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Falsehoods programmers believe about time

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Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time

#121

Post by donatj »

> The system clock will always be set to the correct local time.

I work on a sometimes offline educational product for children. Kids for some reason love to mess with their system clocks.

The hoops we've tried jumping through to get a reasonable time frame of events from iPads that were offline for any period of time is hilarious.

We gave up, and if the time of events is unreasonable, we just shift the entire set waiting to be synced so the first one is sync time. It's not perfect, it's not even really good, but it's gotten the least complaints.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time

#123

Post by pvg »

zdwolfe wrote: post #117
pvg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Falsehoods Programmers Believe Considered Harmful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3735928559

Is this link correct? I get a 404.

So harmful they had to censor it.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time

#124

Post by DiggyJohnson »

Bilal_io wrote: post #64
bee_rider wrote: post #58

We should just define a year to be 360 days long and made up of 12 30 day months. Then we can elect some druids or whatever to arbitrarily, at the start of each year, define which dates the seasonal borders will land on. Events which are truly dependent on weather can be defined in terms of "Days after the season starts." Or we could define a 5.5+-.5 day holiday between the beginning and end of a given year. Those da…

Should we also turn off computers in hospitals and in other important facilities? And then how can we qualify what's important? Maybe you and I have the privilege to turn off computers for almost a week without a negative effect, but not the majority of the world, everything uses a computer to operate and coordinate. Think about food production, aviation, shipping, sailing... And much more at both small and big scale…

How did you make it that far through the comment before choosing this issue to take seriously?

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time

#125

Post by mindcrime »

lenova wrote: post #98
ravi-delia wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why do only people born within them get special hats? Maybe you and I have the privilege of going about hatless, but not the majority of the world.

First they came for the Special Hats, but I did not speak out -- because I was hatless...

Grandpa, tell me a story about the Time Hat Wars

Well sonnie-boy, listen up... it all started on 01-01-1970...

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time

#126

Post by DiggyJohnson »

leecommamichael wrote: post #105

The proposed moral of this story, and those like it, is to avoid re-implementing general-purpose libraries. Yes, good. But not all applications need a “platonic ideal” understanding of time. Often when you type just the code you need, the system performs excellently, and the code is minimal.

I think your comment makes sense for pretty much any domain other than timekeeping though, and to claim otherwise is to take nothing away from TFA.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time

#127

Post by iainmerrick »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #63

Is it just me, or does anybody else hate these "Falsehoods programmers believe about..." lists. Every abstraction at some level is leaky. Even the atom is a leaky abstraction, and maybe even matter itself is a leaky abstraction at some level. What matters is how well the abstraction matches your use case, and where the leaks are. Just having a list of how a particular abstraction leaks without any context is not supe…

I can’t stand them. It’s a smug, click-baity and passive-aggressive format, typically without any actual examples.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time

#128

Post by emrah »

bee_rider wrote: post #58

We should just define a year to be 360 days long and made up of 12 30 day months. Then we can elect some druids or whatever to arbitrarily, at the start of each year, define which dates the seasonal borders will land on. Events which are truly dependent on weather can be defined in terms of "Days after the season starts." Or we could define a 5.5+-.5 day holiday between the beginning and end of a given year. Those da…

Or 11 30-day months and December will be 3X days. No need to shut down.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time

#130

Post by paulryanrogers »

alexfoo wrote: post #101
flir wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your symbols of office shall be a blinking 12:00 and the date 01-01-1970. Wait. In fact, if you weren't born on 01-01-1970, you can't be Time Druid. Sorry.

Do you mean 01-01-1970 or 01-01-1970?

ISO 8601 dammnit
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