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Comment by friendzis | Hacker News Reader

> (Side note, it's wild that npm, bun, and pnpm have all decided to use different time units for this configuration.)

First day with javascript?

You mean first 86,400 seconds?

You have to admire the person who designed the flexibility to have 87239 seconds not be old enough, but 87240 to be fine.

Probably went with the simplest implementation, if starting from the current “seconds since epoch” value. Let the user do any calculations needed to translate three days into that measurement.

It also efficiently annoys the most people at once: those what want hours will complain if they set it to days, thought that want days will complain if hours are used. By using minutes or seconds you can wind up both segments while not offend those who rightly don't care because they can cope with a little arithmetic :)

Though doing what sleep(1) does would be my preference: default to seconds but allow m/h/d to be added to change that.

I'm old enough to remember computers being pitched as devices that can do tedious math for us. Now we have to do tedious math for them apparently.

Hence the way I would do it (and have for other purposes), as stated in my final sentence. Have the human state the intent and convert to your own internally preferred units as needed.

Hey that's a great joke, you made me spill my morning home-brewed kombucha.

I'm going to steal that one for my JavaScript monthly developers meetup.

Is it ok if I attribute it to "Xirdus on Hacker News"?

Lol sure.

I'm sure you would like to memorize all kinds of API instead of having something idiot proof and straightforward

As if `minimumReleaseAge` in `[install]` section of `.bunfig.toml` doesn't require the same kind of memorization.

No no no, see now we just say "computer! do tedious math!", and it will do some slightly different math for us and compliment us on having asked it to do so.

The one true unit of time is hexadecimal encoded nanoseconds since the unix epoch. (I'm only half joking because I actually have authored code that used that before.)

I actually think it is not too bad a design, because seconds are the SI base unit for time. Putting something like "x days" requires additional parsing steps and therefore complexity in the implementation. Either knowing or calculating how many seconds there are in a day can be expected of anyone touching a project or configuration at this level of detail.

Seconds are also unambiguous. Depending on your chosen definition, "X days" may or may not be influenced by leap seconds and DST changes.

I doubt anyone cares about an hour more or less in this context. But if you want multiple implementations to agree talking about seconds on a monotonic timer is a lot simpler

Could you explain what you mean re: ambiguity? I understand why “calendar units” like months are ambiguous, but minutes, hours, days, and weeks all have fixed durations (which is why APIs like Python’s `timedelta` allows them).

The minute between December 31, 2016 23:59 and January 1st 2017 is 61 seconds, not 60 seconds. The hour that contains that minute is 3601 seconds, the day that contains that hour is 43201 seconds, etc. If you assume a fixed duration and simply multiply by 43200, your math will be wrong compared to the rest of the world.

Daylight savings time makes a day take 23 hours or 25 hours. That makes a week take 7254000 seconds or 7261200 seconds. Etc.

That’s what I mean by calendar units. These aren’t issues if you don’t try to apply durations to the “real” calendar.

(This is all in the context of cooldowns, where I’m not convinced the there’s any real ambiguity risk by allowing the user to specify a duration in day or hour units rather than seconds. In that context a day is exactly 24 hours, regardless of what your local savings time rules are.)

"exactly 24 hours" could still be anywhere between 86399 and 86401 seconds, depending on leap seconds. At least if by an hour you mean an interval of 60 minutes, because a minute that contains a leap second will have either 59 or 61 seconds.

You could specify that for the purposes of cooldowns you want "hour" to mean an interval of 3600 seconds. But that you have to specify that should illustrate how ambiguous the concept of an hour is. It's not a useless concept by any means and I far prefer to specify duration in hours and days, but you have to spend a sentence or two on defining which definition of hours and days you are using. Or you don't and just hope nobody cares enough about the exact cooldown duration

If you say "wait 1 day without using a calendar+locale" then the duration is unambiguously 86400s, but if you say "wait 1 day using a calendar+locale" or "wait until this time tomorrow" then the duration is ambiguous until you've incorporated rules like leap/DST. I think GP's point is that "wait 1 day" unambiguously defaults to the former, and you disagree, but perhaps it's a reasonable default.

Yep, this is exactly my point. Durations are abstract spans of "stopwatch time," they don't adhere to local times or anything else we use as humans to make time more useful to us. In that context there's no real ambiguity to using units like hours/days/weeks (but not months, etc.) because they have unambiguous durations.

Now you've got me wondering something: if a "stopwatch month" can't exist since everyone agrees that different months have different durations (and therefore you must select one like "the month of January" to know how long to run the stopwatch), isn't there an argument that a "stopwatch year" has the same need to select one since everyone agrees that different years have different day counts (unless we mean a solar year in seconds, not quantized to the nearest day, but that's probably a Bad Default)?

The collective human decision to make days-per-year vary (requiring leap rules to calculate days) seems similar to the collective human decision to make days-per-month vary (requiring month names to calculate days). So if we say a "stopwatch year" suffers the same fate as the "stopwatch month" then it's a slippery slope to saying the "stopwatch minute" is no different than a "stopwatch year" (requiring leap rules to calculate seconds) even if, for all practical purposes, it seems exempt.

I guess this is why we make "second" the SI unit, and none of our human-convenience rules mess with the duration of a second. A leap second changes the duration of a minute (and above), and a leap year changes the duration of a month (and above). Which, oddly enough, demonstrates an inconsistency: we ought to say "leap day" instead of "leap year" if the thing being added will follow the word "leap."

Leap seconds are their own nightmare. UNIX time ignores them, btw, so that the unix epoch is 86400*number of days since 1/1/1970 + number of seconds since midnight. The behavior at the instance of a leap second is undefined.

Undefined behavior is worse than complicated defined behavior imo.

That's a good way of describing that. It's far too easy to pretend UNIX timestamps would correspond to a stopwatch counting from 1/1/1970.

Right. Currently epoch time is off the stopwatch time by 27 seconds.

In the UK last Sunday was 23 hours long because we switched to BST, and occasionally leap seconds will result in a minute being something other 60 seconds.

No it wasn't. The country instantaneously changed timezones from UTC+0 to UTC+1 (called something else locally), it was no different to any other timezone change from e.g. physically moving into another timezone.

exploiting the ambiguity in date formats by releasing a package during a leap second

I came here to argue the opposite. Expressing it in seconds takes away questions about time zones and DST.

I think you're incorrect to say that second are also ambiguous. Maybe what you mean is that days are more practical, but that seems very much a personal preference.

I understand the [flawed] reasoning behind "x seconds from now is going to be roughly now() + x on this particular system", but how does defining the cooldown from an external timestamp save you from dealing with DST and other time shenanigans? In the end you are comparing two timestamps and that comparison is erroneous without considering time shenanigans

I think you misread the comment you're replying to.

> seconds are the SI base unit for time

True. But seconds are not the base unit for package compromises coming to light. The appropriate unit for that is almost certainly days.

that kind of complexity is always worth it. Every single time. It's user time that you're saving and it also makes config clearer for readers and cuts out on "too many/little zeroes on accident" errors

It's just library for handling time that 98% of the time your app will be using for something else.

I find it best when I need a calculator to understand security settings. 604800 here we come

This is the difference between thinking about the user experience and thinking just about the technical aspect

Well, you have 1000000 microseconds in between. That's a big threshold.

wait what if we start on a day DST starts or ends????

OP should be glad a new time unit wasn't invented

Workdays! Think about it, if you set the delay in regular days/seconds the updated dependency can get pulled in on a weekend with only someone maybe on-call.

(Hope your timezones and tzdata correctly identifies Easter bank holiday as non-workdays)

> Workdays!

This is javascript, not Java.

In JavaScript something entirely new would be invented, to solve a problem that has long been solved and is documented in 20+ year old books on common design patterns. So we can all copy-paste `{ or: [{ days: 42, months: 2, hours: "DEFAULT", minutes: "IGNORE", seconds: null, timezone: "defer-by-ip" }, { timestamp: 17749453211*1000, unit: "ms"}]` without any clue as to what we are defining.

In Java, a 6000LoC+ ecosystem of classes, abstractions, dependency-injectables and probably a new DSL would be invented so we can all say "over 4 Malaysian workdays"

But you know that Java solution will continue working even after we no longer use the Gregorian Calendar, the collapse and annexation of Malaysia to some foreign power, and then us finally switching to a 4-day work week; so it'd be worth it.

It probably won’t work correctly from the get go. But it can be debugged everywhere so that’s good.

... and since it was architectured to allow runtime injection-patching of events before they hit the enterprise-service-bus, everyone using this library must first set fourteen ENV vars in their profile, and provide a /etc/java/springtime/enterprise-workday-handling/parse-event-mismatch.jar.patch. Which should fix the bug for you.

You can find the patch files for your OSs by registering at Oracle with a J3EE8.4-PatchLibID (note, the older J3EE16-PatchLib-ids aren't compatible), attainable from your regional Oracle account-manager.

And least one of those environment can contain template strings that are expanded with arguments from request headers when run under popular enterprise java frameworks, and by way of the injection patching could hot load arbitrary code in runtime.

A joke should be funny though, not just a dry description of real life, so let's leave it at that. We've already taken it too far.

This isn’t even remotely funny.

I am laughing. I'm not even near the end of this thread.

In before someone thinks it's a joke, the most commonly used logging library in Java had LDAP support in format scripts enabled by default" (which resulted, of course in CVE)

JavaScript Temporal. Not sure knowing what a "workday" is in each timezone is in it's scope but it's the much needed and improved JS, date API (granted with limited support to date)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

There's an extra digit in your timestamp.

Ah but you don't know how far in the future I intended it to be :)

And we also need localization. Each country can have their own holidays

And we need groups of locales for teams that are split across multiple locations; e.g.:

  new_date = add_workdays(
    workdays=1.5,
    start=datetime.now(),
    regions=["es", "mx", "nl", "us"],
  )

Hopefully "es" will have Siesta support too.

Might be better to calculate them separately for each locale and then tie-break with your own approach (min/max/avg/median/etc.)

Don't forget about regional holidays, which might follow arbitrary borders that don't match any of the official subdivisions of the country. Or may even depend on the chosen faith of the worker

Pulaski day in Illinois. Or Reds Opening Day in Cincinnati.

When I worked in Finance our internal Date extension did actually have Workdays that took into account Stock Market and Bank Holidays.

…now imagine a list of instruments, some of which have durations specified in days/weeks/months (problems already with the latter) and some in workdays, and the user just told your app to display it sorted by duration.

I tried to write this function in Power Query (Excel hell). Gave up after an hour or so.

Me too, it was just a constant filled with bank holidays for the next 6 years

Why would it get pulled in over the weekend? What automatic deployments are you running if there also isn't a human working to get it out?

Do you run automatic dependency updates over the weekend? Wouldn't you rather do that during fully-staffed hours?

Nah, working hours and make global assumptions of 0900-1230/1330-1730, M-F, and have an overly convoluted way to specify what working ours actually are in the relevant location(s).

If we're taking suggestions, I'd like to propose "parsec" (not to be confused with the unit of distance of the same name)

That way Han Solo can make sense in the infamous quote.

EDIT: even Gemini gets this wrong:

> In Star Wars, a parsec is a unit of distance, not time, representing approximately 3.26 light-years

> That way Han Solo can make sense in the infamous quote.

They explained it in the Solo movie.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/ah3ptm/solo_a...

Making a whole movie just to retcon the parsec misuse in Ep IV was a choice

They made a movie to make money. I doubt anyone holding the purse strings cared one iota if that bit were corrected or not. It’s not really a retcon either because they didn’t change anything.

That had more or less been the explanation in the books for decades, and even in George Lucas' notes from 1977:

> It's a very simple ship, very economical ship, although the modifications he made to it are rather extensive – mostly to the navigation system to get through hyperspace in the shortest possible distance (parsecs).

Parallax arc-second -> distance.

For Star Wars, they retconned it to mean he found the shortest possible route through dangerous space, so even for Han Solo's quote, it's still distance.

It was already fine, because it’s a metric defined on a submanifold of relativistic spacetime.

N multiplications of dozen-second

To me it sounds safer to have different big infra providers with different delays, otherwise you still hit everyone at the same time when something does inevitably go undetected.

And the chances of staying undetected are higher if nobody is installing until the delay time ellapses.

It's the same as not scheduling all cronjobs to midnight.

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