Comment by hopelite | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hopelite | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You almost had me all confused with that much confused and wrong information.

It’s really not difficult, or are you doing that juvenile bit where derision masks the incompetence you admitted to?

Just remember A comes before P.

But on a related note, do you tell people you will meet at 16 or 22 o’clock? I guess if you speak some other language that strongly types time with “…Uhr”, “…Uur”, “kl.…” it makes sense that you might not notice a difference. We can just say 4 or 10 and no one is confused, based on context, that it does not mean in the middle of the night or next morning, unless of course it’s a morning related context.

It’s simply far more human oriented, just like the US Customary Measurement system is a human scale system because it was devised by humans for practical reasons and purposes, to work quickly and efficiently, not necessarily to a nanometer precision. The different systems can exist at the same time, your zealous mindset notwithstanding.

I'm in a country that uses the 24 hour clock. We also say we meet at 4 or at 10, and are able to derive from context whether that means in the evening or in the morning.

In Poland we’ll most often use the 24hr time even when casually speaking and setting up meeting times, or people talking on tv/radio etc. Imo much simpler and less confusing

Then you don't use the 24 time? What are you even saying. America uses the 24 time too, but it's a large country with many different nations and cultures among it that all do various different things, but I don't get all presumptions and condescending about it like the zealots that demand everyone use metric and 24 hour time and then don't even practice what they preach.

Indeed in speech people use the 12 hr clock here (Netherlands), and you know that nobody wants to meet at 4 in the morning, so people (at least I) translate to 16:00...

We have Dinner at 6, not 18:00 (people would be frowning if you'd say 18:00 out loud there). In messages I think I'm one of the few that always says "16:15" because I just hate ambiguity. If context does not clarify enough people say "in the morning/afternoon/evening/night But (easily) arguably "context" is even worse than AM/PM! Though I can't remember this going wrong ever.

I remember as a kid looking at a digital clock and subtracting 2, then dropping the leading 1 to get a "feel" for the time. Nowadays I'm 24h native and don't like the ambiguity of 12 hr references.

I set al my clocks to 24 hr (unless they have arms).

So yeah, here we are, all cool with our "military time", ahum.

That's because everyone should be using decimal time, clearly the superior representation.

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

If there's a zealous mindset here, I see it coming from this comment.

It's significantly easier to use a 24-hour clock and get rid of AM and PM. In fact, it's so easy to use 24 hours that I use it exclusively for my internal time, and I do commonly get confused by times like 12AM - is it day or night? It has a 12 instead of a 0, somewhat confusing.

I also refuse that the metric system is more difficult for human scale measurements. Ever since I switched, I have had a stronger fundamental connection to the units, and I can visualize the world better. It's significantly easier, and I would call it MORE human oriented.

Sequence starting at 12, 01, 02, 03 etc. is "human oriented"?

What do leading zeros have to do with whether people use 12 hour time instead of 24 hour time?

Why is this stuff challenging, it feels like reddit over here. My point is that saying "we will meet at 4" is more human scale than "we will meet at 16" because it segments the context window into morning and afternoon for which most humans and situations do not require additional external context to put meaning to.

Leading zeroes have obviously nothing to do with my question. Reordered integers did though.

You'd be surprised but people in Europe also don't say "sixteen o'clock", they say "four" or "seven in the evening" if it is ambiguous. But at the same time the physical clocks and texts between people have completely clear and unambiguous time, one can understand it instantly. Why with British/USA time, when the clock is between 12 and 1, I always need to stop and analyze which of the bullshit time segments it is referencing, because of the wrong order of numbers, starting at 12, then going back to 1, then forward to 2 etc.

In the UK, it's pretty normal to say "oh two twenty-three" for 0223 or "fourteen thirty-five" for 1435.

But when being less precise, we might say any of "half two this afternoon", "two thirty pm", or "fourteen thirty" depending on context.

As we do still use the 12 hour clock in less-formal situations, using an "oh" prefix for times before 1000 gives an extra point of disambiguation.

Interesting that you say the 'o' to explicitly indicate the 24h format.

In France we just say "let's meet tomorrow at 8 hours" for example, to which the person has to ask something like "Wait, do you mean at 8 hours or 20 hours?"

It's usually obvious from the context, but not always.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com