Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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On a slightly related topic I was recently thinking of how simple it is to only have to worry about one calendar in your personal and business life (the western gregorian calendar). If you're an even slightly observant Muslim with an educated techincal/professional life in many parts of the historical Persian speaking world, you have three calendars to keep track of:

1) Western gregorian calendar (doing business with foreigners, international travel, banking, finance, most everything done on the Internet, etc).

2) Islamic arabic originated lunar calendar (When does Ramadan start, when is an okay time to go for hajj, when is Eid Al-Fitr, when is Eid Al-Adha, etc). This goes "backwards" 10 to 11 days per year compared to the western gregorian calendar so in different decades Ramadan might be in the middle of summer, or middle of winter.

3) Persian solar calendar for new year observances like Nowruz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowruz , and generally persian-related cultural things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Hijri_calendar

But wait, there's more! Let's say you live in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan or that region and you do business with Russians. You might have to think about when the Russians are on vacation and businesses are closed, because they're taking holidays and religious observances based on the eastern orthodox calendar. Basically all the same problem as trying to get business things done in the UK on a UK standard "Bank Holdiay". Their Christmas is not the same as the western Gregorian calendar Christmas...

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

Even on 1), the first day of the week being Sunday (US) and Monday (Europe) screws me up constantly, as someone who is in both worlds now.

I often pick the wrong date for meetings because I'm assuming next Monday will be in the first column, not the second. As dumb and simple as it is, when something has been drilled into you since about age 3 its tough to get in the habit of double checking it when it starts becoming inconsistent.

That’s illuminating. I was born and have lived in the U.S. my entire life. If you asked me what the first day of the week was, I would immediately respond with “Monday”.

I’m going to mull this one over a bit more to figure out where my social education went wrong!

Im in the US and I’d say the week starts on monday but calendar interfaces display a sunday first.

https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=2026&country=9

Toggle the calendars here and you’ll see it.

Monday as the beginning of the week is the only logically defensible position if you support the weekend.

There is only one weekend. One end of the week. It goes at the end as it is definitionally required to do.

If Sunday is the end of the weekend, it is the end of the end of the week.

The end of the end of the week cannot be the beginning of the week.

Sunday comes after Saturday comes after Friday...comes after Monday.

Therefore, Monday is the beginning of the week.

QED

> The end of the end of the week cannot be the beginning of the week.

Of course it can. The word “weekend” just refers to the block of free time starting at the end of the working week. It doesn’t have any direct relation to the way weekdays are laid out on a calendar. The word was invented in England at a time when the English still considered Sunday the first day of the week, a hundred years before ISO 8601 moved Monday to the start for commercial reasons (as described in Annex A).

When a public holiday falls on Monday, my friends and I call that weekend a “three‐day weekend” or a “long weekend,” even though the Monday falls well within what a strict ISO 8601er would consider the next week. What makes the weekend the weekend is when the weekend starts—the end of the work week—not when the weekend ends.

You are conflating the work week with the week.

ISO is but one standard.

Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, and Cambridge all define the weekend as some derivation of "the end of the week".

I'm also not sure how the various definitions and historical context has anything to do with the claim that the end cannot be the beginning. If the end were the beginning that particular day would belong to two different weeks, but that's nonsense. The last day of the prior week and the first day of the current week are two different days, therefore:

> The end of the end of the week cannot be the beginning of the week.

> You are conflating the work week with the week.

The weekend has always been innately tied to the work week specifically, both historically and in current usage.

> Dictionary.com

Has as the third listed definition: “any two-day period taken or given regularly as a weekly rest period from one's work.” And has a whole paragraph describing usage, including: “More strictly speaking, the weekend is thought to consist of Saturday and Sunday (often regardless of whether the calendar week is considered to begin on Sunday or Monday). In practical terms, the weekend is typically considered to be the period between the end of the workweek (or school week) and the beginning of a new one—which is why most people consider their weekend to start on Friday night, after work or school.”

> Merriam-Webster

“the end of the week; the period between the close of one work or school week and the start of the next”

> Cambridge

“Saturday and Sunday, or Friday evening until Sunday night; the part of the week in which many people living in the West do not go to work”

Every dictionary you cited agrees that the weekend is or can be defined in relation to the work week!

> If the end were the beginning that particular day would belong to two different weeks, but that's nonsense.

Millions of people living in cultures where Sunday is the first day of the week have no problem with the concept of a single weekend consisting of a Saturday from one week and a Sunday from the next. There’s no logical contradiction. “Monday as the beginning of the week is the only logically defensible position if you support the weekend” is a false statement, because a single weekend is not required to consist solely of days from the same week.

I think the weekend could cover the beginning and the end, just like a bookend can be at the beginning or end of the book shelf

My shelves all have two bookends. If they only had one, the books would fall off the end without a bookend.

But, this is simply mataphorical reasoning. One cannot conflate weeks with bookshelves for many reasons.

Logically, the weekend days belong together on a calendar but that's not how US calendars are typically laid out.

The week has two ends. Maybe the people putting Sunday at the start are just trying to cover both options.

So it should be called weekends?

That's my standard response. "If Sunday's at the beginning, then there are two weekends per week."

Otherwise, the weekend should have been called weekedge

Oh, I agree that’s the case, and I’ve noticed it over the years, but never thought deeply on it other than “that’s an annoying preset”

1st joke https://youtube.com/shorts/3p2Apuhj40E

Officially (or historically, or to banks maybe) it starts Sunday, but to anyone I have ever talked to in the US its definitely Monday. Saturday and Sunday are the weekEND after all.

This is one of the most annoying ones to me. I recently almost booked a pair of ~2000 euro return flights for the completely wrong dates because the booking site decided to (despite knowing our location and correctly setting currency, currency formatting and language) show it's date picker starting with Sundays. Only caught when I did a last sanity check before I clicked the pay button.

You know, when you speak language where the word for Tuesday is literally "Seconder" and the word for Friday is "Fifter", it's really difficult to accept that starting to number the days of the week from Sunday is a sensible thing.

If you’re referring to Slavic languages, they’re counted from Sunday.

• Sunday: “no work”

• Monday: “[first] after Sunday”

• Tuesday: “second [after Sunday]”

• Wednesday: “middle”

• Thursday: “fourth [after Sunday]”

• Friday: “fifth [after Sunday]”

• Saturday: “sabbath”

Treating the work week as the start of the calendar week is a 20th century invention, as is the five‐day work week. Historically, Slavic calendars began on Sunday: https://www.russianhistorymuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2025...

It depends what kind of business... there are all sorts of weird and wonderful accounting / financial calendar inventions like the 4-4-5 calendar, fiscal years ending in June, bond day count conventions like 30/360, etc.

I do take your point though. I've always found it quite surprising just how universal various arbitrary/western things are like, as you say, the western gregorian calendar, seconds/minutes/hours, SI units for measurement. In a world with so many unintelligible languages and disagreements, you'd think there would be more folks out there doing, I dunno, a 10 day week, or some non-hour/minute system, etc.

The French tried this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

I wonder what they would have thought of swatch internet time.

My partner's place of employment has a fiscal year ending June 30th and a use-it-or-lose-it vacation policy. We are hikers who live in the northeastern United States, which means we're inevitably planning a backpacking trip to use up her remaining vacation at the height of black fly[0] season.

We did a three week thru-hike of the Long Trail in 2022. We had shelters almost entirely to ourselves north of the AT/LT split at the Inn[1] because nobody hikes the LT in June/July if they can avoid it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fly

[1] https://innatlongtrail.com/

Does the policy somehow preclude you from using the remaining days before the beginning of June or end of May?

Seems easy enough to dodge if it's not the case that the relative privacy outweighs the flys.

I think people save them up towards the end of whatever year just because you aren't sure if you're going to need them for medical leave or a sudden family trip or something. As you get close to the end you get more certain that you won't use them on something else and can plan a block trip

Before the beginning of June is mud season, and the Green Mountain Club asks people to stay off the trails to protect them.

Before mud season, it's winter, which is an altogether different adventure entirely.

https://greenmountainclub.org/hike/plan-and-prepare/get-star...

It's the year 2083 in Nepal right now.

It’s 2569 here in Thailand. Used on basically everything official and often more as on many sites, apps, etc, switching the language between English and Thai will alternate between the Thai year and Georgian year.

I'm just grateful that one calendar became the international standard, otherwise the combinatorial explosion would have been even worse. Imagine having to track not just one or two local calendars plus one international one, but the half-dozen different calendars of each of the countries you do business with. "Let's see, the French calendar has their new year's date on Charlemagne's birthday, the German one dates their new year on Bismarck's birthday, Switzerland follows the Gregorian calendar, but Luxembourg never signed onto the Gregorian calendar and they follow the Julian calendar so they're 11 days behind. No, wait, it's up to 13 days behind by now... or was it 14? Darn, I gotta go check again."

I'm just really glad that that's not what happened, and that we ended up with just one international calendar. So that even in countries that don't use it for religious holidays, there's still only two or three (usually two) calendars to track. Which is confusing, but way less confusing than having to track dozens of them.

https://www.anycalendar.io/

I like how unix time and the mayan calendar are next to each other.

Respect to 2, don't you just look up at the start of the (gregorian) year when stuff is?

I mostly do that in my country just to check when the holy friday holiday is, a few saint holidays, a couple of celebrations for the virgin mary, etc.

Like, I know Easter follows a weird lunar calendar but I don't really calculate it.

Or keeping track of national holidays if you manage a remote team in Europe.

The hard part isn't converting dates, it's remembering which calendar is socially relevant in which context

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