We celebrate our birthdays every year, but why not our 1,000,000,000 seconds? | Hacker News Reader

We celebrate our birthdays every year, but why not our 1,000,000,000 seconds?

nerdiversary.com

17 pointsptarjan27 comments

If your site's copy asks that question, one of the first things I should see after submitting my birthday is, indeed, my age after 1,000,000 seconds. Seeing a list of everything I could be besides 1,000,000 seconds old confused the heck out of me. :)

That said, pretty cute. I like it. You could make a cute viral Facebook app out of something like this (though maybe with less nerdy milestones).

Your 1,000,000 seconds should be in there (unless you have past it already, in which case it is hidden behind the link at the top).

Would you prefer different copy? Maybe I just emphasized that too much putting it as the title on HN.

Well, not that many people are on HN before their 1,000,000th second. (1000000 seconds = 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds)

great point. I'll edit it to 3 more orders of magnitude.

"unless you have past it already"

This happens within the first fortnight of your life. Of course you've past it already.

~11-day old babies don't generally read sites like this.

Here's a even more beautiful variation I've seen : http://interconnected.org/home/more/lightcone/

It takes a birth date and tells you when your personal light cone passes nearby stars.

Because no one knows the second they were born? I actually know the minute (0:21 EDT) but I suspect even that is unusual to know.

Also, how long should we celebrate it for? 1 second?

I like the idea of counting down to the event.

"I'll be a billion seconds old next Friday night! Come to the party and be there when the second arrives!"

Deploying surprise party in 3, 2, 1... It's over now, thanks for participating.

I made something similar a while ago ( http://www.addedbytes.com/blog/mathematical-anniversaries/ ). I never did work out why these things aren't more popular. Might I suggest adding ical?

Scrolling down is kind of depressing.

That is a REALLY irritating method of entering a date! To go back a decade, you have to go to january of the first year in the dropdown, click the previous month button.

Can't I just type in a date?

Typing in the text box should just work. I'll try to make that more discoverable.

Or if you have another date input widget I'm all ears.

Just replace the year dropdown with a text input, or even just load the dropdown with 100 years (or both).

I can't type in the text box, as soon as the widget closes the form submits.

Let me know if you guys celebrate any other nerdy dates.

I'm 39. My birth year is not even selectable in the drop-down. I had to go to 1974, then scroll back 2 years. Not exactly a positive experience.

Yeah, this date widget has issues. Have you seen a better one anywhere else? You can always just fall back to the text box, but that is less good.

I've used the jquery-ui datepicker before. You can customize it to make the year a drop-down, similar to what you have. I forget what the default range of years is, but we modified it to suit our needs anyway...

But can't you just modify your widget? Somewhere in your code must be the range of years provided...

Ideally you could use the input element with type=datetime for browsers that support it, and a date widget fallback for browsers that don't. This should provide a better experience for users and hopefully less support issues for you.

Also, it allows you to set hour and minute of birth, but the rest of the site doesn't use them.

Since it has second-related marks, it would be nice if it was working with hours and minutes as well.

I'd like to know my xE6-iversaries, but this site only does 10^6,10^7,...

Both are crazy. Why would anyone want celebrate being closer to death? Plus, as a nerd, I wouldn't choose an arbitrary unit of time like seconds.

I'll give you the answer child me would say: presents and cake.

In other words, we celebrate because we get something desirable out of the celebration or the act of celebrating.

There is a few other planetary orbital periods in there if you prefer another arbitrary unit.

And other bases too incase you weren't born with 10 digits.

Writer, philosopher Alain de Botton: "We should cite our age not by how many years we've lived, but by how many we statistically have left: a 70 yr old UK male as 8 etc."

http://twitter.com/#!/alaindebotton/status/95809899929407488

It seems to be bitten by a 2038 bug. I asked for a reminder for my 100th birthday and got an error.

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