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Ask HN: What does 12:00 AM mean?

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Ask HN: What does 12:00 AM mean?

#1
Today I missed my online exam because I was 12hours late. Being European and engineer I was used to 24hours notation. “12:00 AM” was interpreted as 12:00 noon in my head. In retrospect i’m disappointed Pearsonvue (in this case) does not write these times in universal format or even better, attach an ics file upon schedule confirmation.

My question to you is: did you run into this kind of mistakes also? How do we solve this more universally?

Re: Ask HN: What does 12:00 AM mean?

#6
post #4

Using 24hr clock. It would have been 00:00 for you.

Of course, if you list a time as 00:00 for a US audience, you'll probably get a lot of people complaining that it's broken.

And in the same way it's impossible for the US audience to learn metric it's also impossible for them to learn 24 hr time.

Re: Ask HN: What does 12:00 AM mean?

#10
Ante meridium and post meridium.

Ante- meaning “before”, meridium meaning “highest point of the sun” as in when the sun crosses the “meridian” which would be the line in which it is now setting instead of rising.

Passing from post-meridian to ante-meridian is exactly 12 hours from when the sun passed the meridian point, to keep it “consistent”.

I get though that it’s confusing, I questioned it a lot as a young boy.

Personally I believe that is stupid that we go from 11pm to 12am, but the reason is that the cutover is “12”, and everything after 12 (including the hour) are considered morning.

Like others have mentioned, we should really be using 24hr time these days where possible. Additionally I’m of the impression that we should use ISO8601 for date formats instead of what the Uk does (or even worse: what the US does).

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