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Comment by greggyb | Hacker News Reader

Completely random and off-topic. I'm in the US and used to 12-hour time. I personally prefer 24-hour time, and am comfortable with 18:00 or similar for a time indicator. I don't know that I've ever seen a 24-hour time with am/pm attached to it. Is this common?

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No, at least not in Italy. In fact, I don't think it makes any sense.

To feed off your random comment, I live in the US as well but switched all of my clocks (that I was able to) over to 24-hour time a few years ago. It just makes more sense to me. But everybody around me thinks I'm some sort of weirdo for it.

I've got a handful of software (Skype, my ereader) that don't have 24h time options. Super annoying, especially for software where all they'd have to do is use the OS time convention.

I've found that a lot of software that moved to Electron or similar solutions has trouble adhering to OS settings. Heck, even Chrome ignores my date format in the history tag. That's what you get with a technology that's not really supposed to interact with the user's OS settings much.

I switched everything I could to C, km, 24 hour time, and YYYY-MM-DD. US social conventions around measurements are just obtuse.

Thank you.

not at all, it just seems a misprint / little error

I say 6pm but write 18:00. I imagine things like that can very easily lead to awkward translations.

I've found countries (Slovakia springs to mind) that would say "a quarter of 8" for 7:15 (think "7 hours and a quarter of the eighth hour") and "half 8" for 7:30. Time can translate in rather interesting ways.

In Russian at least, a closer translation would be “half of 8th” because it means something like “half of the 8th hour [has passed].”

it's a gesture for the americans probably. you start typing 18:00 and realize that US people will want to know if it's pm.

You're right. My mistake.

Just a bit of redundancy, to compensate USA Covid-19 tests.

How else would you distinguish e.g. 18 in the morning or 18 in the evening if you can't say 18am and 18pm.

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