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Use Timestamps

jankremer.eu

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Re: Use Timestamps

#151

Post by _glass »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #122
skrebbel wrote: post #30

I’ve found that internal documentation is a great place to put timestamps. People often complain that eg architecture pictures or design documents tend to go out of date, as if that’s somehow a big enough problem to not make them. Instead, consider making whatever documentation seems useful at a given moment and timestamp it with a clear, prominent “this was accurate on yyyy-mm-dd”. It will still be useful a year lat…

Documentation maintenance seems underrated. For most of my career, information was dumped in a wiki, so that everyone could maintain it. But if everyone maintains it, nobody does. Every project needs someone responsible for someone taking ownership of the documentation, including research and timestamping and the like. Have a todo list where the oldest document goes on top, check it for relevance and accuracy, cull i…

Documentation has to be part of the process. Work according to the process. Do documentation reviews.

Re: Use Timestamps

#152

Post by ianburrell »

orthoxerox wrote: post #94
contravariant wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should even use terrestrial time, just in case.

Space colonization is going to be a pain. We've just managed to get sensible datetime APIs with instants and zoned timestamps, but they only work when time is the same everywhere. As soon as relativity comes into play we'll have to come up with a different approach.

Space travel will be relatively easy since requires computers. Everyone will keep track of their local clock in seconds. Then they will calculate clock for places they care about, eg Earth-time, since those are pretty predictable. Relativistic corrections will be pretty minor.

My guess is that planets will keep local day-year. Mars is close enough to Earth that throwing in extra 37 min might make sense. OTOH, most planets and moon might use Earth calendar because local day cycle is too far off human internal clocks.

They will calculate time for other places, but will be less important than time zones since every communication will have light speed lag. No video calls, but lots of email.

Re: Use Timestamps

#154

Post by ketozhang »

lijok wrote: post #91

Few things irk me as much as systems that show you "N hours/minutes/seconds ago" instead of the timestamp. GitHub for example, of all systems, should know better. Trying to write up a report of any sort and not having access to accurate timestamps is very annoying.

Hover your mouse over those and you should get the absolute date. Some if not many are using time tags.

Re: Use Timestamps

#155

Post by quickthrower2 »

mat0 wrote: post #70
karl42 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shows "2023-11-15" below the title for me.

That wouldn't be considered a timestamp in my book. For starters, it doesn't have time information, only date information. Quickly asking ChatGPT it gives this answer: In computing, timestamps are commonly expressed in formats like "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss" (year-month-day hour:minute:second). When pressed about this particular time detail, ChatGPT elaborates: While "YYYY-MM-DD" is a common date format, it's not complete…

Quite the nitpick. They obviously mean date not timestamp.

The fidelity increase of Date->Timestamp for a blog post is almost nothing (unless you are reporting on current events, e.g. the BBC has timestamps in their live reports).

The fidelity increase of {} -> Date is much higher. For tech you now know that this article is likely incorrect. E.g. if it is 10 years old and about how to install Node or something.

Re: Use Timestamps

#156

Post by lijok »

ketozhang wrote: post #154
lijok wrote: post #91

Few things irk me as much as systems that show you "N hours/minutes/seconds ago" instead of the timestamp. GitHub for example, of all systems, should know better. Trying to write up a report of any sort and not having access to accurate timestamps is very annoying.

Hover your mouse over those and you should get the absolute date. Some if not many are using time tags.

Amazing, how have I never seen this. Thank you !

Re: Use Timestamps

#157

Post by eckesicle »

account42 wrote: post #83
eckesicle wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s some unexpected behaviour with MMM as a formatter, which is that it’s not always 3 characters long and differ subtle by locale. Notably on the JVM if your locale is en-GB every month is 3 chars: Jan, Feb, Mar, etc. until you get to September which is Sept. In en-US it’s just Sep. Of course, if you don’t specify the locale in code, it will choose the system default leading to lovely region specific exceptions…

Using different locales based on region for your servers is in itself an insane decision.

It’s the default on many non-AWS providers.

Re: Use Timestamps

#158

Post by zestyping »

usrbinbash wrote: post #55
mog_dev wrote: post #3

I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.

People without a technical background could accept a browser that doesn't display an URL at all. Just put a nice big Button with the Google-Logo somewhere, which for many people is "The internet" and they are happy. And anyone claiming otherwise should riddle me this: How do most non-technical people in the world access "awesomepageireallylike.something"? That's right, they click into the address bar, start typing un…

Sharing URLs is a fundamental operation.

Without a URL, you can't text someone a webpage, refer to it in a social media post or a tweet, or link to it in a document. You can't make links.

Sure, you can browse the web without it. But you can't use any of our everyday basic tools for sharing and content creation without it.

Re: Use Timestamps

#159

Post by actionfromafar »

alanbernstein wrote: post #128
rekoil wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Day I can accept, even if I dislike it. Starting with the month will always make me angry. It just has no logic to it.

Sure it does. It's the shortest way to specify a date within a period of a year surrounding the current day... Which means it's a date format that should only ever be spoken, not committed to written record.

Month first is not even syntactically correct, even in spoken form, in some languages.

Re: Use Timestamps

#160

Post by jimlikeslimes »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #33
jimlikeslimes wrote: post #25

I ran into a fun bug last week. I wrote a piece of .Net Core software that accepts a batch of transactions. The transactions are shovelled into Sql Server without much processing. Each transaction had a timestamp set to DateTime.UtcNow in C#. I didn't expect the transactions to end up with duplicate timestamps but DateTime.UtcNow only has a resolution of between 0.5 and 15 milliseconds. So in a tight loop I got dupli…

Timestamps no matter how precise don't show you the true order. If ordinality is so important then you should be using something else that guarantees ordinality, like an incrementing ID or something, not timestamps.

Yes I think in the end I'll likely go for an GUID Id column, an integer InsertOrder column, and a timestamp which is non-essential meta-data.
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