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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

What is the relevance of saying that a week starts on a particular day? In the most common usage, the "week" starts on Monday in the United States, and concludes on Friday, to be followed by the "weekend". A calendar week of 7 days does start on Sunday, but who cares? If they changed how the calendars were printed, life would be different in no way.

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In parts of the world, weeks of the year are numbered, so that you can talk about things happening "in week 43", and so on. For such a system, it's of course quite important to agree on which day a new week begins. Also (again, as a European) it feels very odd to not have the weekend (Saturday and Sunday) be at the end of the week, but instead "straddle" between two weeks.

I found the original article a bit strange in it's partitioning of the world into { US, Europe, some places }, I feel that is giving ... undue weight to the US convention, but I haven't studied this to see if I'm right.

In the US, weeks are not numbered, and the way to refer to a week is e.g. "the week of the 10th". (If you're talking about a different month, "the week of September 10th".) You would usually name the Monday of the week because the context is usually work-related.

I question whether "Thursday of week 37" is really that much clearer than "Thursday, September 13".

Indeed, it isn't. I'm living in a country where my company as well as our (foreign) customers use week numbers all the time. It's painful. My watch doesn't show the week number. A normal calendar doesn't. The company calendars do, but there's never one nearby when I need one. So I have a bookmark in my web browser to a 'week calendar' on the net. I can use a 'date' command, but the actual +%<something> syntax always disappear from my mind, so I have to look it up. Week numbers is just a pain. You can't even be sure about week 1 or week 52, it depends on the weekdays that year.

I wrote a date parsing library and spent a fair bit of time trying to wrap my brain around week numbers. Definitely messy.

It never occurred to me to check my Apple Watch for a week number complication. A bit disappointed it's not there, even if I'd never use it.

Update: you can install an app to Apple Watch that supplies a complication for it. "Current Week".

Perhaps it's not, but it is a bit more compact and even more so in my native language, Swedish. The names of months are longer: "September", which is the same word in Swedish has four syllables while the word for week ("vecka") has two.

And sometimes you really want to speak about the entire week without naming a day ("we'll have the first boards week 40, smoke-test and bring-up during week 41, and then start proper development by week 42"), since it's times in the future and you don't want to be too specific but still align work tasks with weeks.

Also (re: a sibling comment) Google Calendar shows week numbers, or can be configured to. For quickly finding out the week number, there's always https://vecka.nu. :)

> Also (re: a sibling comment) Google Calendar shows week numbers, or can be configured to. For quickly finding out the week number, there's always https://vecka.nu. :)

KDE and i3 desktops can be configured for pretty much arbitrary date formats, I always have the KW in there.

So for all intents and purposes, the week actually starts on Monday in the US, if I understand what you're saying.

For instance, if I were to tell you "Beginning of next week, I'm gonna X", you'd understand Monday, correct?

If you said that to me at work, I'd understand Monday, because Sunday is not part of the work week.

I'd likely understand it as Monday in other contexts too, because it's very rare for something to start on Sunday. Monday and Saturday are the transition points and thus the logical places to start doing something.

But I might understand it as Sunday if context seemed to point that way. What I'm saying is that nothing is organized according to "the beginning of the week", so the question of which day is the beginning of the week doesn't have any implications.

No hard implications, but it might influence how you number the days (C99's tm_wday uses 0-6 with 0 = Sunday, which suggests a week starting with Sunday, particularly since tm_mon uses 0-11 with 0 = January, but is also compatible with the way the days are numbered in Chinese, with Monday = 1), and it might be related to how you work out which months have 4 weeks and which months have 5 weeks: it's unusual, but some part-time employees get 4 weeks' pay at the end of most months but 5 weeks' pay at the end of some months, bizarrely.

> it's unusual, but some part-time employees get 4 weeks' pay at the end of most months but 5 weeks' pay at the end of some months, bizarrely.

Why would this be unusual? I'd expect pay-by-the-week to be more common for part-time employees, but it's not rare for FTEs either.

Well for me as Dev it changes how I render a week calendar to a user

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