How the lore of New Year defeated the law of New Year • Hacker News Board

Re: How the lore of New Year defeated the law of New Year

#61

Post by ralferoo » Sun, Jan 05, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

jsmith99 wrote: post #39

postingawayonhn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems awkward not ending on the last day of the month. In NEw Zealand it's close, the FY ends on 31 March.

In practice most people treat the UK tax year as ending 31 March - this is sufficiently close and actually explicitly permitted.

Not at all. There is no explicit permission to do so, as you would very quickly find out if you have already filled your ISA by 31st March and pay into it again between 1st and 4th April.

In practice, the only reason people can consider the tax year as ending on 31st March is because most people have no significant taxable events occurring between then and 5th April.

But if you sell shares that put you over the capital gains threshold, receive dividends, pay into your ISA or even receive interest from your bank account in those few days, these are all considered taxable events. For most people they are a non-issue due to the tax-free allowances on all these classes of income, but if you exceed the tax-free allowance for any of them, it's important you apportion them to the correct year.

Re: How the lore of New Year defeated the law of New Year

#62

Post by kybernetikos » Sun, Jan 05, 2025, 11:57 PM UTC

kridsdale1 wrote: post #58

fragmede wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the names of the months, September is the 9th month and October is the 10th? December is the 12th? Those names changed to those numberings roughly about the same time, and is also tech debt.

I just looked that up (in 4o with Search), and it happened long before ceasar made the Julian calendar: “Your observation about the misalignment between the numerical prefixes of the later months and their positions in the calendar is astute. This discrepancy arises from the evolution of the Roman calendar over time. Original Roman Calendar: • Structure: The early Roman calendar, traditionally attributed to Romulus,…

I'm not sure this is entirely correct, it implies a level of standardisation that I don't think was the case. Not everyone agreed when years were considered to have started or used the same numbering systems for a very long time, even after the Julian calendar was widely adopted.

You can see how this played out in England, a relative latecomer to the increasing year start consensus. Up until the Calendar (New Style) Act of 1750, the year was considered to start on the 25th of March. This means that historical documents in England containing dates in January or February have what we would consider to be the 'wrong' year number on them. Pretty inconvenient, but at least the roman numbered months would have made some sense to a person living in England before 1750.

Re: How the lore of New Year defeated the law of New Year

#63

Post by athom » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 6:39 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #38

A decent case can be made for March 1 as the start of the year. With March 1 as the start of the year the extra day in leap years then comes on the last day of the year. This makes dealing with leap years when calculating the day of the week from a date simpler. It also makes the names of September, October, November, and December make sense. Those names come from the Roman words for 7, 8, 9, and 10, which were the n…

Starting from March also sets up a neat pattern that can be used to generate accurate month/day values from day-of-year numbers, IF you number them from zero. You can also go back the other way.

March through July follow a simple two-month cycle of 31 days, followed by 30, repeating at May and July. August breaks the cycle with 31 days, but it essentially restarts, and runs a second five months before it breaks again, at January (the 11th month, since we started from March). The third run obviously runs out after February, ending prematurely, but this doesn't really break the cycle, either. You just restart again with March!

This allows you to write some (relatively) simple conversions using just a few divisors, along with some conversions from 1-based to 0-based numbering, and back. 153 days every five months, 61 every two, and of course 31 for a single month. Divide the remainder from each prior division by the next divisor, and the final remainder is your (0-based) day of the month. The month itself (taking 0 = March) is then the sum of each quotient multiplied by the associated count of months.

Reversing the process, I'll leave to the reader.