5 ms·
.Beat Swatch Internet Time
- Deprogrammer9 8mo agoSwatch® Internet Time, or .beat time, is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998, dividing the day into 1,000 ".beats" rather than hours and minutes. It eliminates time zones by anchoring to "Biel Mean Time" (UTC+1). One beat equals 86.4 seconds, with the time written as @000 to @999
- gerikson 8mo agoThe swatch.com website still shows @beats in the upper left corner. I am unsure whether Swatch still markets watches with digital displays.
- joelccr 8mo agoFun! Not sure if it's a bug, but for the date+time permalink at the bottom, the displayed link changes but the underlying href is locked to 7 months ago
- netsharc 8mo agoSince humans still prefer to work in daylight and sleep in darkness, even without timezones you still need to have extra information in addition to "what time is it" to figure out if Steve in Australia will be awake at @700 or asleep... Maybe when the nuclear winter makes it dark all the time, or forces us all to live underground, then we can abolish timezones.
- bananaflag 8mo agorelated https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
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- sph 8mo agoTo be fair, I still have to look up what is the time zone difference to Australia and do mental maths, which is the exact same effort as looking up whether @700 is day or night time over there.
- netsharc 8mo agoAren't we saying the same thing? On second thoughts, the extra information is probably less complicated, Steve can say "I'm available between @300 and @1000" (maybe he keeps odd hours), and this knowledge plus a glance at the current time can tell me whether I can call Steve. Steve could also just tell his availability in UTC, and the same lack of maths is needed. Although, we still need maths because most of us don't use UTC time, in the UK only half a year as well. Except Icelanders...
- sph 8mo ago> Steve could also just tell his availability in UTC Good luck convincing Aussies, Kiwis and Americans to share their times in UTC without having to ask or doing the conversion yourself.
- xattt 8mo agoThis was a missed opportunity to call it netric time.
- bmacho 8mo agoWait is that available? Best clock would be UTC + decimal time anyway, netric time is a good name for that. Decimal time: you divide the day into powers of tens, a 'deci' is 2.4 hours, a 'centi' is 14.4 ~= 15 minutes, a 'mili' is 1.44 minutes ~= 86 seconds and so on. Great system with convenient lengths, and easy to add duration + date, and convert between different units.
- subroutine 8mo agoSee French Decimal Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time Not to be confused with Metric Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time Timekeeping units of measurement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_time
- xattt 8mo agoInternet time is already that: it’s UTC with the day divided into a 1000 beats/metric minutes. Edit: Swatch internet time
- bmacho 8mo agoThere is no "Internet time": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_time There is "Swatch Internet Time" which is UTC+1. (Wiki never refers that time as Internet Time, good that they couldn't take the term for their time.) It seems "Internet time" is still free for someone to take, if they can.
- zokier 8mo agoWhile deciday is workable hour replacement and milliday is decent minute replacement, the metric time would be missing decent seconds replacement. The next named prefix, microday, is 86ms which is very small for humans. Of course it is not insurmountable problem, but for lot of other units milli- tends to represent the lower end of "human scale"; millimeters, milligrams, milliliters, milliwatts, etc are as small as most people will ever use in day-to-day life. In some ways it would be more convenient if the base unit would be e.g. 1e-4 days (or some other power of 10) so day would be 10 kilos. Understandably it would be lot less elegant but more practical. Deci- would be .86 seconds which is kinda nice.
- fainpul 8mo agoThis always felt like a marketing gimmick. I've never seen it actually used for anything, unlike UTC.
- exegete 8mo agoMost definitely marketing. It’s got the company name in it. I’m surprised other watch makers didn’t come up with their own time standards as gimmicks.
- marvinborner 8mo agoEven UTC+-0 I have seen rarely. AoE seems more common, especially for deadlines
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> Even UTC+-0 I have seen rarely Hover the timestamp here on HN and you'll see it at least once in your life time :) I'm guessing it's mostly developers, especially ones working internationally, who come across it every day. Others seem to prefer to convert between people's timezone, while we just send UTC+00:00 to each other.
- globular-toast 8mo agoI was about to comment that it's not UTC, it's in my local time. Then I remembered my local time (Europe/London) is currently equivalent to UTC, so I have no idea what it's actually displaying (it's not indicated in any way). It's actually a problem in these parts that it's not obvious to us whether a time is in UTC or local time. I've found so many things displayed in UTC that people have assumed is local time then summer comes around and everything is off by an hour.
- Symbiote 8mo agoYour comment currently says "7 minutes ago" and 12:03:56, yet here it is 13:11.
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- donatj 8mo agoFun fact, PHP has built in support for Swatch Internet Time with it's "B" format token. https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php
- markonen 8mo agoWhat a blast from the past. I added that!
- lwansbrough 8mo agoHow does it handle leap seconds?
- sph 8mo agoAs it's based upon UTC+1, I imagine the same way as UTC.
- JamesTRexx 8mo agoIt manhadles it like a Swiss stuffed on cheese fondue and chocolate.
- bartread 8mo agoThis website: > There are no confusing time zones ordaylight savings time shifts to worry about. Also this website (and in the very next sentence - emphasis mine): > There are exactly 1,000 .Beats in a day, making each .Beat precisely 1 minute and 26.4 seconds long. Having a laugh. I'm assuming this cannot be serious, otherwise get thee hence!
- anileated 8mo agoI don't think global time would be a problem like many people suggest. If you're in US and talk to somebody in Australia, you will quickly develop an intuition that time @X is night (or whatever it happens to be) over there, just like our other intuitions about how many things (weather, season, how long are sunsets, etc.) are different in different places. Timezones are failing at all of their jobs. Getting time to correspond to sun position? It can be 7pm here and 7pm there but here it will be fully dark and there it will be still mid-evening. Knowing working hours of shops and government? Everything is all over the place. Everything is fluid and changes with seasons. Plus, there is this unfair specialness that some countries are at UTC and others have offsets. With global time, everybody gets @0, just for different places it will be at a different sun position. (As long as we find a political way to pick something neutral, instead of saying "that's when the sun is highest in London".) Finally, we don't have per-latitude calendar and things are working fine for us. It's February here and February in Argentina, and yet life doesn't stop even though it corresponds to winter here but to summer there.
- xnorswap 8mo agoIt's worth noting that technically London uses GMT for 5 months and BST for 7 months. The GMT offset is zero, but it's important to note the difference especially when configuring servers to avoid nasty daylight savings surprises kicking in at at end of March. There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning, but given we couldn't even manage Metrication without people still complaining 20 years later, I can't see it ever happening.
- ChrisMarshallNY 8mo agoI’ve heard about it, from time to time. It’s interesting, but don’t see it going anywhere. From the official Swatch page: > The BMT Meridian was inaugurated on October 23rd, 1998, in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s an oddly-phrased sentence. I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like.
- sph 8mo ago> I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like. That is what an artificial intelligence would say, unable to comprehend the existence of the physical world :-) (I've also just finished reading the novel Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which revolves around a similar plot point, but it's aliens)
- toyg 8mo agoIt means it was at a Swatch marketing event that featured Negroponte in person, in the room as they started the system. It's like saying the Amiga 1000 was launched in the presence of Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol. Maybe because I'm European and there are direct translations in my native tongue, "in the presence of" sounds just fine if a bit official.
- ChrisMarshallNY 8mo agoMakes sense. Probably a literal translation, then. Thanks!
- alexpotato 8mo agoHaving worked at firms based in New York, Chicago and London, every time there has been a debate about "Should we use local or UTC time?", I ALWAYS mention Swatch Internet Time. The fact that it's now on the front page of Hacker News makes me so happy.
- RupertSalt 8mo agoWhen I worked for a nationwide company, that was chiefly WFH with several small satellite offices, and a few abroad as well, we had some timezone issues. The main one, which became my pet peeve about event and meeting announcements, was that they always, always used Standard Time abbreviations, whether it was DST or not DST, they always specified standard time. So if a meeting was at 3pm on June 13 in Delaware, it was announced as "3pm EST". If the meeting was at 9am on August 8 in California, it was announced "9am PST". This drove me up the wall because, living in Arizona, there is a legitimate difference for us between "MDT" and "MST". Now if we anticipate this quirk, it is really not a problem, except for edge-cases. But I complained and asked why they were doing it, and they said they'd always done it that way, and even implied that it was written into policy somehow, and I came to discover it was far more widespread than just our one company's internal comms, and my brain exploded with ASD dissonance.
- Cthulhu_ 8mo agoI've got some cheap esp32's and small oled displays lying around for years now, I should build a Beats clock as a weekend project.
- portly 8mo agoI couldnt quite get the benefit of this. It's similar to UTC, but then in a format that doesn't make sense unless you convert it back to minutes? Why not use UTC, it is already in human understand format.
- ewidar 8mo agosame here, this is just moving to switzerland as the base time. https://www.swatch.com/en-ch/internet-time.html https://www.swatch.com/en-ch/internet-time.html https://beats.wiki/0 https://beats.wiki/0
- satisfice 8mo agoI never understand why smart people promote metric measurements. If you are smart, wouldn’t want to use the most complex and arcane version of everything? Let’s play Fizzbin, everyone!