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Comment by wan23 | Hacker News Reader

One thing that's tricky about analog clocks if you're not used to them - the hour hand sweeps unnecessarily over the course of an hour so you have to find the hour hand then go backwards. We have the technology to make clocks where the hour hand actually points to the hour that it is. I don't understand why the jump hour feature isn't more common.

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Wouldn't 4:58 with jump hour look too much like 4:00?

Some (the worst) clocks do that.. It's convenient that the hour hand is moving continuously because it means that unless you need to be able to say "it's five seconds past two minutes past four _in the morning_", you simply look at the hour hand, if it's in the middle of two hours, well it's half past the smaller.. if it's one forth past the smaller, it's.. yes, quarter past.. if it's one forth from the larger then it's quarter to.. and well, honestly, if you need to read the time more precisely than that and chose to use an analogue clock for it, you've chosen the wrong type of clock, a digital clock with seconds and 24 hour display is a superior tool for telling the time anyway.

That's a good point. The hour hand moves continuously as an artifact of technical constraints on the original clocks -- which I think is a great example of achieving a balance between UI and technical feasibility -- but we don't technically need them to work that way anymore, and digital clocks work exactly like that.

With that said, it's not obvious that we should use the jump hour UI[1]. It's desirable to have the hour hand be close to 4 when it's close to 4 o'clock. Like the neighbor comment says, that prevents you from confusing 4:58 with ~4.

[1] See my "continuity heuristic": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11687391

Having discrete jumps on a mechanical analog clock is not a particularly hard problem. Certainly easier that shrinking an accurate mechanical time keeping device down to wrist watch size.

For that matter getting a purely digital display out of a mechanical clock is not diffucult either either.

If there was a strong demand for such a product, they would have caught on before the 7 segment display made them the cheapest option. Possibly as a luxury or status symbol depending on how the cost worked out.

>Having discrete jumps on a mechanical analog clock is not a particularly hard problem.

I meant at the creation of the first clocks.

>For that matter getting a purely digital display out of a mechanical clock is not diffucult either either.

I don't know where I implied otherwise.

That would make it discontinuous, which means there's no information beyond the integer.

I think, though I don't know how I'd prove, that anyone truly used to an analogue wristwatch probably only looks at the hour hand when casually checking.

Many watches don't even have face markings.

I disagree with this. I read analogue clocks without having to do any conscious mental effort, but the minute hand is definitely a part of it.

If I have to think about how I parse them, I think the minute hand is more important than the hour hand. I'm usually roughly aware of what hour it is, and if I'm looking at a clock, it's to know what minute it is.

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