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Comment by vaughan | Hacker News Reader

.beat time or Swatch Internet Time is way better.

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

My favorite is traditional Japanese time. Breaks day and night into 6 equal time periods each, and adjusts them as the seasons change. I made a Sahku Dokei (19th century Japanese pillar clock) simulator to play with it.

https://www.tdcmotorsports.com/clock/

In a way, China kind of has something like the Swatch gimmick for real. There's just one time zone in the whole country (which is roughly the size of the Continental US). This has benefits (easy to coordinate video conferences in different cities) and drawbacks (the official time is far off from what the sun would indicate in much of China).

It only works because the overwhelming majority of the population and all of the political and economic power lies on the east coast of China in a single time zone. I doubt that the people in Urumqi are happy to have the sun rise at 10 am, and I doubt that anyone cares about their opinions.

Given that the sun rose at 10 am approximately 0 times this year [1] I guess the people in Urumql were ecstatic. Also note that the sunrise time varied by about 3h over the course of the year so how many times do you want to change the clocks?

Of course to your actual point and everybody else that brings that same one up. You do not need to wake up at 8am every day ... If the sun actually rises at 1400 then feel free to start your day at 1500. I'm not sure what why people keep arguing as-if they can't figure out a time besides 8am to wake up; look at the world around you, so many people wake up at wildly different times in a timezone.

[1]: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/china/urumqi

I stayed in Urumqi four times (in 1993, 1996, 2006 and 2010), each time for some weeks. It is really confusing that the (traditional) working hours are from 10AM to 2PM and 4PM to 8PM. I found myself everytime looking at the clock substracting two hours. Similar as to when we changed currencies in the Netherlands when the Euro was introduced. I guess it would have taken about half a year stop doing the reverse time calculations.

Making it oriented on UTC+0100 is dumb

They used CET as a reference, the local timezone of the Swatch headquarters.

I get that it's all arbitrary, but if we're going to go for a global time system, just makes sense to me to try and align with already-existing universal standards. Both UTC +0000 and UTC +0100 are pretty alien to me as someone in UTC +0800 so it's not like I have any bias toward Switzerland or the UK either way...

No, it's not.

Dividing one day into just 1000 units is way less precise unless one uses decimals, in which case it's just plain inconvenient.

I think the idea is that for most human uses of time we don't specify start or end times to a precision of more than about 5 minutes. Stuff like train timetables you might want to go down to about a minute. So one could argue that we have at least 60 times the resolution we really need for day-to-day use.

If you absolutely need more precision (accurate timestamping) then decimals are available.

I take it you haven't used a microwave recently. Or done any other cooking.

Yep tho most ppl use microwaves by pressing the "30s" button (I guess it would be labelled 1/2 or 1/3) n times. Other cooking seldom requires time precision < 1 minute, for finicky precise things you usually watch the process and manage it by eye, rather than relying on absolute time.

"way less precise" ? There are only 1440 minutes in a day, so a beat is 1 minute and 26.4 seconds, precise enough. And then, if you you want more precision, like we use seconds for minutes, you can divide a beat by 100 (@500.12), not less inconvenient than using seconds.

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