Hacker News Reader

Comment by nippoo | Hacker News Reader

In other "incorrect calendars" bugs, there's the Rockchip RK808 RTC, where the engineers thought that November had 31 days, needing a Linux kernel patch to this day that translates between Gregorian and Rockchip calendars (which are gradually diverging over time).

Also one of my favourite kernel patch messages: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin....

View on HN

My favorite: For one day all the Microsoft Zunes froze for the entire day, only to recover on their own 24 hours later when the infinite loop in their leap year code had finally resolved: https://web.archive.org/web/20090313105752/http://www.zunebo...

To be fair, that's nowhere near as daft as september, october, november, december. Latin for seven, eight, nine, and ten is: septem, octem, novem, decem. Those are the nineth, 10th, 11th and 12th months.

Edit: Whoops, correct eng -> latin nums

You may know this but originally they were 'correct' because the start of the year was March.

Which wouldn't be that weird, except that the earliest Roman calendar started in March and ended in December, having only 10 months!

The Romans were of course well aware that this left a gap of about two months between the end of one year in December, and the beginning of the next year in March. But they just didn't bother counting this period as part of the calendar year. Presumably because there was no agricultural reason to need accurate dates during winter.

Numa did try to name and consolidate the winter months, but it wasn't very popular.

The months were for productive seasons, winter for everything else.

Also French revolutionaries ;-)

I'm French and occasionally like to (re)read about the revolution period and every time I come to the calendar stuff I can't help but think "Really? This was stuff we wanted to spend time on?"

AIUI, there is some confusion over whether this is actually the case. The pre-Julian calendar had 12 months, plus an optional intercalated month (they were aware that their ‘year’ had the wrong number of days, and periodically shoved in some extra time to patch it up). The 10 month calendar, if it existed, would have been very early and there’s not much hard evidence that it was actually used. Numa Pompilius, who was allegedly responsible, is a mythical figure and probably not an actual historical king.

No? How is it octem and not octo? Does the flat bar accent do something?

>The Latin word for "eight" is octō. [0]

[0] asked google

And indeclinable.

40 years since I studied Latin and a few glasses of wine and it was late ...

"I hate that SEPTember OCTOber NOVember and DECember aren't the7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months."

"Whoever f---ed this up should be stabbed."

"I have excellent news for you."

https://old.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/m5f6wv/i_hate_that_s...

We named the eighth month after a guy whose name was Eight, but October was taken so we called it August instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com