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Comment by awhitty | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else get a sense of vertigo when they try out numbers like 3000000000 (January 23, 2065)? It's like it's close enough to be tangible but far enough to be scary.

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Yeah, unless http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

I often glance at a floating-point year clock that shows time is passing in the context of a year [1].

It helps me get back on track of being productive and stay true to my goals, when seeing time fly by in such a way...

[1] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8554242/dmitri/projects/...

<super-pedantic-mode>That's actually fixed-point, since the decimal point is always in the same place, right after the year.</super-pedantic-mode>

Interestingly, there is an error in your code: number of seconds in a year is not constant, so you might get next year before a new year. Here's a fixed version: http://jsfiddle.net/r8txd/4/show/

It's not an error, it's a design decision.

I wanted the rate of time increase to be constant every year, and I wanted the time to be universal (across all timezones). I did take leap years into account by calculating the average year length in seconds. I also wanted the calculation to be simple and independent of variations in earth's rotation speed changes, etc. So yes, over a long time, it will diverge from "years" as we know them.

The only reason I used years is to provide context, since most people have a feel for how long a year is. After that, everything is base 10.

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