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Comment by ferongr | Hacker News Reader

Which is completely asinine, as mechanical watches, even expensive ones are inaccurate by many seconds every day.

“Many” seconds per day strikes me as an overstatement.

The Hamilton I’m wearing right now gains about 10 seconds per week. I set it about once every 3-4 months - that’s hardly an onerous task.

I'd say you got a lucky one. From Hamilton's own site -

> Most watches that do not have a chronometer certificate have an average course deviation of -10/+15 seconds per day. To be called a Chronometer, the mechanical watch mechanism must have an average course deviation of -4/+6 seconds per day.

That’s a min/max daily range that is influenced by factors such as movement, angle, temperature and magnetism. They generally do not hit the min max and average out quite a bit day to day.

I agree it's not perfect but:

1. For cases where seconds matter in human interaction there are well know and efficient protocols to sync

2. Often 2-3 seconds turn out to not matter but being on the right time zone does. It is an evolutionary development after all so (at least at some point) there exists a large market for this feature

They're so perfectly imperfect, and that's why we love them.

It's useful while traveling across time zones. You'd lose a lot more time if you had to hack it while changing the local time setting.

Is it? You have a phone, you can just sync to it when you change timezone. Or is not looking at your phone part of the hobby?

> Or is not looking at your phone part of the hobby?

yes.

I mean, yes, if you're wearing a watch, it's obviously because you want to be able to tell the time with a simple glance at your wrist, rather than having to pull your phone out of your pocket.

Plus watches are waterproof, and you can bring them with you while swimming/snorkeling/diving/saunaing/whatever, which you wouldn't do with a phone.

Sure, but I feel you are rather unlikely to need to change time zone while snorkelling (unless you snorkel really far!). I understand the point of watches, just not why you would care about the lack of hack for changing the hour.

You missed the point; you aren't changing time zones while snorkeling, but you are still wearing the watch. The point is you don't have your phone with you while snorkeling so you have to check the time on your watch, and because you're traveling, you had to change the time when you got there, which the independently adjustable hour hand made easier.

An independently adjustable hour hand is a useful complication on a watch for traveling across time zones.

I don't know about seconds, but it's pretty nice to adjust the hour without having to reset the minute hand.

Rolex are +/- 2 seconds per day.

That's terrible. Hacking prevention would make sense if they were ±2 seconds a month.

1 minute a month (upper bound) is hardly a deal breaker. If you were adjusting the watch regularly without hacking (as a pilot) you'd have an error rate that's probably close to 10x higher. 10+ minutes a month WOULD make a difference.

> 1 minute a month (upper bound) is hardly a deal breaker.

For a relative measure: if you're off by one minute when using a sextant, then you could be off by (IIRC) about 15 nautical miles.

So one should at least know the average drift of the time piece if it's being used for navigation, and it should be sync'd up with UTC/GMT regularly.

For regular day-to-day stuff, one minute is probably less dire.

+- 2 seconds per day is their worst case specifications (watches being stored in weird orientation, with high temperature etc.). It is common for standard usage watch to be within 10 secs monthly.

It's art

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