Viewing profile — benjoffe

Correct URL: https://www.benjoffe.com/fast-leap-year (The link in the submission is incorrect; apologies for the confusion.)

In this article I present a new faster full-range function to calculate whether a year is a leap year. This type of calculation is a fundamental date library utility, it is used al…

That is an interesting question. It might also come into play if developing SIMD alternatives for batch date processing, as one can have more lanes with 16-bit. I plan to make a bl…

Thanks, that is a good idea. This was originally a blog post series, and the first article gave a bit of an introduction. When I started the blog series, I expected the first artic…

The first article in this blog post series has a little section talking briefly about this history, and there's a representation of this that I think sheds a lot of light on the or…

Thanks. I was fortunate enough to be programming on an ARM based device, which meant that the terms (x * 4 + 3) strongly stood out to me as highly inefficient, being 2 cycle prep f…

Converting that integer to a Year, Month and Day is a fundamental calculation made in almost all programming languages and standard libraries. It runs every time a date is displaye…

A write-up of a new Gregorian date conversion algorithm. It achieves a 30–40% speed improvement on x86-64 and ARM64 (Apple M4 Pro) by reversing the direction of the year count and …

This article dives deep into a topic I find very interesting, even if it’s not immediately useful. If you don't have time to read, you may want to quickly check "Appendix A" for th…

As I noted in this HN post, I did not invent this system (there are other tutorials online). I'll update the web app itself to state this clearly. The goal of the web app is more a…

The initial popup dialogue shows the default locale setting with a "change" button right next to it, and it can be changed at any time on the settings tab.

The intention is to present dates the way they often are found in that country (not just the "gold standard"). From my understanding Canadians often encounter dates in all three fo…

Thanks. I like your suggestion and I'll add a YYYY-MM-DD only option.

Thanks, I'll add a dismiss button to that popout soon.

Thanks, there is some attempt in the code to auto select US/Canada date format if the user's timezone is in the USA or Canada, but I didn't actually test it to see if it is activat…

Thanks, that's a good point that it does not clearly explain the use of that table. I will update the page soon to explain that the table cell represents the last 2 digits of a yea…

Mentally calculating the day-of-the-week for any date in history sounds like an impossible task for a normal person, but the algorithm is actually pretty simple to learn. Although …

That's a good feature but quite different, if the user is at home when they need to use the app that first time then it reveals where the user lives and possibly personally identif…

It seems a bit extreme to offer apps one of two extremes: either my sub-metre location or no location at all. It seems the reasonable default for location sharing should be somethi…

> Is the 'light' reflecting off the asteroid emitted from the sun? I had never seen or even knew radar could distinguish value like what is shown here. Yes it's emitted from the su…

Paradoxically, respecting the wishes of the dead is more about empowering the living. If there are no such guarantees then people alive will take actions to enforce their wishes pa…