You have to admire the person who designed the flexibility to have 87239 seconds not be old enough, but 87240 to be fine.
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 going to steal that one for my JavaScript monthly developers meetup.
Is it ok if I attribute it to "Xirdus on Hacker News"?
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
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.
Daylight savings time makes a day take 23 hours or 25 hours. That makes a week take 7254000 seconds or 7261200 seconds. Etc.
(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.)
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
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."
True. But seconds are not the base unit for package compromises coming to light. The appropriate unit for that is almost certainly days.
It's just library for handling time that 98% of the time your app will be using for something else.