Tomorrow the Unix timestamp will get to 1,666,666,666 | Hacker News Reader

Tomorrow the Unix timestamp will get to 1,666,666,666

time.is

248 pointsbubblehack3r116 comments

Here is how to get the date from the Unix timestamp (GNU/Linux coreutils):

   date -d @1666666666

macOS/bsd coreutils:

   date -r 1666666666

In PostgreSQL:

SELECT to_timestamp(1666666666);

i like your style; but im still trying to quit vi

This key sequence should work no matter which mode you are currently in.

It discards all changes in all buffers though.

Got a bit curious.

date -d @6666666666

Wed 04 Apr 2181 01:51:06 PM CEST

I also got curious

→ date -d '@2222222222' Fri Jun 1 08:57:02 PM PDT 2040

You're implying there's time past 2038-01-19T03:14:07? That's ridiculous.

Something like 30 years ago I came across a magazine in which there was a calendar with set of events for each day so that you can have a pretext to drink everyday. After a while the idea of a similar service came to mind - a program which would figure the nearest "round" number of seconds, minutes, days in hex, oct, bin etc. So it is more than 20 years already and I'm still thinking it would be great to implement it finally.

This should be a comemoration of the things that are easy for computers to read and look like a representation of hell for humans. We can't in any way find meaning in what 1,666,666,666 seconds are, we can only atribute some magical evil meaning to a number.

We would start the party with google deep dream, move to algorithms hiring and firing people, crime prediction, some guy ranting that his life was ruined when youtube close his account and the impossibility of talking to a human, and then would end with a bang reaching 1,666,666,666.

I am a fun party planner.

I went to a party (I think EFF sponsored it) at golden gate park when we hit 1,000,000,000

I went and checked 2000000000. It will happen on 2033-05-18T03:33:20.000Z (edited)

Assuming 2000000000 is unix seconds, epochconverter.com converts it to Wednesday, May 18, 2033 3:33:20 AM GMT.

My bad, thank you for the correction. I had converted it properly to 2033 but decided I wanted to switch to the format with ms. Ended up adding a zero in the process without checking the output (other than the .000 being there). Edited

I think you've added an extra 0 in there.

$ date -r 2000000000

Wed 18 May 2033 04:33:20 BST

$ date -r 20000000000

Tue 11 Oct 2603 12:33:20 BST

realizing that I would be long gone by 2603, your reply made me really sad. then I realized that your calculation is obviously wrong.

can I sue you for such such emotional distress?

i think you have an extraneous 0. It would not make sense for it to take a longer time to get from 1,000,000,000 to 2,000,000,000 than from the unix epoch to 1,000,000,000.

The time I think you meant to post is Wed May 18 2033 03:33:20 UTC+0000 (Greenwich Mean Time).

Two days before 9/11 happens, talk about creepy numerology.

Fun fact: Unix timestamp will eventually be every integer number from 1 to 4294967295

Except if we have a negative leap second at some point

Implying it hasn’t already been every integer number from 1 to 4294967295..

The 1970 epoch was set in 1973 so time_t (as currently specified) never had values less than 100,000,000

https://dotat.at/@/2014-11-22-nerdy-trivia-about-unix-time-t...

That's funny! I never really thought about WHEN it was adopted. I guess I just assumed every nerd sat around on Dec 31, 1969 and pressed a button 1 sec after 11:59 GMT. (Clearly I'm joking, please don't correct me, folks!)

Approximations of Pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximations_of_π

> In the 3rd century BCE, Archimedes proved the sharp inequalities 223⁄71 < π < 22⁄7, by means of regular 96-gons (accuracies of 2·10−4 and 4·10−4, respectively).

  223/71  = 3.1408450704225
  666/212 = 3.1415094339622
  π       = 3.14159265359
  22/7    = 3.1428571428571

Is π a good radix for what types of math in addition to Trigonometry? And then what about e for natural systems; the natural log.

"Why do colliding blocks compute pi?" https://youtu.be/jsYwFizhncE https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/clacks-solution https://www.reddit.com/r/3Blue1Brown/comments/r29vm5/rationa... ... Geogebra: https://www.geogebra.org/m/BhxyBJUZ :

> The applet shows the old method used to approximate the value of π. Archimedes used a 96-sided polygons to find that the value of π is 223/71 < π < 22/7 (3.1408 < π < 3.1429). In 1630, an Austrian astronomer Christoph Grienberger found a 38-digit approximation by using 10^40-sided polygons. This is the most accurate approximation achieved by this method.

At that time, a total of 1,666,666,693 seconds will have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT as Unix time pretends leap seconds don't exist...

Hmmm, am I wrong in understanding that, by pretending leap seconds don't exist, the unix time actually represents how many seconds passed rather than what time time is now? (Where a second is as long as every other second, not smearing out the leap second across the whole year. I.e. by the cesium standard definition.)

    user@debian:~$ qalc "$(date -d 2022-01-01T00:00:00+0000 +%s)"/3600/24/365.25
    ((1640995200 / 3600) / 24) / 365.25 = 52

Precisely 52 years' worth of seconds, which I guess also tells me that there have been an integer number of leap years since then. Either way, at 1666666666, 1666666666 seconds will have passed rather than ...693 no? The extra 27 seconds are either for keeping the sun at its zenith when the clock strikes noon (not that that is even close to true where I live, it's off by more than an hour) or for keeping winter in December. I can never remember which, although we already have leap days for keeping December in winter (in this hemisphere) so I think it must be the 24-hour variable rotation speed thing.

If you want to define 1666666666 as having +27 seconds passed since 1970 started, you would have to redefine the length of the second every time a leap second is announced, I think.

I find this all tough to wrap my head around, though, so it can very well be that I'm wrong here.

Hmmm, am I wrong in understanding that, by pretending leap seconds don't exist, the unix time actually represents how many seconds passed rather than what time time is now?

It's the other way around: Unix time pretends every day has exactly 86,400 seconds, and consequently, you can calculate the current time of day by taking the respective modulus.

However, this comes at the cost that the difference between two unix timestamps does not yield a duration in seconds in general.

The choice to go along with leap seconds was one of the bigger crimes against precision...

However, it also allows you to re-sync a device just by putting in the current datetime - at the cost that it'll drift at a rate of up to two seconds per year (though the current average is more like 0.5s given 27 leap seconds in 50 years).

This is also like the Julian Day, used in astronomy (AFAIU), which uses floating point to represent the number of days since an epoch. The fractional part presumes 86400 "seconds" per day. Conversion between Unix Time and Julian Day is a simple, fixed function, as is conversion to proleptic Julian or Gregorian date-times. These types of schemes makes calendrical calculations, both past and future, trivial.

Note that there are different variants of the Julian Date: For example, the Julian Date(Universal Time 1) drifts against Julian Date(Terrestrial Time), with the former being based on Earth's rotation, the latter being an idealized time scale which can be approximated by TAI + 32.184s.

Why didn't 1,618,033,998 get this much buzz?? Is there a rational explanation for this?

Yeah, I can't figure out what the hell the significance of 1,666,666,666 is. I'm usually able to suss these things out, but I'm having a devil of a time on this one.

The number of the beast is pretty explicitly the exact number six hundred and sixty six, not 'six six six', so any other concatenation of the digits should really be meh even to the apocalyptically inclined.

You know, "2 out of 3 ain't bad"

In this case, one out of three is bad

Well, there is about three devils worth of pain in our Unix servers sometimes.

I remember being in a building that was 668 and we called it neighbor of the beast (US streets have odd on one side and even house numbers on the other).

...as in Europe (but I am certain there are exceptions and am looking forward to the replies pointing out where that is not the case)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:House_numbers_clockw...

I don't know of any country that uses an entirely different system, but I'm willing to bet each country has a couple of exceptions somewhere.

IIRC, Japan uses (or used?) to number buildings in chronological order.

Obligatory: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

Berlin uses a different system in the older parts of the city

https://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-berlin-hous...

Wikipedia describes two systems in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_numbering#United_Kingdom

According to both those systems, if you look down the street from the end where number 1 is (which is always the open end of a cul-de-sac), then number 1 is the first house on your left. I'd be interested to hear about any exceptional cases in which number one is on your right.

"Triablo"

> Well, there is about three devils worth of pain in our Unix servers sometimes.

Our machines have been possessed by daemons for years so I'm not at all worried.

That is not a strict rule. I grew up in a neighborhood where houses were numbered by the order the lots sold. They were effectively random.

I know. I grew up on a road with no name that numbered the houses with an odd cadence. But, well mannered neighborhoods have stuck with the scheme such that most people recognize the reference.

Time flies. Seems like just yesterday the clock hit 1,000,000,000 (Sun Sep 9 01:46:40 UTC 2001)

One of my favorite questions from my take home interview is:

> I just turned 1 billion seconds old. What day was I born? > Show your work. Bonus points for precise second.

Most people would do it the hard way - determine the number of days in 1 billion seconds, and then work backwards to get the date.

The approach that I look for (and surprisingly few people thought to do) was to get the current unix timestamp, remove the leading 1 (billions) and get the datetime for that timestamp.

Apple I was priced at $666.66. Look at what Apple became, a beast!

Can’t even transact without it * wink *

We got apple watch.. soon to come apple headband.

I won't upvote because it currently has 166 points.

To pretty print the Unix timestamp in your ZSH prompt, you can use something like this:

   function prompt_epoch() {
     printf -v COMMA_EPOCH "%'d" ${EPOCHSECONDS}
     p10k segment -f 66 -t ${COMMA_EPOCH}
   }

It relies on zmodload zsh/datetime to get EPOCHSECONDS. In the example above I'm using it with the powerlevel10k prompt.

Guess what else will happen, Unix timestamp will get to 1,666,666,667, then 1,666,666,668, etc.

That actually looks like the rent on the old office facility at a company I worked for, only a few decimal places to the left: $16,666.66/month <shudder>

we humans tend to enjoy numerology for some reason. I remember turning 55,555.5 miles on my motorcycle and stopping to take a photo. It turns out I was on a small back road with a 55mph speed limit, and I was close to a "Speed Limit 55", unfortunately I could get that into the photo as well.

That's definitely some Law of 5's probability field distortion there.

Seems like walking the bike to a better position to get that photo might have been worth it

It would have been a beautiful "footprints in the sand" moment if you had turned off the ignition and carried the motorcycle those last hundred feet for the photo.

Closing in on the Y2K38 problem.

Nooooo! The Y2K38 problem is already here. It is not a problem that will happen in 2038. It is a problem with storing and processing dates past 2038. For example, if you work in a bank and you have a system to store mortgage information that includes the epoch timestamp that someone's 25 year mortgage will end that means you need to store a date that is in 2047. If you do that using an epoch timestamp on a system that's using a 32 bit timestamp it'll overflow and return a date before the epoch instead.

Do not imagine that Y2K38 is something to put off until nearer the time. You need to be thinking about it right now.

What's wrong with dates before the epoch? Subtraction of rolled over unsigned ints works.

So long as you know it was before 1970, and after 1970-(2038-1970)=1902, you can recover the original date, yes.

I'm kind of both horrified and impressed that this very solution is likely in place in some codebases.

The fix itself doesn't need to be complicated for it to be hard to actually implement. A lot of apps that are affected probably haven't been deployed in years. Some won't have any source code available. Others won't have any docs, or tests, or even developers who know the right language. Fixing simple issues in old apps is hard.

Are 32-bit systems still around? I mean other than some old embedded system that will likely be decommissioned well before 2038.

Even in 64 bit systems, some numbers are stored as 32 bit integers. And 32 bit systems can process 64 bit numbers, they are just slower at it.

It is a software and standardization problem, not hardware.

I think it is often an incorrect assumption that the people who flaunt numbers like this are being tongue in cheek.

If anybody's interested, there is a best-guess on why the heck 666 was declared to be the "number of the beast" in ancient scriptures: It's a statement that each one of us is our own worst enemy, as this is the number you can easily make an image of with your left hand.

The fact that this was inadvertently recycled into the WP gesture is abysmally hilarious.

I would've thought that by 2022 everyone would have finally realized that the "OK hand sign emoji = white supremacist secret hand sign" thing was literally a 4chan troll job. people still don't actually think white supremacists make the "OK" sign with their fingers as some kind of secret signal to each other, do they?

> people still don't actually think white supremacists make the "OK" sign with their fingers as some kind of secret signal to each other, do they?

The only people who ever thought that, though it because the news told them so. Since the news hasn't told them it's not true, they still think it is.

This is one of those things where fiction becomes truth. While it may have initially started as such, unless you can also prove that every single white supremacist also knew it was a joke, it kind of became a white supremacist hand sign.

It's an issue with satire in general. Eventually there will be someone too stupid to see it as satire.

And then you get into Schrodinger's racist territory. Being an asshole ironically is still being an asshole.

> unless you can also prove that every single white supremacist also knew it was a joke, it kind of became a white supremacist hand sign.

4chan is an anonymous imageboard, anyone can post anything, anyone can "meme" anything into being a "hate symbol".

it doesn't seem like a very good idea to allow 4chan trolls to literally dictate societal norms, especially the creation of "hate symbols". at some point one must realize that such "hate symbols" literally only have as much power as you're willing to grant them—so why grant them any?

This is kind of a vacuous argument. Once something leaves the confines of 4chan, the origin doesn't matter. The intention behind the action matters. If white supremacists are using it as a signal, it is a de facto white supremacist symbol.

And by the way you're trying to move the goalposts, I'd have to say you're from Tennessee. At first your argument was that "it's from 4chan, it was a joke, it didn't count". And now, your argument is "words are powerless unless you give them power". Which, is the sort of aphorism I'd expect from Ricken.

Symbols are important because they serve to signal to others what is and is not accepted. Or who are members of your in-group, whatever those groups may be. If I go to a sporting event, I can choose to adorn myself in the symbols of one team or another to indicate support of that team. And that tells complete strangers if I'm inclined to cheer with them or against them.

Don't be obtuse.

> And by the way you're trying to move the goalposts, I'd have to say you're from Tennessee.

> Which, is the sort of aphorism I'd expect from Ricken.

dude what are you even talking about you completely lost me

> And now, your argument is "words are powerless unless you give them power".

when were we talking about words? what?? I think you're having an argument with some kind of Tennessean strawman on accident.

Tennessee beat Alabama in a recent game and responded by ripping the goalpost out of the ground and crowd surfing it around the field.

Ricken is a character from Severance who writes a book of profound sounding nonsense.

I addressed why both were relevant. Your argument now is different from your initial argument. And "abstract concepts only have the power we give them" is the kind of pap we feed to others to give ourselves license to keep using shitty abstract concepts.

uh ok, apologies for not understanding all the cultural references I guess?

what portion of people today in 2022 do you think see someone use U+1F44C in electronic communications and immediately think "white supremacist dogwhistle"? obviously there was a bit of a "panic" there a few years back, but hasn't pretty much everyone gotten over it by now? I use it all the time especially as a reaction-emoji in messaging services, and nobody I know (of all faiths & colors) has any issue with it. I used it all the time before, during, and after the 4chan trolling, with the latter being what I consider to be "doing my part" in not letting something so ridiculous actually take hold within my culture, because holy shit how ridiculous can you be, it's the OK sign, I've been making it all my life, I'm not going to stop doing it because some 4chan trolls (correctly, but frustratingly) thought it would be hilarious to convince everyone overnight that it was the Ultra Secret White Supremacist Hand Sign, specifically because it is so widely-used by everyone.

so going forward, do we keep pretending like "the ok hand sign" should be "white supremacist dogwhistle", just because there was a brief flash-in-the-pan 4chan trolling about it a few years ago, which a few people are (apparently???) still sensitive about? should what society determines to be "hate symbols" be exclusively dictated by the most sensitive and reactionary people in said society? if that's the rules you want to play by, go for it man, if you need me I'll be over here in Normal World where a man can pinch his index finger and thumb together without being assumed to be a white supremacist.

"abstract concepts only have the power we give them" is an absolute truth, which I am actively proving by refusing to give this abstract concept any kind of undesired power, and going out of my way to refuse to cease using said abstract concept in my day-to-day life, due to some ill-defined sense of Internet Moralism trying to exert control over me by preventing me from doing so. it has no power over me or anyone around me whatsoever, and in fact I completely forgot it was even a thing until today lmao

I don't think that our current character for 6 is the same as it was when those scriptures were written.

The original scriptures did not use Arabic numerals.

From what I can tell, the earliest manuscript of Revelation 13:18 (the typical source of "666" being evil) originates from the third century CE in Egypt [1], instead saying "616" is the mark of the beast and using the Greek numerals. The first example of the earliest ancestor to the modern numeral "6" appears in inscriptions in India dating to the same period [2]. I would expect there is no relationship between Revelation and the modern numeral for 6.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_115

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edicts_of_Ashoka#Ancestor_of_t...

Actually I listened to a NPR show that said something like 666 was a mis-translation or due to a smudge on an old doc. Supposedly it should be 616. IIRC, they said in Roman Numerals 616 has/had somekind of meaning.

I know it's irrational but now I'm looking forward to 1732050808

In about 13 hours at time of writing, so today in most US timezones.

at ~10:57EST i'll be toasting this event with some kind of intoxicant

EDT. It would be a shame if you missed it by an hour.

I use them interchangeably which is a bad habit I need to work on.

Well, I missed it

Happy Halloween.

Happy All Hallows Eve!

And Lucifer shall walk the earth

Praise the sun!

It's kind of funny people are so obsessed with 666 when it's a mistranslation, the actual number was 616.

Citation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_beast has a fair bit on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/616_(number)

seriously? If so, what is then meant with the statement about it being "the number of a man"?

The popular theory is that it referred to Emperor Nero. The author was basically telling you, "I'm making an allegory right now. Wink wink, nudge nudge."

That theory has never made a lot of sense to me because the persecution of Christians wasn't a big secret.

It's generally dangerous to talk about things everyone knows, when the thing everyone knows is how evil the local power structure is.

Two reasons come to mind:

1) There's a long history of it. Gematria was a Jewish technique, then carried over to the early Christian community. There may have been reasons to keep it up as a matter of course, but as you said, with Nero it probably didn't matter: the dude knew everyone hated him. Not just Christians.

2) The purpose of Revelations was meant to comfort the current Christian community at the time by prophesying a future calamity with many parallels to the current calamity. The end of the world brings great destruction, yes, but there is vindication at the end of it all, and hence hope for the community.

One thing to keep in mind about the nature of the "anti-Christ" is that it is the opposite of Christ in all ways. Christ was expected to come back at the end of days. So, too, then, was the anti-Christ. If the anti-Christ has never been seen before then "coming back" doesn't quite make sense, but it does make sense if the anti-Christ refers to Nero: he was a complete bastard in his first life, and he's so evil that he will come back at the end of days to persecute Christendom again.

I have also heard the suggestion that 666 is an obvious number to pick if you use Roman numerals, being every letter (less than M) once in descending order: DCLXVI. (But why exclude M?)

(Trivia: what is the biggest number that is an English word when written as a Roman numeral?)

Man is a carbon based lifeform (atomic # 6) According to Genesis, Man was made on the 6th day

Huh. TIL!

From wiki:

> Papyrus 115 (which is the oldest preserved manuscript of the Revelation as of 2017), as well as other ancient sources like Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, give the number of the beast as χιϛ or χιϲ, transliterable in Arabic numerals as 616 (χιϛ), not 666.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_beast

I don’t think it’s a mistranslation, the manuscripts themselves differ. Regardless of which is ‘correct,’ it’s likely an error in the retelling or copying.

This person points out that either 616 or 666 could refer to Nero and some other possible evidence that was the case: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-number-of-beas...

Even funnier is that 666 is a positive/holy number in Judaism.

It represents the creation of the physical world: The 6 directions, (cardinal directions plus up and down), and the 6 days of creation, and repeating a number represents strengthening it, i.e. it represents perfecting the physical world.

It's also the Gematria (numerical value) of a prayer requesting divine mercy.

https://ohr.edu/ask_db/ask_main.php/277/Q1/

Edit: It's also interesting that two people got so annoyed at me posting this that they downvoted every one of my comments that they still could.

That downvoting behavior is indeed fascinating (and slightly troubling).

Not a mistranslation, exactly. It depends on whether you rendered Nero's name from Latin or Greek. In Greek, Nero's name was written "Neron". The letter 'n' had a gematria value of 50, so when transliterated into Hebrew, the extra 'n' would have made the calculated value either '616' or '666' depending on what source language the name came from.

It might not be a mistranslation but if you wanna construct a "haha people are dumb" narrative or drop a "well akschually" it can be construed as one which is sufficient for that purpose.

The above statement applies to a hell of a lot of things, not just the whole 666 was/wasn't a mistranslation factoid. Comments like the top level one are what platforms incentivize when they "keep score" of discourse like many/most do.

I learned something from both posts so I am glad we got the simple answer and the lets-knuth-this-thing answer too.

> lets-knuth-this-thing

As a related aside, Don Knuth once composed a work for the pipe organ based on the book of Revelation:

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fant.html

Why did I just get "Dawn of the Final Day" vibes?

why is this relevant?

Presumably channers seeking to claim the glory of a 1666666666 GET.

What is the exact unix time for "a cold day in hell"?

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