This one is good (or evil, depends on how you see it):
Human-readable dates can be specified in universally understood formats such as 05/07/11.
Comment on xkcd #2867: DateTime
elvith@feddit.de 11 months ago
sukhmel@programming.dev 11 months ago
elvith@feddit.de 11 months ago
That one’s really good.
Which one is it?
- July 5th 2011
- May 7th 2011
- July 11th 2005
- November 7th 2005
And is it 2011/2005 or rather 1911/1905, 1811/1805,…?
randy@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
I really wish that list would include some explanations about why each line is a falsehood, and what’s actually true. Particularly the line:
The software will never run on a space ship that is orbiting a black hole.
If the author has proof that some software will run on a space ship that is orbiting a black hole, I’d be really interested in seeing it.
nybble41@programming.dev 11 months ago
Technically isn’t the Earth itself a sort of space ship which is orbiting (…a star which is orbiting…) the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy? Not really close enough for time dilation to be a factor, but still.
elvith@feddit.de 11 months ago
All links to the original article are dead and even archive.org doesn’t have a capture either. I guess the argument is along the lines of “it might not be relevant, when you’re scripting away some tasks for your small personal projects, but when you’re working on a widely used library or tool - one day, it might end up on a space vessel to explore whatever.”
E.g. my personal backup script? Unlikely. The Linux kernel? Somewhat plausible.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
It’s a programmer thing. As you’re typing the code, you may suddenly realize that the program needs to a assume certain things to work properly. You could assume that time runs at a normal rate as opposed to something completely wild when traveling close to the speed of light or when orbiting a black hole.
In order to keep the already way too messy code reasonably simple, you decide that the program assumes you’re on Earth. You leave a comment in the relevant part of the code saying that this part shouldn’t break as long as you’re not doing anything too extreme.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Well in a very strict sense one can’t really say “never” (unless you can see into the Future), but it’s probably safe to go along with “It’s highly unlikelly and if it does I’ll fix it or will be long dead so won’t care”.
Kethal@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Does anyone know what is untrue about “Unix time is the number of seconds since Jan 1st 1970.”?
icydefiance@lemm.ee 11 months ago
When a leap second happens, unix time jumps back by a second. See the section about leap seconds here: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
nybble41@programming.dev 11 months ago
It might be more accurate to say that Unix time is the number of days since Jan 1st, 1970, scaled by 24×60×60. Though it gets a bit odd around the actual leap second since they aren’t spread over the whole day. (In some ways that would be a more reasonable way to handle it; rather than repeating a second at midnight, just make all the seconds slightly longer that day.)
Logical@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This post made my head hurt
hakunawazo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Thank you, but I gave up halfway through the list.
kurwa@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I got to “The day before Saturday is always Friday” and I was like waaaa?
sukhmel@programming.dev 11 months ago
I thought it is about when Julian calendar was dropped in favour of Gregorian, but that’s not it:
elvith@feddit.de 11 months ago
Also some of the islands around the International Date Line did switch their stance on which side of the Date Line they are. So… they might have had a day twice or lost a whole day in the process. And maybe, they didn’t change sides only once…
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Epoch is your friend, or use UTC. At least that’s my layman reasoning. I have no challenges working with DateTime except when I don’t know the underlying conditions applied from the source code.