8 ms·
Freedom Clock
- henry_viii 4y agoFeature request - make the time go faster when moving the mouse cursor.
- andrewfromx 4y agoShould we list hours, minutes, seconds? or year, month, day? Should we drive on the right side of the road or left? Should we use imperial or metric system? These are all good questions but I think the answer is "it depends." Just like timezones. You can't get rid of timezones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337 https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- Kwpolska 4y ago> Should we list hours, minutes, seconds? > Should we use imperial or metric system? Those two seem very clear-cut. I haven’t ever seen time in any other format (HH:MM does not count as a different format), and there is zero benefit to the imperial system, other than Americans being used to it. > Should we drive on the right side of the road or left? I don’t think there’s much benefit in picking one over the other that isn’t related to economic factors (such as being able to import cars from neighbouring countries, but also the cost of redesigning all roads).
- lfciv 4y agoWe could make things easier by keeping timezones consistent – the fact that they move is what makes things hard.
- jacknews 4y agoI get it, it's really annoying that there are different formats. In fact I once nerfed a small database by importing a bunch dates from a csv in the wrong format. But honestly both formats (M/D/Y and D/M/Y) are wrong, as clear from the clock example: dates should be big-endian; Y/M/D.
- dreen 4y agoI say whatever floats your boat. Which I guess could be pound-force (lbf).
- chewbacha 4y agoIso8601 for the win!
- l- 4y ago2023-03-25=1995
- crote 4y agoOnly for dates. It is horribly broken once you start involving timezones.
- cratermoon 4y agoWhat isn't horribly broken once you start involving timezones? Also daylight saving (summer) time. What else?
- akvadrako 4y agoNot if you always use UTC; just stick a Z on the end and be done with it.
- wscott 4y agoI am kinda shocked no one has posted this yet: https://xkcd.com/1179/ https://xkcd.com/1179/
- mattnewton 4y agoSeems broken on mobile? I just see a black bar. I assume from the description it has the hours/minutes/seconds in a weird order
- haswell 4y agoI'm seeing the same issue in Safari on macOS.
- eriktrautman 4y agoSame - chrome on ios
- tintedfireglass 4y agoworks on ff android and Chrome android for me
- chrononaut 4y agoCorrect. It's a site that shows the current time in Minutes:Seconds:Hours
- nozzlegear 4y agoThe monkey’s paw curls, and Americans adopt this time format as well just to spite the rest of the world for complaining about their preferred date format.
- viro 4y agoI can see us doing it out of spite... " Oh ? you thought that was odd? hold my beer"
- favaq 4y ago[flagged]
- gs17 4y agoWhere's the European clock with the seconds first?
- xyzelement 4y agoExactly! What date format was used to land on the moon?
- nerdponx 4y agoNot a great argument, seeing as mixed up units between European and American scientists ruined a very expensive Mars mission.
- gs17 4y agoYou're thinking of the Mars Climate Orbiter, where the mistake was between NASA and Lockheed Martin, both American. Besides that, the issue wasn't the specific unit system used, it was NASA not testing to make sure their specifications were met before launch and then being too bureaucratic to react in time. The exact same issue could happen in metric with CGS vs MKS.
- dtech 4y agoOoh, let's play this game. Which date format was used to launch the first sattelite and human into space? What date format is used on the ISS and in the Hubble Telescope?
- Steltek 4y agoFun fact, the Apollo computer used the metric system internally and patronizingly displayed freedom units because the astronauts supposedly couldn't handle it.
- cratermoon 4y agoMET: Mission Elapsed Time, HH:MM:SS, from liftoff. https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.step.html https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.step.html @ 109:24:23
- hprotagonist 4y agothe least ambiguous format i know for human-facing dates: %d %b %Y so today is 25 Mar 2023. not coincidentally, this format is in common use in the american military. Occasionally my use of it has had people ask me where i served, though i never have.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 4y agoThis is a good example of why we have standards for dates. Your example is wrong for multiple reasons: * You don't specify the year and the time zone * ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 are better when it comes to naming files * It's not a valid date in the healthcare industry where the month must be in uppercase letters like "25 MAR 2023"
- atemerev 4y agoWe already have freedom clock, it is there every time you write 1 PM instead of the usual 13:00.
- laurentlb 4y agoand when the day starts at 12:00 a.m.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoYear/month/day.
- joshuaheard 4y agoThis is what I use to name files I want to sort by date. America uses the wrong date format, and is also one of only three countries that doesn't use metric (the U.S, Liberia, and Myanmar).
- thechao 4y agoEvery Chinese engineer I work with knows how to measure in li, fen, & jin; the Japanese measure floor area in tatami, etc. I think you're conflating customary units with scientific units. Most of the world uses local, customary, units. The US — like most of the world — uses metric for science stuff.
- vehemenz 4y agoEuropeans have access to multiple countries, cultures, and languages, yet still complain about imperial units, date formats, "soccer," SMS, and all of the many other ways in which the United States differs. It's another country. Stop being so insular.
- Kwpolska 4y agoAmerica’s insistence on weird date and unit formats has a negative effect on software and resources used all around the world.
- vehemenz 4y agoDevelopers aren't using M/D/Y. This is a straw man.
- SonicScrub 4y agoDevelopers? Maybe but even if we accept that all developers pay close attention to their date formats to avoid misinterpretation errors, others who produce work within the developers workflow are certainly not doing so.
- kzrdude 4y agoFor example, if your company has a splunk install for log surveillance, it has a default of M/D/Y year format for all date ranges etc, it's a bit confusing, but it has localization too of course. Developers who do devops tasks might run into this one.
- Kwpolska 4y agoDevelopers and their APIs might not be. The user-facing software often does, and it often does not let you switch, at least not without affecting other things (such as the spelling of “colour”).
- warent 4y agoif you think there aren't Americans that also complain about these, I've got news for you.
- wakamoleguy 4y agoFor anybody looking to build a real clock, please don't use `setInterval`. Instead, use `requestAnimationFrame` which will avoid awkward stutters and delays. With a second-by-second timer, `setInterval` routinely results in seconds that appear too short or too long (in this case, up to the interval time of 100ms). Also, it's nice to see that this simple page isn't using any framework. One quick performance win is to cache the `querySelector` calls. Those will be the slowest part of the computation, and the nodes themselves never change.
- duxup 4y ago> `setInterval` routinely results in seconds that appear too short or too long I just ran into this/ noticed it on something I rebuilt, both using setInterval. It was fine before… but the new setInterval is … “off” visually. TY
- mistermann 4y agoNever mind American date format, visualize how something like the democratic congressional hearings on TikTok would appear to a super intelligent alien who just arrived here and hasn't had a chance to get his bearings on human culture. Or, replace the alien with the founding fathers of this formerly great nation, or replace these hearings with most anything we do.
- mistermann 4y agoA rather unpopular message. :) The winds of change are blowing though, it seems a rare in history movement may be coalescing on TikTok as we speak...TTFN, nodes!!
- Mizoguchi 4y agoI moved to the US from a country using metric system and different formats for things like date and currency. I don't really find the difference important at all and have no trouble switching between units and formats (my job requires me to exchange information with teams in Europe and Canada). I did find that for the sake of avoiding misunderstandings date should always start with the year. It's also good for sorting files and folders. Daylight savings time is the only thing I wish we didn't have in the US.
- noNothing 4y agoI have lived in English and Metric countries and have had no trouble with formats or units. I think it is because I didn't try to convert anything, just learned it as a new system. My wife on the other hand had a bunch of mental trick to convert between Metric and English, but she also never had any trouble with date or time formats. The biggest problem to me is time zones and summer/winter time. I wish we all used UTC.
- sfeng 4y agoTo play devil's advocate, the American format aligns with how (American's at least) speak the date "March 24th, 2022".
- Ukv 4y ago"4th [of] July, 2023" and "July [the] 4th, 2023" are both valid - I'd bet there's a correlation between spoken order and written order, but not sure which caused which (or maybe mutually reinforcing).
- pclmulqdq 4y ago"4 July 2023" is a common written format, but you would never say it out loud.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- The28thDuck 4y agoNothing shows up in noble except a long black bar
- warent 4y agoOne thing I've come to learn is that American formats are human-friendly rather than machine-friendly. Our date system is like the Fahrenheit system; it works well when thinking like a human. in Fahrenheit, you just think of it in terms of 50 being the middle, "not cold and not hot". Then you understand 80 is high warm, closing in on hot, etc. Similarly for our date system, we lead with names and important information rather than numbers. We're not feeding a number into a machine, we're speaking to humans. Consider any other Label. You don't say "25th Apartment", you say "Apartment 25", "Unit 25", "P.O. Box 25" Here we are on March 25. The year comes last because it's least important.
- seydor 4y agowater freezes at 0, boils at 100. this is an excellent and intuitive scale for a human that is 70% water. The SI units, like kg or m are characteristic of the human scale. and more importantly, sanely decimal. and you say 3rd street, not Street 3. and 4th of july i do prefer the american decimal point 1,000.00 , it makes more sense. But it's time for humans to quit our nonsense and give way to machines , which require universal standards.
- chordalkeyboard 4y ago> But it's time for humans to quit our nonsense and give way to machines , which require universal standards. I think we should arrange our society to favor humans and program computers in such a way to accommodate humans rather than the other way around.
- noizejoy 4y agoArguably human imperfections are already deeply reflected in computer design and programming.
- tshaddox 4y ago> water freezes at 0, boils at 100. this is an excellent and intuitive scale for a human that is 70% water. This is a stretch. How is being 70% water relevant? It’s not like I’m routinely measuring the water in my body to make sure I don’t let it boil or freeze.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- booleandilemma 4y agoBut I don't care how the rest of the world feels when they see our date format.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoDates should be annotated as such and rendered according to your browser's time zone and formating preferences. Don't blame the other culture, blame your inept communication medium.
- nerdponx 4y agoThis is a great point. Hypermedia is failing us! <p>Today is <date year=2023 month=3 day=25 />.</p>
- WorkLobster 4y agoI dimly remember trying this five years ago and it being a bit of a mess. IIRC it was that date picker widgets in browsers presented in a different format to what the Accept-Language header suggests (a killer when you're trying to render static and editable dates in the same table), or users were confused seeing dates in their preferred format after being linked from a site that disregards them, etc. Perhaps the situation has improved by now.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoSeems like requiring the date author to think about widgets is too much of burden. Better to just leave it as text and have an annotation layer that optionally says "this substring is a date in format X with timezone Y" which viewers can optionally re-render according to their preferences. That way if neither option is exercised, it's still just text.
- Steltek 4y agoLast I checked, there's no locale that gets me YYYY-MM-DD.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DougMerritt 4y agoFor many years I've used e.g. 2023 Mar 25, in the spirit of ISO 8601, to avoid all these problems. I say "in the spirit of" because, as I recall (it's been years since I read it), the standard is quite focused, whereas I just want to do Year/month/day regardless of other little details like punctuation / numeric vs named month / zero padded digits or whether there should be a timezone etc etc. Usually I'm just adding a date to private notes, so it really doesn't matter. When I have to fill out official forms on paper, I have to make an effort to change my habit.
- zahrc 4y ago(Not American) We think units that are used in different countries/cultures/continents are weird, because we’re not used to it. I can get behind the Fahrenheit bit, being more “human-readable” but for me 30C will always be hot.
- skilled 4y agoI mean, this is honestly a fantastic jab at it, made me laugh out loud. And yes, it did in fact cause brain lag at first!
- danscan 4y agoYYYY-MM-DD is the way
- pythko 4y agoI've settled on the explanation that this is just a cultural difference, and anyone arguing from a place of "logic" or "correctness" is refusing to accept that it's all convention, and different people do things differently. As an analogy, some languages put the verb at the end of the sentence (e.g. Latin, certain German grammatical structures). As an English speaker, this is weird because I don't really know what's going on until the sentence is done, and it feels like I'm putting together a little puzzle in my head. Whereas to a fluent speaker, it presumably just makes sense and you don't really find it difficult. Same thing with dates. As an American, I like our convention for writing dates. I usually care about month first. Immediately upon seeing a date, I know the rough time frame. Is it this month? Next month? Around Christmas? Around my birthday? Then the day pins it down to something specific. I will assume a date is referring to the current year, unless I see a different year, in which case it's a quick update to my mental model. April 12 flows as "soon, and exactly 18 days away" and September 12 flows "far away, and the middle part of the month". I get that computers are a different use case, and there I'm a ISO 8601 advocate.
- jl6 4y agoA fun fact about ISO 8601... it mandates[0] use of the proleptic Gregorian calendar for dates earlier than 15th October 1582. Now, in that calendar there is a year zero - so anyone using the proleptic Gregorian calendar can say that the 3rd millennium began on 1st January 2000, instead of the pedant's preferred date of 1st January 2001. Since ISO 8601 is baked into so many modern systems and standards, and since software has eaten the world, there's a real sense in which we are all using it as our primary calendar - and thus for those of us who were celebrating on 1st January 2000, we can retro-canonically rest in peace knowing the fireworks were not mistimed after all. [0] OK, there's some fuzziness in the wording, where "mutual agreement" must be sought before exchanging such earlier dates.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- arrakeen 4y agoyou see this format makes sense because we usually say "the 20th minute, 30th second of 04 PM" in america
- jdlyga 4y agoThis only makes sense from a euro-centric view of the world. Month before Day is most compliant with the international standard for date (ISO 8601). We use Year-Month-Day fairly frequently in the United States too (though the most common is Month/Day/Year).