Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

#81

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 5:56 AM UTC

koch wrote: post #12

prepend wrote: post #9

This looks neat. I wish it used iso8601 [0] dates. It’s pretty convenient as the time periods uses the format YYYY-MM-DD/YYYY-MM-DD and I think is easier to mentally parse than MM/DD/YYYY-MM/DD/YYYY. Of course I didn’t even know what a solidus (“/“) was until using iso8601. Also, I usually find standards pretty much as overhead, but 8601 seems pretty good as a universal standard. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO…

Yeah, so long form 8601 are supported `2022-08-02T23:00:00.000Z - 2022-08-03T00:00:00.000Z: Event` but in general I do need to figure out a way to allow more customizable date parsing.[0] [0] https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen/issues/27

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

#82

Post by pronik » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 5:57 AM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #71

rzwitserloot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germanic (Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) languages just say "10 october", they'd never say "October 10th". Before we get our 'english is so stupid!!!' hat on, in many of these (e.g. Dutch and German), the number '87' is pronounced 'seven-and-eighty' ('zevenentachtig' - 'zeven en tachtig' - seven and eighty), which is stupid. Languages are weird). Same for the romance ones: It's just "Quatorze juillet" - 1…

About that romance 87 … French in France: four twenties seven French in Switzerland: eighty seven (octante sept)

French is actually not so weird if you think about what a "score" is in English. Gettysburg address literally begins with "four score and seven years ago", which equals to 87.

Re: Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

#83

Post by jmiskovic » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 8:08 AM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #16

chriswarbo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s pretty convenient as the time periods uses the format YYYY-MM-DD/YYYY-MM-DD and I think is easier to mentally parse than MM/DD/YYYY-MM/DD/YYYY Especially for those outside the USA!

As someone who grew up in the US, it's still bizarre as a programmer to have a mixed-significance ordering (MM-DD-YYYY) instead of any consistently-endian ordering (DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD). Out of curiosity, in what order do Europeans verbally say full dates with month names? Or does it vary by language?

I really hate watching historical documentaries where they spell out dates with day->month->year. If the intention is to teach, then the year is most important number and all other information is to be catalogued in context of broadest time period. The DD-MM-YYYY forces viewers to keep the whole date in their heads before it can be parsed and understood.

The "Algorithms to Live By" book has a good name for this: computational kindness. We should strive to reduce cognitive burden. The bigger the audience, the more effort should go into making data digestible. Unfortunately the established date standard goes against it.

The other problem is mixing endianness: the date information uses little endian, while numbers themselves are spelled out in big endian. The American MM-DD-YYYY on the other hand... I don't know what they were thinking.

Re: Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

#84

Post by metaketa » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 8:21 AM UTC

As mentioned in a Github issue, would love to store the Markdown file in my code repository (roadmap) and the markwhen server to deploy hosting the file to my static domain when I deploy my code.

Other than that, you are making amazing progress! And fast also.

Re: Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

#85

Post by metaketa » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 8:23 AM UTC

koch wrote: post #14

cheeaun wrote: post #10

Really awesome to see this evolving to this stage :)

I'm glad you're here to see it! So cheeaun here posted his life timeline project[0] 9 years ago (!) to hacker news[1] and I always thought it was pretty neat. I made a tool to make timelines like that and it has since evolved into markwhen. [0] https://github.com/cheeaun/life [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833565

Yes, very awesome what you did with it! Really promising to use as a developer. Always hated all the roadmapping tools that required to generate the roadmap in the tool itself instead of Roadmap-as-Code.

Re: Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

#86

Post by metaketa » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 8:24 AM UTC

account-5 wrote: post #67

I definitely can't use this, the date overhead is too much. I agree with the other commenter, YYYY-MM-DD is the way to go.

Agreed, the date thing is stopping me too still for now. I'm waiting for symbolic headers! Or the use of relative dates.

Re: Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

#87

Post by metaketa » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 8:27 AM UTC

lootsauce wrote: post #17

This is awesome! I want to see other tools like this. I dream of a project management system that is text based and lives in your codebase seems we are pretty close with this. Planning (this), comments / descriptions (markdown), identity / people (??), tickets (??) Anyone know of something like this?

It doesn't exist yet but it needs to be built. Project-management-as-code. This would be the roadmap interface. Let's kill Jira.

Re: Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

#88

Post by AdrianB1 » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 12:25 PM UTC

jmiskovic wrote: post #83

ethbr0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who grew up in the US, it's still bizarre as a programmer to have a mixed-significance ordering (MM-DD-YYYY) instead of any consistently-endian ordering (DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD). Out of curiosity, in what order do Europeans verbally say full dates with month names? Or does it vary by language?

I really hate watching historical documentaries where they spell out dates with day->month->year. If the intention is to teach, then the year is most important number and all other information is to be catalogued in context of broadest time period. The DD-MM-YYYY forces viewers to keep the whole date in their heads before it can be parsed and understood. The "Algorithms to Live By" book has a good name for this: comp…

Interesting thing I learned about historical battles: the most important part of the date is the season. In my country there were no battles during winter, early spring and late autumn, most were from April to September. It does not mean month is more important than year.

Re: Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

#89

Post by AdrianB1 » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 12:27 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #16

chriswarbo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s pretty convenient as the time periods uses the format YYYY-MM-DD/YYYY-MM-DD and I think is easier to mentally parse than MM/DD/YYYY-MM/DD/YYYY Especially for those outside the USA!

As someone who grew up in the US, it's still bizarre as a programmer to have a mixed-significance ordering (MM-DD-YYYY) instead of any consistently-endian ordering (DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD). Out of curiosity, in what order do Europeans verbally say full dates with month names? Or does it vary by language?

The one difference by language is the day: some languages say 1st or 7th, some just 1 or 7. In mine, except for 1st we use the day number, full reading is "day month, year" where the comma is a small extra space.

Re: Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

#90

Post by asaibx » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 3:30 PM UTC

For all those who are requesting ISO8601 dates -- according to the GitHub repo [0] these are already supported:

> Dates: A date can be expressed in a few forms. Human readable dates are supported, like 1665, 03/2222, or 09/11/2001, as well as IO8601 dates, like 2031-11-19T01:35:10Z.

[0]: https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen