I am unsure whether Swatch still markets watches with digital displays.
Not sure if it's a bug, but for the date+time permalink at the bottom, the displayed link changes but the underlying href is locked to 7 months ago
Maybe when the nuclear winter makes it dark all the time, or forces us all to live underground, then we can abolish timezones.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Not to be confused with Metric Time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
Timekeeping units of measurement:
Hover the timestamp here on HN and you'll see it at least once in your life time :) I'm guessing it's mostly developers, especially ones working internationally, who come across it every day. Others seem to prefer to convert between people's timezone, while we just send UTC+00:00 to each other.
It's actually a problem in these parts that it's not obvious to us whether a time is in UTC or local time. I've found so many things displayed in UTC that people have assumed is local time then summer comes around and everything is off by an hour.
The API shows a unambiguous timestamp, which is the exact same value I see for your comment: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/46958592
> created_at: "2026-02-10T12:03:56.000Z"
Thank you for helping me discover the source of this little brainwurm.
I read the PHP docs and wondered "What in the heck is that?" before Googling it.
> There are no confusing time zones ordaylight savings time shifts to worry about.
Also this website (and in the very next sentence - emphasis mine):
> There are exactly 1,000 .Beats in a day, making each .Beat precisely 1 minute and 26.4 seconds long.
Having a laugh.
I'm assuming this cannot be serious, otherwise get thee hence!
Timezones are failing at all of their jobs. Getting time to correspond to sun position? It can be 7pm here and 7pm there but here it will be fully dark and there it will be still mid-evening. Knowing working hours of shops and government? Everything is all over the place. Everything is fluid and changes with seasons.
Plus, there is this unfair specialness that some countries are at UTC and others have offsets. With global time, everybody gets @0, just for different places it will be at a different sun position. (As long as we find a political way to pick something neutral, instead of saying "that's when the sun is highest in London".)
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 even manage Metrication without people still complaining 20 years later, I can't see it ever happening.
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.
Case in point, we have global calendar with no problems.
I constantly forget which way the half hour difference is between Adelaide and Melbourne / Sydney!
Then I have regular contact with offices in London and LA. For some of the year it’s not too bad, and then our clocks switch the opposite way and it gets less convenient! Which way is which I can never remember.
Queensland doesn’t bother changing their clocks at all.
Writing software that deals with Timezones isn’t too bad these days, but supporting it is as it constantly confuses users I find!
From the official Swatch page:
> The BMT Meridian was inaugurated on October 23rd, 1998, in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That’s an oddly-phrased sentence. I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like.
That is what an artificial intelligence would say, unable to comprehend the existence of the physical world :-)
(I've also just finished reading the novel Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which revolves around a similar plot point, but it's aliens)
The fact that it's now on the front page of Hacker News makes me so happy.
Deprogrammer9•5d ago