Live data from Hacker News

Freedom Clock

domsson.github.io

151–160 of 189 posts

Re: Freedom Clock

#151
post #42

One 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 informatio…

You seem to be the lucky lightning rod comment on this!

I guess it's fitting that the tech world gets particularly up in arms about this; we're certainly a group who enjoys demanding standardization while refusing to change our own practices.

(But also, if you're not using ISO 8601 in a code context, what are you doing?)

Re: Freedom Clock

#152
post #58
post #42

One 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 informatio…

water 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 requir…

> The SI units, like kg or m are characteristic of the human scale

Of course kilogram is a mess in itself, being base unit with a prefix. While SI is mostly okay system, lets not forget that it has its own warts.

Re: Freedom Clock

#153

Dates 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.

Last I checked, there's no locale that gets me YYYY-MM-DD.

Re: Freedom Clock

#154
post #42

One 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 informatio…

I don’t think Fahrenheit is more “human” then Celsius. We think 25 is normal, above 40 is hot and below 0 is freezing.

Re: Freedom Clock

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your body temp is over 100 F, you have a fever. If the outside is 100 F, it's too damn hot. The bottom end is much harder to justify but I believe the idea was that you wouldn't have to regularly deal with negative numbers. But both F and C are completely arbitrary. That's the least messed up part of the non-SI unit system.

Freezing and boiling water really does not seem that arbitrary to me.

What's the pressure for your nonarbitrary boiling point? In SI units please.

Re: Freedom Clock

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I say 11rd Street and set my hot pot to 1100100 degrees. The added benefit is I can now do math on my fingers with a 100x greater range! Bring in toes and it gets insane.

You will love this: https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/how-10-fingers-became-12-...

I guess it’s good they didn’t use base 2 finger counting or we would have 1024 hours

Re: Freedom Clock

#158
post #42

One 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 informatio…

> Here we are on March 25. The year comes last because it's least important. Sorry to break it to you, but in the UK, Australia or India you wouldn't say March 25, you would say 25 March or 25th March. Just as you would in Spanish, French or German. The fact that you say March 25 reflects the atypical American date standard. They do say March 25 in Chinese, but that's because they use YMD order (and when saying a ful…

As a weird contradiction, don't Americans also generally say '4th of July' when referring to the holiday?

Re: Freedom Clock

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't think so. If it's 0°C outside, I know it's probably time to put winter tires on because the water in the puddles will freeze. If water in the pot on my stove is close to 100°C, I know it will boil soon. Same with dates — it has nothing to do with being machine readable or not, dates should go from largest to smallest (yyyy-mm-dd, etc) or vise versa, not turn 180 degrees at midpoint for some reason. Your…

0°F: cold, 100°F: warm 0°C: cold, 100°C: dead 0 K: dead, 100 K: dead

There is no degree symbol in Kelvin.

Re: Freedom Clock

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freezing and boiling water really does not seem that arbitrary to me.

What's the pressure for your nonarbitrary boiling point? In SI units please.

It know it's not SI level scientific, but still, it's not as arbitrary as the "temperature of a normal human body".
Post reply on HN