they will start emailing you Sunday morning.
Shatnerz 4y ago
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; First day of the working week is Sunday in Nepal. I assume they consider Sunday the start of the week, but I'm not Nepalese. This is just a random fact I remember from visiting.
poisonarena 4y ago
>Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week Sunday is the first day of the week in much of the middle east
irrational 4y ago
Why is it illogical to have Sunday be the first day of the week? Maybe Saturday is logically the first day of the week since nobody in their right minds would want a work day (assuming a 5 day work Week) to be the first day. Like eating dessert first, starting the week with a day off just makes logical sense.
- Jorengarenar 4y ago
  Why? One word: weekEND
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    Which end?
    - messe 4y ago
      The one at the end of the week, and not the start.
      - irrational 4y ago
        Maybe it is both ends. Like book ends.
        thfuran 4y ago
        But then surely a consecutive Saturday and Sunday would be weekends rather than a single weekend?
        irrational 4y ago
        The concept of a weekend is a recent development that I don’t think really corresponds to what the first day of the week is (which was conceived of as Sunday for thousands of years before the weekend was invented). When the weekend was invented, Sunday as the sabbath was still a real thing for many people. I have to wonder if originally only Saturday was conceived as the weekend, followed by the week start and sabbath of Sunday. Then, as Sunday became secularized, the weekend was extended to include Sunday.
smsm42 4y ago
Colloquially, lot of places use 12h - it's always "we're going to the restaurant at 8", never "at 20" or "at 20:00", at least in the countries I've lived or visited. But officially it's still 24h - which may be more confusing or less confusing, depending on your point of view. And times (with timezones, and leap seconds, and DST, and so on) add another level of fun to it.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  There are certainly countries where a translation of "16 o'clock" or similar is the default way to say that time. France is one I'm familiar with. In Britain, people reading out an important time presented in 24h format (like when discussing booking a flight) will usually read it out as fifteen thirty etc.
fire 4y ago
just fyi the author's pronouns are they/them ( they're in their twitter bio )
pezezin 4y ago
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Japan does too; I blame the American occupation (and plenty of other illogical things).
Fatnino 4y ago
In Hebrew the days of the week don't really have names. They are simply called (direct translation here) "first day" "second day" etc. Except for Saturday which is called "Shabbat" instead of "seventh day".
smsm42 4y ago
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; No, in Israel Sunday is the first day of the week too, because the weekend is Friday-Saturday (Shabbath). In Hebrew, though, the week days are named rather simply - except for Sabbath, they are just "Day 1" (Sunday), ..., "Day 6" (Friday). OTOH, that's exactly how they were numbered in the Bible, so...
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have. Swatch Time is just a rebranding of French Revolutionary decimal time displaying the hour number next to the minute. It was introduced a bit before the metric system in 1793 but was made optional in 1795 and finally dropped in 1806. Swatch has always been extremely good at marketing but I don’t like crediting a corporation for something they didn’t invent.
LukeShu 4y ago
> May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off) The author uses they/them pronouns. And more likely their ADHD episode started to wear down, rather than something they took started to wear off.
- ben_ 4y ago
mcv 4y ago
This is incorrect. The US is hardly the only country where people consider Sunday to be the first day of the week. Anyone with some understanding of the history of our weekdays does so, and that historical understanding is not limited to Americans. It's also not true that the US is the only country to use 12h time; many countries do. Including mine. If you need to write time without ambiguity, you use the 24h format, but in everyday use and in cases where context makes it clear what you mean, people use the 12h format.
- psnehanshu 4y ago
  Yeah I agree. 12h time is the natural consequence of using analog clocks where one rotation of the hour hand on the dial represents 12 hours. But I guess it won't be hard to represent 24h if the speed of the hour hand is halved, although I have never seen such clocks.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    you can find them in novelty shops
    - psnehanshu 4y ago
      Idk what "novelty shop" is.
      - em-bee 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_item https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_item
- midasuni 4y ago
  What country is that? I’ve only really seen 12h time in America and it’s colonies.
  - weberer 4y ago
    In Finland its common to use 12h time in conversation. Digital clocks are 24 hours, but many people still use analog clocks, which are always 12 hours. And for what its worth, the name for Wednesday, keskiviiko, means midweek.
typetheorist 4y ago
A lot of people have already commented on how Israel and the Middle East consider Sunday to be the first day of the week, but I'd like to add that the week itself seems to originate in Judaism (Wikipedia, "Week"): "A continuous seven-day cycle that runs throughout history without reference to the phases of the moon was first practiced in Judaism, dated to the 6th century BC at the latest." In Judaism the week starts from Sunday, so you could argue that it's not completely illogical for it to be the case in the US. Changing the rest day of the week to Sunday was a change made in Christianity by the Council of Laodicea: "Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord’s Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians. But if any shall be found to be judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ".
sqs 4y ago
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; What do you mean by this? I mean, what behaviors do US people exhibit to show this to be true? I was born in the US and have lived here almost my entire life. I consider Monday to be the first day of the week, and I haven't seen anything in US culture to indicate that other people disagree or behave otherwise (except for the default behavior in some calendar apps in the US locale).
- Symbiote 4y ago
  Printing all calendars and design all calendar software with Sunday in the first column is a big clue that most Americans consider Sunday the start of the week. In Europe, printed calendars and apps have Monday in the first column.
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    Being European, I prefer "Sunday in column 1" calendars. Not for religious reasons or because I consider Sunday to actually be the first day of the week, but for practical reasons: It gives me a clearer understanding of the workweek. It moves Wednesday (in my language called "middle of the week") into the week's center. It deemphasizes the weekend for planning (and thus for planning work), making them better rest days. YMMV.
Digory 4y ago
All of Christianity puts Sunday as the first day, as does the calendar of Judaism. Saturday as the Jewish Sabbath, Sunday as the ‘the Lord’s day” in Christianity. Matthew 28:1 The Resurrection [1] Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.
- eps 4y ago
  "Tuesday" in Russian is "vtornik", which is derived from "second". "Thursday" is "chetverg", which is a variation of "four". So, no, not all Christianity.
  - Digory 4y ago
    The start of the Russian week was Sunday until the Soviets tried to stamp out Sunday. The current date order is still from 1940, when the state was opposed to Christianity. https://www.rbth.com/history/335241-week-in-russia-began-sunday https://www.rbth.com/history/335241-week-in-russia-began-sun...
    - anjbe 4y ago
      Thanks for the link. It had another interesting fact: > In 1978, the UN recommended that Monday be made the first day of the week in most countries. It was established in 1988, according to ISO 8601, an international standard for exchange and communication of date and time-related data. I’m really curious about why the UN made that decision. Is this the primary reason so many countries now consider Monday the first day?
    - eps 4y ago
      That's an odd article. "Nedelya" doesn't refer to the first day of the week, at least not now. It means is "week". I can see how it may have meant "do-nothing" and also refer to the rest day, but it doesn't place it at the front of the week. Monday (ponedelnik) splits into "po" and "nedelya". "Po" is a repetition indicator, not "after", so it's more of something that happens every week. As I've said - Tuesday is "2nd day", Thursday is "4rd day" and Friday is "5th" (pyatnitca - pyat - five). So 3 days out of 7 point at the start of the week being Monday. These names date to the ancient times, not something Soviets invented. Wednesday ("sreda") does mean "middle day", but it refers to the middle of the work week, excluding Saturday and Sunday, which are named after Christian events and (likely) extended the original 5-day week. So if you are to argue that a week that has 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th days literally spelled out starts on its 7th day, the only explanation would be that Russians used 0-based indexing for the week days. Which is alright with me even if somewhat far-fetched. PS. Also, the calendar reform was not a move against the religion, but because Russia Empire was literally 13 days behind the rest of the world, which was not very convenient.
mullingitover 4y ago
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; There's one other country in particular that firmly designates Saturday as the seventh day of the week: Israel. (Canada, Japan and Brazil also use Sunday as the first day of the week.) I'm not religious, but I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, which worships on the seventh day, which for the past couple millennia has been Saturday. There is no end to conspiracy theories in the church about the seventh day of the week being designated as Sunday and how this (and particularly the compulsion to worship on Sunday instead of Saturday) is a sign of the end times.
dogmatism 4y ago
>despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well It actually reminded me of, and made me sad for the days of the old internet. I don't think this should be on twitter but it's own site
smegger001 4y ago
just think if he had to explain how the date for easter is calculated
sva_ 4y ago
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; I think Israel, and Jews in general consider Sunday the first day of the week.
ordu 4y ago
> This is absolutely hilarious Not absolutely, it could be even more hilarious, if PM/AM switches happened at 11:00 and 23:00, not at 12:00 and 00:00. Or even better, the switch could ignore seasonal timezone shift.
unity1001 4y ago
> DST I always felt that DST was invented to prevent people from realizing that they are forced to wake up and get out of the house before dawn during the winter. It would literally alienate people from work life.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  Winter time is "real time". Summer time is when DST takes effect.
coldtea 4y ago
>* - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;* I think most countries use 12h time casually (conversationally and so on), but most understand 24h time - and it's used officially (e.g. in state communications) in many. It's in the US though that people often need it explained.
Morgawr 4y ago
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Just adding to the rest of the responses but Japan also has a very... contrived relationship with what counts as "the beginning of the week" and most people would say Sunday is that day.
- fomine3 4y ago
  N=1: No, Monday is that day and I believe I'm majority, despite many Japanese calendars are beginning with Sunday
  - Morgawr 4y ago
    I can only talk about the people I personally know and I've asked this question myself (because it's funny and interesting from a cultural perspective) and most people I asked said "Sunday", although as I said it's not set in stone.
    - fomine3 4y ago
      Do you work at big tech in Japan? I suspect that people around you tend to think as international (read: US, in Japan) way.
soneca 4y ago
Living in Brazil, I always heard that Sunday is the first day of the week. Accordingly, we do name most of the week days by number, sort of. Monday is ”Segunda-feira”, which a literal translation would be “Second fair”. The “Third fair, Fourth fair, Fifth fair, Sixth-fair”.
lr4444lr 4y ago
Israel also starts the week on Sunday, in keeping with Saturday being the Jewish end of week sabbath.
throwaway888abc 4y ago
at Swatch https://www.swatch.com/en-en/internet-time.html https://www.swatch.com/en-en/internet-time.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Nit: foone uses they/them pronouns and has previously expressed some displeasure with the way they get misgendered when their posts hit hacker news. Queer folks seem to agree that if you aren’t sure what someone’s pronouns are, they/them is a good default (only until they tell you or you find out the correct pronouns). As a non-binary person myself I always find it interesting when people assume he/him for every random internet commenter. Happens on HN a lot.
- zxexz 4y ago
  Not sure why this got flagged. Anyways, I find it’s best to use they/them pronouns (or rather remain gender/pronoun neutral) when referring to people on the internet, unless their pronouns are obvious.
User23 4y ago
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; I assume Israel must too since shabbat, the seventh day of rest, is Saturday.
npsomaratna 4y ago
Over here in Sri Lanka: 1) I've seen calendars with both starting days (Sunday/Monday). Anecdotally, calendars with Sunday as the first day seemed to be more popular when I was a kid; now, calendars with Monday as the first day seem to be more common. 2) The 12-hour system is far more popular here than the 24-hour system. Not that we don't use it, but in my experience, 24-hour tends to be mainly used in professional settings; 12-hour is used essentially everywhere else.
davchana 4y ago
> US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used India uses 12h time (except in military talk; & railway timetable display boards) in day to day life. I have never heard in 29 years somebody using 15 as 3, or 20 as 8pm. Even till few years ago, atound 2008, flights times at Delhi Airport too were displayed in 12h, on mechanical card spinner display board (where a card with letter falls & next one comes, on a roll until desired letter comes). Seeing that board as a kid was highlight of my childhood trips to airport.rt.
el-salvador 4y ago
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Where I live we are taught that Monday is the first day of the week, yet most calendars start on Sunday. It's the sort of question you ask your teachers at school and nobody knows how to answer.
fritolaid 4y ago
In Arabic, Sunday is Ahad (first) Monday is Ithnain (second) and so on until Friday which is Jum’a (gathering) and Sabit (comes from Sabbath I think?) as Saturday. So the US is not the only country that considers Sunday to be the first day, etymologically speaking. I think the first day in the Middle East is Saturday because people work on that day (on Friday is a day off, unless things changed since the 70s) …
retrocryptid 4y ago
The US, Canada, China, Japan and most of South America. Oh. And the Phillipines consider Sunday the beginning of the week. And someone just shouted at me that Israel considers Sunday the beginning of the week, but that seems unlikely to me.
- anjbe 4y ago
  What’s unlikely about that? The Jewish seventh‐day Sabbath is literally the founding principle of the seven‐day week.
csours 4y ago
I saw someone wearing a Swatch Time t-shirt today!
srcreigh 4y ago
I picked 3 random countries and 2/3 of them had calendars starting with Sunday. Calendars starting with Sunday: Nambia, Trinidad and Tobago. Calendars starting with Monday: Benin.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Perhaps you mean 24h _sometimes_ is used conversationally! My devices all show 12h too. The thing is most people know if it means the evening or morning. But when programming, and dealing with times from all over the shop - please show me 24h clocks!
apexalpha 4y ago
>- Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Does anyone know why? This has always seemed a bit weird to me. I mean the US is a fairly religious country and it's pretty much known to anyone that Sunday is the 7th day in Christianity? And on the first day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the first day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the first day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. edit: just looked it up. Apparently Sunday = Restday is a catholic thing and Jews / Muslims use Sunday as their first day! How and why America switched as Christian nation I'm still not sure.
- pfortuny 4y ago
  Mmmh… Sunday is religiously the first day of the week (the Lord rises on “the first day of the week…” (John)). It has become the “last day” only because people rest after their jobs (i.e. at the end of the “week”). But conceptually, it is still the first day. It is indeed the First day of the new creation (Redemption).
- jmopp 4y ago
  Sunday is still considered the first day in Christianity. Jesus rising on the first day led to Christians celebrating the resurrection on Sunday and it eventually eclipsing the Saturday Sabbath. Also much of Latin America and Southern Africa also consider Sunday the first day of the week.
  - apexalpha 4y ago
    Mhh, yes. It seems you're right. Saturday is the day God rested supposedly? Wow it really hasn't stuck. I stand corrected.
- disruptthelaw 4y ago
  In Hebrew the days of the week are named numerically: first day, second day etc. Sunday is the first day of the week in israel. Saturday, the last day of the Hebrew week is the only one not named numerically, it’s called sabbath.
madsohm 4y ago
In Denmark we use 24h, but we call them by their 12h equivalent, e.g. "15:15" is "a quarter past three". However, you could also say: "It's now 21 30" to signify half past nine. Or some people would say: "It's half 10". Okay, having 24h clocks don't make it easier it seems.
anoopelias 4y ago
> Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have. There is Tranquility Calendar[1] that was proposed sometime back: - Starts at the time when man landed on Moon. (Tranquility base) - 1 year = 13 months each of 28 days (13*4 = 364) + 1 Armstrong day - Exactly 4 week months. Back in 2019, (50th year of moon landing) I happened to build a web representation of the same[2]. [1] https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48c6d4c3d54cf https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48c6d4c3d54cf [2] https://anoopelias.github.io/tranquility-calendar/ https://anoopelias.github.io/tranquility-calendar/
bradwood 4y ago
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Many Arabic countries have the weekend on Friday and Saturday and work on Sunday. I think they probably all start the week on Sunday for this reason. No idea why the US does too though!
kelnos 4y ago
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Not correct, as others have pointed out. Regardless, why is it more or less logical for any particular day to be considered the start of the week? Hell, it seems that even in several countries that use Monday as the first day of the week, the names of the day reflect that Monday is the second day of the week! I personally like Sunday and Saturday to be the opposite ends of the week. Sunday and Saturday are both considered rest days for the most part, and I think rest days are a good way to both start and finish your week. But I recognize that there's still really no logical basis for this; it's just what I grew up with so it "feels right". Just as those of you who grew up in a Monday-indexed week are used to it, so that "feels right" to you.
- mmmmmbop 4y ago
  Do you consider Sunday to be part of the weekend?
  - weberer 4y ago
    Why not? The head and the tail are both ends.
belter 4y ago
Hopefully the Aliens will leave the planet before the discussion gets to G11n... "The Problem with Time & Timezones" - https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...
krageon 4y ago
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; In a few EU countries people have started implying Sunday could somehow be the start (even though they are protestant societies! Makes no sense), so I think the US is leaking lunacy to the rest of the world.
- lagadu 4y ago
  Not just the US, it's also present in at least part of catholic Europe: in Portugal Monday is explicitly called "Second Market" (Segunda-Feira).
bipson 4y ago
> - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; For German speaking countries: rather always#. In fact, you don't even say 3 PM. Just "drei". I think everything from 8 AM to 7 PM is considered "business hours" - and everything else needs clarification ("4 in the morning"). And we call 0:00 "12 Uhr Mitternacht" as well, I think nobody says "0 Uhr". But at least writing it down makes sense. # Nobody I knows really uses "15 Uhr" to say 3 PM (people might sometimes do, but I never hear it, it sounds wrong, maybe "nerdy")
- dark-star 4y ago
  I live in Germany and I have the exact opposit experience from everything you just said. the only people that use "drei" or "halb fünf" etc. are those one generation older than me, and everyone says "null Uhr" or "vierundzwanzig Uhr" (depending on which day-crossing you're referring to), I have honestly never before heard the phrase "12 Uhr Mitternacht". "Die Party geht bis 24 Uhr" oder "..bis 0 Uhr". Nobody says "die Party geht bis 12 Uhr Mitternacht", do they? I guess it depends on where you live exactly in D/A/CH shrug
  - bipson 4y ago
    I guess I am from (and work with) the previous generation. I haven't used "Die Party geht bis..."# for almost a decade now, that might be a hint. #and my "parties" never ended before midnight for more than 2 decades now.
bjarneh 4y ago
> the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; Here in Norway we use 24 hours when writing; but we use 12 hour system when speaking - if that makes any sense? I.e. we would say: "Vi spiser middag klokka fem (5)" [We eat dinner at five o'clock]; but we'd write it with 17 typically. We never use the terms AM/PM but can occasionally specify daytime/nighttime if it's uncertain which of the two we are talking about. I.e. "Jeg kom hjem fra jobb klokka fem (5) om morgenen" [I came home from work at five in the morning].
- dark-star 4y ago
  I guess that's what he meant by "sometimes conversationally"?
  - bjarneh 4y ago
    It could be, but since it could also be interpreted as sometimes used, I wrote a comment to say that we use the 12 hour system exclusively when we speak about time, and the 24 hour system for written purposes. Perhaps that's what he meant, but I'm not sure...
kmclean 4y ago
Sunday is also the first day of the week in Canada (actually a separate country from the US despite appearances).
henriquecm8 4y ago
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; In Brazil, I think most people consider Sunday the first the of the week, in Portuguese the days of the week sound like ordinal numbers, Monday sounds like 2nd, Tuesday sounds 3rd, and so on. So it's pretty logical to consider Sunday the first day of the week.
ubermonkey 4y ago
I don't know that we necessarily consider Sunday first in any way except in the default / traditional presentation of weeks in calendars -- which is to say, it's a visual thing but not something that seems to impact work or life in any meaningful sense. I think pretty much all calendaring programs can show Monday as the first day if you prefer.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
What is the advantage of adopting any of those, other than being a bit more in sync with other countries? None of them imply anything other than semantic difference, there is very little advantage and a lot of pain if we were to adopt those "standards".
gjvnq 4y ago
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Brazil does the same as seemingly do Grece and Japan. Also, in Portuguese, Monday is _segunda-feira_ which roughly translates as second-day.

edflsafoiewq 4y ago

In Hebrew the weekdays are named "First", "Second", etc. making "Shabbat" ie Saturday, the last day of the week.

walrus01 4y ago
This is along the same general idea as the Persian/Farsi day names, you've got Jummah which is the western Friday (Islamic day of rest), then the rest of the days are named shanbe, yakshanbe, doshanbe, sehshanbe, and so on. shanbe = day (first day of the week after Jummah) yak = one do = two seh = three Literally just day one, day two, day three. You count upwards in day number until you reach six, then it's Jummah again and it resets. The city of Dushanbe, Tajikistan being part of the historical extent of the Persian empire and language is literally just named second day.
Cyph0n 4y ago
The same roughly applies to Arabic: Sunday (derived from one) to Thursday (derived from five). The word for Friday seems to be derived from “gathering” (probably due to weekly Islamic mass) and Saturday seems to derived from “sleep” (?).

_glass 4y ago

- Sunday is the first day of the week (even by name, literally the first day) in Israel/Hebrew. - In Germany we use the 12h format in day to day conversation - Swatch time was so cool when I was a teenager

googlryas 4y ago

I'd love to hear the logic of why Monday should be the first day of the week.

988747 4y ago
Well, since Saturday and Sunday are called "weekEND", so it logically follows that Monday is a "week start". Most people think about it like this: Monday is a start of a new work-week, and then you get two days of rest at the end of the week.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  But there are two ends of any line, one on each side. Not two ends, both of which are on the same side.
  - layer8 4y ago
    In a ring buffer, you have a start and an end pointer, not two end pointers.
    - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
      If we think of it like iterators in C++, though, begin() is Monday, and end() is the next Monday.
      - Quekid5 4y ago
        One-past-the-end is the way.
      - layer8 4y ago
        If Saturday is weekend, then Sunday is one-past-the-end. ;)
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Exactly. A sausage has two ends, the beginning end and the end end, and so shall the week

Yhippa 4y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time I believe the old Sega Dreamcast used this as its standard time in the menu system. Maybe that was for the online service. I would love to move to something like that permanently. Little ambiguity as to when people could meet across time zones.

octobus2021 4y ago
Yeah, that was the idea, they invented it to make things easier for people around the world communicating over the Internet. They even launched a series of watches which displayed Swatch time. It was so cool, too bad it never took off :(
ISL 4y ago
It's not obvious why a new system is needed. UTC, TAI, or unix-time are sufficient. The primary defect I see in the SIT proposal is that it isn't obviously based on the SI, but rather tied to the Earth. Defining a new unit that is 86.4 seconds long feels troublesome for everyone.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  Or, more closely, Julian day number.
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    Yeah, I played around with a decimal time: https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ but eventually realised that my seconds, minutes and hour equivalents were just names for some of the decimal places of the Julian day number.
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  I don't see what makes the second less tied to the Earth than the day. The SI system is for scientific purposes, it doesn't have units important for civil purposes like liters. If you were to completely redefine civil timekeeping (good luck!), the day feels like a better unit to focus on.

myth2018 4y ago

> however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; That happens in Portuguese (brazilian, at least). Digital clocks go through 0-23 hours, but the second half is _sometimes_ named as 1-11 afternoon/night (whatever fits your taste). Hour 0 is never referred to as 12, though: it's always 0 or "half night"

cassianoleal 4y ago
> "half night" Minor nit, but probably important since the equivalent vocabule exists in English: "midnight".
- myth2018 4y ago
  true that. Thanks

Swizec 4y ago

> US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; Maybe this is because I grew up when analog clocks were common, but it would feel extremely weird to say “15 o’clock” in speech instead of “3pm”. Even though it’s written down as 15. I think you’re right that younger generations that grew up with digital are more likely to answer “fifteen oh seven” when you ask the time whereas I’d be more likely to read the same time and say “ten past three” (Slovenian background)

less_less 4y ago

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; It's not the only one. In Portuguese, the names of Monday .. Friday are literally "second .. sixth fair [day]", with Saturday and Sunday being "sábado" (sabbath) and "domingo" (lord's day). I'm not sure which other countries follow the convention, but it's the numbering used in the Bible so I would be surprised if there aren't others.

zakki 4y ago
In Indonesia looks like Sunday is taken from Portuguese name with modifications: Domingo - Mingo - Minggu

fortran77 4y ago

Israel (where I spend several months/year) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week. The workweek is Sunday through Thursday. Weekend is Friday and Saturday. I suspect many Islamic countries are the same way.

octobus2021 4y ago
I had no clue, if the work week is Sunday though Thursday, it makes perfect sense. Learned something new today :)
988747 4y ago
Saudi Arabia used to have Thursday and Friday as weekend. They changed that recently (2013) to Friday and Saturday, because that gives them a bigger overlap with the rest of the world, which is good for business.

retrac 4y ago

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week /Officially/ almost everyone has standardized on ISO 8601 where Monday = 1 and Sunday = 7. But unofficially, not really. The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada, and probably some other parts of the English-speaking world. A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. But yes, the other is more common. Most of the Slavic languages, and Chinese, among others, use indexed from Monday = 1. Then there's Swahili: Saturday = 1 and Friday = 7. Though personally, I believe Sunday is the 0th day of the week.

shakezula 4y ago
> Sunday = 1 Animals. Absolutely barbaric. Everybody knows we should index lists starting at 0. /s
- stnikolauswagne 4y ago
  Time to start a movement to consider saturday the as the beginning of the week!
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Well by struct tm, Sunday is 0. And months start at 0. And the day of the month starts at 1!
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    I remember years ago that Larry Wall said about Perl 5->6 upgrade: "We can fix some broken things." This was an item on his big list.
- rieTohgh6 4y ago
  I remember seeing API that accepted both 0 and 7 as Sunday.

plebianRube 4y ago

Sunday is the first day of the week in crontab. First index in the array, 0.

bombcar 4y ago
Sunday is the last day of the week in crontab. Last index in the array, 7.
- plebianRube 4y ago
  7 also resolves to Sunday, but doesn't take away from the fact that the first index [0] is Sunday.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

eastbound 4y ago

Yes. It should end with “…and this is the best system we’ve found, because all other ones were ditched for being too complicated.”

dan-robertson 4y ago

There was a more significant effort to decimalise time (and the calendar to some extent) after the French Revolution, along with introducing the metric system everywhere. People hated it and they eventually switched back. A bit of related trivia is that France only accepted the Greenwich Meridian on maps/charts on the condition that the international meridian conference (of 1884) also concluded that the convened nations also resolved that decimal time was a good idea and they should work towards it.

narag 4y ago

Honestly I didn't find it funny, maybe because it ignores the reasons of the inconsistencies, that by the way are perfectly understandable looking at space. Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases. Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because Romans used to go to war in the Spring. Asimov had an excellent chapter on calendar in his divulgative book The Universe, explaining why it's not so easy to design a regular "logical" calendar.

Ensorceled 4y ago
- decremental 4y ago
  It was fine with me. Learned something.
- gerdesj 4y ago
  Why is it unacceptable to you for someone to explain why they do not find something funny? We are really not all the same. HN is a big old forum and there is no such thing as a normal response. That person was describing their personal reaction to ... something. I don't think that proscribing dogma is helpful in response.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    > Why is it unacceptable to you for someone to explain why they do not find something funny? I mean, it's not "unacceptable", free speech and all. It's just silly to jump in and "well actually" a joke, especially when the explanation is kind of why the joke was funny.
    - gerdesj 4y ago
      Different people see humour in different ways or even not at all. Do I really need to spell it out?

happyopossum 4y ago

Both of your first points are factually incorrect - I’d have to imagine some bubble-bias involved, but many countries aside from the US use the 12 hour clock and start their calendars on Sunday.

octobus2021 4y ago
I did say "per my knowledge" so my point stands :)

NorwegianDude 4y ago

Legit question. What is a weekend in the US? Is a weekend in the US Friday - Saturday? Most places consider the week to end with Sunday and the weekend is usually considered to be from after work on Friday(or technically Saturday) until Monday starts. But when an American says "right over the weekend", do they mean Sunday, since the US week starts on Sunday? Or does the week actually start on Monday as in most places? I'm from this planet, and even I am confused with all of us, but especially with Americans.

sethhochberg 4y ago
“Weekend” in the US typically refers to Saturday / Sunday. Monday through Friday is the workweek.
masklinn 4y ago
The american weekend is sat-sun. Work week starts on the second day of the week. Because reasons.
octobus2021 4y ago
That was my point, if the workweek in US is Monday through Friday, and US weekend is Saturday and Sunday, there's NO REASON WHATSOEVER to call Sunday "the first day of the week"...
- tolmasky 4y ago
  The year also starts and ends with winter. The day starts and ends with night. So growing up it seemed to fit that the week would start and end with weekend.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  There’s no reason whatsoever (other than historical) for any of the inconsistencies explored in the tweet thread. Why should the start of the week be any different?
- pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  It's biblical. Saturday is the sabbath, the 7th day rest day, which would make sunday the first day. Later, christians decided to hold mass on sunday instead, because it was when Jesus resurrected. Eventually you end up with saturday and sunday as rest days, even though one is biblically the first and one is biblically the last day of the week. But both are the "weekend".

lloeki 4y ago

> May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off) Reading through to the last bits I was foreseeing the launch of a specific space faring vehicle except it would have failed in some way because of non-metric units (purposefully not saying of which kind) thus closing by leaving a loose thread up another level of insanity.

rspeed 4y ago

I had a hell of a time trying to find a pill planner that didn't start on Sunday. I was ready to 3D print one when I found one that's circular.

shadowofneptune 4y ago

The Swatch time is a variation on the fractional day. Astronomers use it, with .00 being noon and .50 being midnight. You can extend it to any precision you like, 1/100,000th of a day makes for a good 'decimal second.' I like knowing what percentage of the day is over, a friend of mine says it'd drive her crazy knowing exactly how much time gets wasted.

dwighttk 4y ago
Why does midnight matter? And since we don’t use local noon, why does noon matter?
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  It matters in the astronomer's case (which does use local noon) because that's when they do their work. For the version where .00 is midnight in the local time zone, well... it's how we live our lives! I'd argue the week is more important than the months for the same reason.

magic_hamster 4y ago

Sunday is the first day of the week in Israel, not just on paper but very much in practice. I know this because Israelis I worked with will be unavailable on Friday but they will start emailing you Sunday morning.

Shatnerz 4y ago

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; First day of the working week is Sunday in Nepal. I assume they consider Sunday the start of the week, but I'm not Nepalese. This is just a random fact I remember from visiting.

poisonarena 4y ago

>Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week Sunday is the first day of the week in much of the middle east

irrational 4y ago

Why is it illogical to have Sunday be the first day of the week? Maybe Saturday is logically the first day of the week since nobody in their right minds would want a work day (assuming a 5 day work Week) to be the first day. Like eating dessert first, starting the week with a day off just makes logical sense.

Jorengarenar 4y ago
Why? One word: weekEND
- dwighttk 4y ago
  Which end?
  - messe 4y ago
    The one at the end of the week, and not the start.
    - irrational 4y ago
      Maybe it is both ends. Like book ends.
      - thfuran 4y ago
        But then surely a consecutive Saturday and Sunday would be weekends rather than a single weekend?
        irrational 4y ago
        The concept of a weekend is a recent development that I don’t think really corresponds to what the first day of the week is (which was conceived of as Sunday for thousands of years before the weekend was invented). When the weekend was invented, Sunday as the sabbath was still a real thing for many people. I have to wonder if originally only Saturday was conceived as the weekend, followed by the week start and sabbath of Sunday. Then, as Sunday became secularized, the weekend was extended to include Sunday.

smsm42 4y ago

Colloquially, lot of places use 12h - it's always "we're going to the restaurant at 8", never "at 20" or "at 20:00", at least in the countries I've lived or visited. But officially it's still 24h - which may be more confusing or less confusing, depending on your point of view. And times (with timezones, and leap seconds, and DST, and so on) add another level of fun to it.

Symbiote 4y ago
There are certainly countries where a translation of "16 o'clock" or similar is the default way to say that time. France is one I'm familiar with. In Britain, people reading out an important time presented in 24h format (like when discussing booking a flight) will usually read it out as fifteen thirty etc.

fire 4y ago

just fyi the author's pronouns are they/them ( they're in their twitter bio )

pezezin 4y ago

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Japan does too; I blame the American occupation (and plenty of other illogical things).

Fatnino 4y ago

In Hebrew the days of the week don't really have names. They are simply called (direct translation here) "first day" "second day" etc. Except for Saturday which is called "Shabbat" instead of "seventh day".

smsm42 4y ago

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; No, in Israel Sunday is the first day of the week too, because the weekend is Friday-Saturday (Shabbath). In Hebrew, though, the week days are named rather simply - except for Sabbath, they are just "Day 1" (Sunday), ..., "Day 6" (Friday). OTOH, that's exactly how they were numbered in the Bible, so...

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

> Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have. Swatch Time is just a rebranding of French Revolutionary decimal time displaying the hour number next to the minute. It was introduced a bit before the metric system in 1793 but was made optional in 1795 and finally dropped in 1806. Swatch has always been extremely good at marketing but I don’t like crediting a corporation for something they didn’t invent.

LukeShu 4y ago

> May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off) The author uses they/them pronouns. And more likely their ADHD episode started to wear down, rather than something they took started to wear off.

ben_ 4y ago

mcv 4y ago

This is incorrect. The US is hardly the only country where people consider Sunday to be the first day of the week. Anyone with some understanding of the history of our weekdays does so, and that historical understanding is not limited to Americans. It's also not true that the US is the only country to use 12h time; many countries do. Including mine. If you need to write time without ambiguity, you use the 24h format, but in everyday use and in cases where context makes it clear what you mean, people use the 12h format.

psnehanshu 4y ago
Yeah I agree. 12h time is the natural consequence of using analog clocks where one rotation of the hour hand on the dial represents 12 hours. But I guess it won't be hard to represent 24h if the speed of the hour hand is halved, although I have never seen such clocks.
- em-bee 4y ago
  you can find them in novelty shops
  - psnehanshu 4y ago
    Idk what "novelty shop" is.
    - em-bee 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_item https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_item
midasuni 4y ago
What country is that? I’ve only really seen 12h time in America and it’s colonies.
- weberer 4y ago
  In Finland its common to use 12h time in conversation. Digital clocks are 24 hours, but many people still use analog clocks, which are always 12 hours. And for what its worth, the name for Wednesday, keskiviiko, means midweek.

typetheorist 4y ago

A lot of people have already commented on how Israel and the Middle East consider Sunday to be the first day of the week, but I'd like to add that the week itself seems to originate in Judaism (Wikipedia, "Week"): "A continuous seven-day cycle that runs throughout history without reference to the phases of the moon was first practiced in Judaism, dated to the 6th century BC at the latest." In Judaism the week starts from Sunday, so you could argue that it's not completely illogical for it to be the case in the US. Changing the rest day of the week to Sunday was a change made in Christianity by the Council of Laodicea: "Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord’s Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians. But if any shall be found to be judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ".

sqs 4y ago

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; What do you mean by this? I mean, what behaviors do US people exhibit to show this to be true? I was born in the US and have lived here almost my entire life. I consider Monday to be the first day of the week, and I haven't seen anything in US culture to indicate that other people disagree or behave otherwise (except for the default behavior in some calendar apps in the US locale).

Symbiote 4y ago
Printing all calendars and design all calendar software with Sunday in the first column is a big clue that most Americans consider Sunday the start of the week. In Europe, printed calendars and apps have Monday in the first column.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  Being European, I prefer "Sunday in column 1" calendars. Not for religious reasons or because I consider Sunday to actually be the first day of the week, but for practical reasons: It gives me a clearer understanding of the workweek. It moves Wednesday (in my language called "middle of the week") into the week's center. It deemphasizes the weekend for planning (and thus for planning work), making them better rest days. YMMV.

Digory 4y ago

All of Christianity puts Sunday as the first day, as does the calendar of Judaism. Saturday as the Jewish Sabbath, Sunday as the ‘the Lord’s day” in Christianity. Matthew 28:1 The Resurrection [1] Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.

eps 4y ago
"Tuesday" in Russian is "vtornik", which is derived from "second". "Thursday" is "chetverg", which is a variation of "four". So, no, not all Christianity.
- Digory 4y ago
  The start of the Russian week was Sunday until the Soviets tried to stamp out Sunday. The current date order is still from 1940, when the state was opposed to Christianity. https://www.rbth.com/history/335241-week-in-russia-began-sunday https://www.rbth.com/history/335241-week-in-russia-began-sun...
  - anjbe 4y ago
    Thanks for the link. It had another interesting fact: > In 1978, the UN recommended that Monday be made the first day of the week in most countries. It was established in 1988, according to ISO 8601, an international standard for exchange and communication of date and time-related data. I’m really curious about why the UN made that decision. Is this the primary reason so many countries now consider Monday the first day?
  - eps 4y ago
    That's an odd article. "Nedelya" doesn't refer to the first day of the week, at least not now. It means is "week". I can see how it may have meant "do-nothing" and also refer to the rest day, but it doesn't place it at the front of the week. Monday (ponedelnik) splits into "po" and "nedelya". "Po" is a repetition indicator, not "after", so it's more of something that happens every week. As I've said - Tuesday is "2nd day", Thursday is "4rd day" and Friday is "5th" (pyatnitca - pyat - five). So 3 days out of 7 point at the start of the week being Monday. These names date to the ancient times, not something Soviets invented. Wednesday ("sreda") does mean "middle day", but it refers to the middle of the work week, excluding Saturday and Sunday, which are named after Christian events and (likely) extended the original 5-day week. So if you are to argue that a week that has 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th days literally spelled out starts on its 7th day, the only explanation would be that Russians used 0-based indexing for the week days. Which is alright with me even if somewhat far-fetched. PS. Also, the calendar reform was not a move against the religion, but because Russia Empire was literally 13 days behind the rest of the world, which was not very convenient.

mullingitover 4y ago

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; There's one other country in particular that firmly designates Saturday as the seventh day of the week: Israel. (Canada, Japan and Brazil also use Sunday as the first day of the week.) I'm not religious, but I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, which worships on the seventh day, which for the past couple millennia has been Saturday. There is no end to conspiracy theories in the church about the seventh day of the week being designated as Sunday and how this (and particularly the compulsion to worship on Sunday instead of Saturday) is a sign of the end times.

dogmatism 4y ago

>despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well It actually reminded me of, and made me sad for the days of the old internet. I don't think this should be on twitter but it's own site

smegger001 4y ago

just think if he had to explain how the date for easter is calculated

sva_ 4y ago

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; I think Israel, and Jews in general consider Sunday the first day of the week.

ordu 4y ago

> This is absolutely hilarious Not absolutely, it could be even more hilarious, if PM/AM switches happened at 11:00 and 23:00, not at 12:00 and 00:00. Or even better, the switch could ignore seasonal timezone shift.

unity1001 4y ago

> DST I always felt that DST was invented to prevent people from realizing that they are forced to wake up and get out of the house before dawn during the winter. It would literally alienate people from work life.

saalweachter 4y ago
Winter time is "real time". Summer time is when DST takes effect.

coldtea 4y ago

>* - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;* I think most countries use 12h time casually (conversationally and so on), but most understand 24h time - and it's used officially (e.g. in state communications) in many. It's in the US though that people often need it explained.

Morgawr 4y ago

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Just adding to the rest of the responses but Japan also has a very... contrived relationship with what counts as "the beginning of the week" and most people would say Sunday is that day.

fomine3 4y ago
N=1: No, Monday is that day and I believe I'm majority, despite many Japanese calendars are beginning with Sunday
- Morgawr 4y ago
  I can only talk about the people I personally know and I've asked this question myself (because it's funny and interesting from a cultural perspective) and most people I asked said "Sunday", although as I said it's not set in stone.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Do you work at big tech in Japan? I suspect that people around you tend to think as international (read: US, in Japan) way.

soneca 4y ago

Living in Brazil, I always heard that Sunday is the first day of the week. Accordingly, we do name most of the week days by number, sort of. Monday is ”Segunda-feira”, which a literal translation would be “Second fair”. The “Third fair, Fourth fair, Fifth fair, Sixth-fair”.

lr4444lr 4y ago

Israel also starts the week on Sunday, in keeping with Saturday being the Jewish end of week sabbath.

throwaway888abc 4y ago

at Swatch https://www.swatch.com/en-en/internet-time.html https://www.swatch.com/en-en/internet-time.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

Nit: foone uses they/them pronouns and has previously expressed some displeasure with the way they get misgendered when their posts hit hacker news. Queer folks seem to agree that if you aren’t sure what someone’s pronouns are, they/them is a good default (only until they tell you or you find out the correct pronouns). As a non-binary person myself I always find it interesting when people assume he/him for every random internet commenter. Happens on HN a lot.

zxexz 4y ago
Not sure why this got flagged. Anyways, I find it’s best to use they/them pronouns (or rather remain gender/pronoun neutral) when referring to people on the internet, unless their pronouns are obvious.

User23 4y ago

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; I assume Israel must too since shabbat, the seventh day of rest, is Saturday.

npsomaratna 4y ago

Over here in Sri Lanka: 1) I've seen calendars with both starting days (Sunday/Monday). Anecdotally, calendars with Sunday as the first day seemed to be more popular when I was a kid; now, calendars with Monday as the first day seem to be more common. 2) The 12-hour system is far more popular here than the 24-hour system. Not that we don't use it, but in my experience, 24-hour tends to be mainly used in professional settings; 12-hour is used essentially everywhere else.

davchana 4y ago

> US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used India uses 12h time (except in military talk; & railway timetable display boards) in day to day life. I have never heard in 29 years somebody using 15 as 3, or 20 as 8pm. Even till few years ago, atound 2008, flights times at Delhi Airport too were displayed in 12h, on mechanical card spinner display board (where a card with letter falls & next one comes, on a roll until desired letter comes). Seeing that board as a kid was highlight of my childhood trips to airport.rt.

el-salvador 4y ago

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Where I live we are taught that Monday is the first day of the week, yet most calendars start on Sunday. It's the sort of question you ask your teachers at school and nobody knows how to answer.

fritolaid 4y ago

In Arabic, Sunday is Ahad (first) Monday is Ithnain (second) and so on until Friday which is Jum’a (gathering) and Sabit (comes from Sabbath I think?) as Saturday. So the US is not the only country that considers Sunday to be the first day, etymologically speaking. I think the first day in the Middle East is Saturday because people work on that day (on Friday is a day off, unless things changed since the 70s) …

retrocryptid 4y ago

The US, Canada, China, Japan and most of South America. Oh. And the Phillipines consider Sunday the beginning of the week. And someone just shouted at me that Israel considers Sunday the beginning of the week, but that seems unlikely to me.

anjbe 4y ago
What’s unlikely about that? The Jewish seventh‐day Sabbath is literally the founding principle of the seven‐day week.

csours 4y ago

I saw someone wearing a Swatch Time t-shirt today!

srcreigh 4y ago

I picked 3 random countries and 2/3 of them had calendars starting with Sunday. Calendars starting with Sunday: Nambia, Trinidad and Tobago. Calendars starting with Monday: Benin.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Perhaps you mean 24h _sometimes_ is used conversationally! My devices all show 12h too. The thing is most people know if it means the evening or morning. But when programming, and dealing with times from all over the shop - please show me 24h clocks!

apexalpha 4y ago

>- Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Does anyone know why? This has always seemed a bit weird to me. I mean the US is a fairly religious country and it's pretty much known to anyone that Sunday is the 7th day in Christianity? And on the first day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the first day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the first day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. edit: just looked it up. Apparently Sunday = Restday is a catholic thing and Jews / Muslims use Sunday as their first day! How and why America switched as Christian nation I'm still not sure.

pfortuny 4y ago
Mmmh… Sunday is religiously the first day of the week (the Lord rises on “the first day of the week…” (John)). It has become the “last day” only because people rest after their jobs (i.e. at the end of the “week”). But conceptually, it is still the first day. It is indeed the First day of the new creation (Redemption).
jmopp 4y ago
Sunday is still considered the first day in Christianity. Jesus rising on the first day led to Christians celebrating the resurrection on Sunday and it eventually eclipsing the Saturday Sabbath. Also much of Latin America and Southern Africa also consider Sunday the first day of the week.
- apexalpha 4y ago
  Mhh, yes. It seems you're right. Saturday is the day God rested supposedly? Wow it really hasn't stuck. I stand corrected.
disruptthelaw 4y ago
In Hebrew the days of the week are named numerically: first day, second day etc. Sunday is the first day of the week in israel. Saturday, the last day of the Hebrew week is the only one not named numerically, it’s called sabbath.

madsohm 4y ago

In Denmark we use 24h, but we call them by their 12h equivalent, e.g. "15:15" is "a quarter past three". However, you could also say: "It's now 21 30" to signify half past nine. Or some people would say: "It's half 10". Okay, having 24h clocks don't make it easier it seems.

anoopelias 4y ago

> Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have. There is Tranquility Calendar[1] that was proposed sometime back: - Starts at the time when man landed on Moon. (Tranquility base) - 1 year = 13 months each of 28 days (13*4 = 364) + 1 Armstrong day - Exactly 4 week months. Back in 2019, (50th year of moon landing) I happened to build a web representation of the same[2]. [1] https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48c6d4c3d54cf https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48c6d4c3d54cf [2] https://anoopelias.github.io/tranquility-calendar/ https://anoopelias.github.io/tranquility-calendar/

bradwood 4y ago

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Many Arabic countries have the weekend on Friday and Saturday and work on Sunday. I think they probably all start the week on Sunday for this reason. No idea why the US does too though!

kelnos 4y ago

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Not correct, as others have pointed out. Regardless, why is it more or less logical for any particular day to be considered the start of the week? Hell, it seems that even in several countries that use Monday as the first day of the week, the names of the day reflect that Monday is the second day of the week! I personally like Sunday and Saturday to be the opposite ends of the week. Sunday and Saturday are both considered rest days for the most part, and I think rest days are a good way to both start and finish your week. But I recognize that there's still really no logical basis for this; it's just what I grew up with so it "feels right". Just as those of you who grew up in a Monday-indexed week are used to it, so that "feels right" to you.

mmmmmbop 4y ago
Do you consider Sunday to be part of the weekend?
- weberer 4y ago
  Why not? The head and the tail are both ends.

belter 4y ago

Hopefully the Aliens will leave the planet before the discussion gets to G11n... "The Problem with Time & Timezones" - https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...

krageon 4y ago

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; In a few EU countries people have started implying Sunday could somehow be the start (even though they are protestant societies! Makes no sense), so I think the US is leaking lunacy to the rest of the world.

lagadu 4y ago
Not just the US, it's also present in at least part of catholic Europe: in Portugal Monday is explicitly called "Second Market" (Segunda-Feira).

bipson 4y ago

> - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; For German speaking countries: rather always#. In fact, you don't even say 3 PM. Just "drei". I think everything from 8 AM to 7 PM is considered "business hours" - and everything else needs clarification ("4 in the morning"). And we call 0:00 "12 Uhr Mitternacht" as well, I think nobody says "0 Uhr". But at least writing it down makes sense. # Nobody I knows really uses "15 Uhr" to say 3 PM (people might sometimes do, but I never hear it, it sounds wrong, maybe "nerdy")

dark-star 4y ago
I live in Germany and I have the exact opposit experience from everything you just said. the only people that use "drei" or "halb fünf" etc. are those one generation older than me, and everyone says "null Uhr" or "vierundzwanzig Uhr" (depending on which day-crossing you're referring to), I have honestly never before heard the phrase "12 Uhr Mitternacht". "Die Party geht bis 24 Uhr" oder "..bis 0 Uhr". Nobody says "die Party geht bis 12 Uhr Mitternacht", do they? I guess it depends on where you live exactly in D/A/CH shrug
- bipson 4y ago
  I guess I am from (and work with) the previous generation. I haven't used "Die Party geht bis..."# for almost a decade now, that might be a hint. #and my "parties" never ended before midnight for more than 2 decades now.

bjarneh 4y ago

> the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; Here in Norway we use 24 hours when writing; but we use 12 hour system when speaking - if that makes any sense? I.e. we would say: "Vi spiser middag klokka fem (5)" [We eat dinner at five o'clock]; but we'd write it with 17 typically. We never use the terms AM/PM but can occasionally specify daytime/nighttime if it's uncertain which of the two we are talking about. I.e. "Jeg kom hjem fra jobb klokka fem (5) om morgenen" [I came home from work at five in the morning].

dark-star 4y ago
I guess that's what he meant by "sometimes conversationally"?
- bjarneh 4y ago
  It could be, but since it could also be interpreted as sometimes used, I wrote a comment to say that we use the 12 hour system exclusively when we speak about time, and the 24 hour system for written purposes. Perhaps that's what he meant, but I'm not sure...

kmclean 4y ago

Sunday is also the first day of the week in Canada (actually a separate country from the US despite appearances).

henriquecm8 4y ago

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; In Brazil, I think most people consider Sunday the first the of the week, in Portuguese the days of the week sound like ordinal numbers, Monday sounds like 2nd, Tuesday sounds 3rd, and so on. So it's pretty logical to consider Sunday the first day of the week.

ubermonkey 4y ago

I don't know that we necessarily consider Sunday first in any way except in the default / traditional presentation of weeks in calendars -- which is to say, it's a visual thing but not something that seems to impact work or life in any meaningful sense. I think pretty much all calendaring programs can show Monday as the first day if you prefer.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

What is the advantage of adopting any of those, other than being a bit more in sync with other countries? None of them imply anything other than semantic difference, there is very little advantage and a lot of pain if we were to adopt those "standards".

gjvnq 4y ago

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Brazil does the same as seemingly do Grece and Japan. Also, in Portuguese, Monday is _segunda-feira_ which roughly translates as second-day.