Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

.Beat Swatch Internet Time

beats.wiki

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#41

Post by jmkd »

xnorswap wrote: post #26
anileated wrote: post #19

I don't think global time would be a problem like many people suggest. If you're in US and talk to somebody in Australia, you will quickly develop an intuition that time @X is night (or whatever it happens to be) over there, just like our other intuitions about how many things (weather, season, how long are sunsets, etc.) are different in different places. Timezones are failing at all of their jobs. Getting time to c…

It's worth noting that technically London uses GMT for 5 months and BST for 7 months. The GMT offset is zero, but it's important to note the difference especially when configuring servers to avoid nasty daylight savings surprises kicking in at at end of March. There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning, but given we couldn't…

I think you mean complaining about metrication 50 years later :-)

The counterpoint is that without the metric system how could we make snarky comments on US-based woodworking videos?

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#42

Post by pndy »

fainpul wrote: post #8

This always felt like a marketing gimmick. I've never seen it actually used for anything, unlike UTC.

This comes from that short period where the Internet was meant to be the bonding agent for our global village bright happy future.

And it was always portrayed as a solution for arranging meetings for you and your friends or business people on the other side of planet.

I think the other idea from these times was abolishing phone numbers and using unified global email-like identifiers. And in a way we got this on social media - some people use same account names everywhere - not mention keybase, and we also have instant messengers on smartphones in our pockets.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#43

Post by bmacho »

xattt wrote: post #22
bmacho wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait is that available? Best clock would be UTC + decimal time anyway, netric time is a good name for that. Decimal time: you divide the day into powers of tens, a 'deci' is 2.4 hours, a 'centi' is 14.4 ~= 15 minutes, a 'mili' is 1.44 minutes ~= 86 seconds and so on. Great system with convenient lengths, and easy to add duration + date, and convert between different units.

Internet time is already that: it’s UTC with the day divided into a 1000 beats/metric minutes. Edit: Swatch internet time

There is no "Internet time": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_time

There is "Swatch Internet Time" which is UTC+1. (Wiki never refers that time as Internet Time, good that they couldn't take the term for their time.)

It seems "Internet time" is still free for someone to take, if they can.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#44

Post by nickorlow »

anileated wrote: post #34
nickorlow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think this, but mirroring the sun position makes a lot of sense. If I wanted to meet w/ someone in Australia, I would still need to know extra information (what their equivalent 9-5 working hours are).

You would need to know that person's working hours, so I don't see how you are avoiding something. Sure, if you talk to someone there for the first time, you would need to learn what time is generally day/night. However, you will know that 2-3 times in. Just like you would automatically know that now it's summer in Oz, or 3 hour short days near Arctic circle, if you talk to anyone from there even very occasionally. C…

My point is either way you need to memorize some info in the first couple of interactions and it really doesn't make sense to go through all of this change to just memorize a different thing.

If you really need to coordinate something across many timezones, you currently have the option to use UTC to specify the time.

Following the sun also gives a lot of context. (i.e. if my flight to China lands at 9p local time, I immediately know that it's going to be night, but if my flight lands at 1PM UTC, I really have no context as to what time of day I'll be landing)

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#45

Post by netsharc »

sph wrote: post #28
netsharc wrote: post #5

Since humans still prefer to work in daylight and sleep in darkness, even without timezones you still need to have extra information in addition to "what time is it" to figure out if Steve in Australia will be awake at @700 or asleep... Maybe when the nuclear winter makes it dark all the time, or forces us all to live underground, then we can abolish timezones.

To be fair, I still have to look up what is the time zone difference to Australia and do mental maths, which is the exact same effort as looking up whether @700 is day or night time over there.

Aren't we saying the same thing?

On second thoughts, the extra information is probably less complicated, Steve can say "I'm available between @300 and @1000" (maybe he keeps odd hours), and this knowledge plus a glance at the current time can tell me whether I can call Steve.

Steve could also just tell his availability in UTC, and the same lack of maths is needed. Although, we still need maths because most of us don't use UTC time, in the UK only half a year as well. Except Icelanders...

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#46

Post by anileated »

nickorlow wrote: post #44
anileated wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would need to know that person's working hours, so I don't see how you are avoiding something. Sure, if you talk to someone there for the first time, you would need to learn what time is generally day/night. However, you will know that 2-3 times in. Just like you would automatically know that now it's summer in Oz, or 3 hour short days near Arctic circle, if you talk to anyone from there even very occasionally. C…

My point is either way you need to memorize some info in the first couple of interactions and it really doesn't make sense to go through all of this change to just memorize a different thing. If you really need to coordinate something across many timezones, you currently have the option to use UTC to specify the time. Following the sun also gives a lot of context. (i.e. if my flight to China lands at 9p local time, I…

> My point is either way you need to memorize some info in the first couple of interactions and it really doesn't make sense to go through all of this change to just memorize a different thing.

It's at least to make time management in systems much less error-prone and complex, among other things.

> if my flight to China lands at 9p local time, I immediately know that it's going to be night

What does that imply? If you mean "it's going to be dark", not really (you need to have more context to assume it's going to be dark at 9pm, there are places where in summer it's still very much light at 10pm). If you mean something like "buses are going to be running and McDonalds will be open", not really (you'll need to check the schedules anyway).

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#47

Post by portly »

I couldnt quite get the benefit of this. It's similar to UTC, but then in a format that doesn't make sense unless you convert it back to minutes? Why not use UTC, it is already in human understand format.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#48

Post by nickorlow »

anileated wrote: post #46
nickorlow wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is either way you need to memorize some info in the first couple of interactions and it really doesn't make sense to go through all of this change to just memorize a different thing. If you really need to coordinate something across many timezones, you currently have the option to use UTC to specify the time. Following the sun also gives a lot of context. (i.e. if my flight to China lands at 9p local time, I…

> My point is either way you need to memorize some info in the first couple of interactions and it really doesn't make sense to go through all of this change to just memorize a different thing. It's at least to make time management in systems much less error-prone and complex, among other things. > if my flight to China lands at 9p local time, I immediately know that it's going to be night What does that imply? If yo…

> It's at least to make time management in systems much less error-prone and complex, among other things.

I'm sure people deal w/ more complex issues, but 90% of it is covered by storing everything as UTC and doing the conversion on the frontend.

> What does that imply? If you mean "it's going to be dark", not really (you need to have more context to assume it's going to be dark at 9pm, there are places where in summer it's still very much light at 10pm). If you mean "buses are going to be running and McDonalds will be open", not really (you'll need to check the schedules anyway).

It implies a lot, including that less things are likely to be open, it's likely to be dark, and that I'll probably want to get to bed within a couple of hours to wake up for whatever I'm doing the next day at a reasonable time in the morning (i.e. how to adjust to the daylight cycle there).

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#49

Post by ewidar »

portly wrote: post #47

I couldnt quite get the benefit of this. It's similar to UTC, but then in a format that doesn't make sense unless you convert it back to minutes? Why not use UTC, it is already in human understand format.

same here, this is just moving to switzerland as the base time.

https://www.swatch.com/en-ch/internet-time.html https://beats.wiki/0

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#50

Post by anileated »

nickorlow wrote: post #48
anileated wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is either way you need to memorize some info in the first couple of interactions and it really doesn't make sense to go through all of this change to just memorize a different thing. It's at least to make time management in systems much less error-prone and complex, among other things. > if my flight to China lands at 9p local time, I immediately know that it's going to be night What does that imply? If yo…

> It's at least to make time management in systems much less error-prone and complex, among other things. I'm sure people deal w/ more complex issues, but 90% of it is covered by storing everything as UTC and doing the conversion on the frontend. > What does that imply? If you mean "it's going to be dark", not really (you need to have more context to assume it's going to be dark at 9pm, there are places where in summ…

Things you will have in context when traveling: "it's going to be cold", "it's likely to rain", "it's going to be government conference so there will be extra delays with transport", "it's going to be %holiday% so everything's going to be closed all week", etc.

You're so used to it you don't even question that, and if you add to that "@x is when sunset usually happens"... somehow I think the world will not come crashing down.

Post reply on HN