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Comment by cecilpl | Hacker News Reader

This is the difference between a programmer's understanding of "tomorrow" and a user's.

My girlfriend insists that, as soon as the clock ticks over to 12:00AM, "tomorrow" means a full 24 hours later. I still insist "tomorrow" doesn't change up until you sleep (or stay up all night).

Funny, me and a few friends have the same logic of 'if you've not slept it's the same day', thought we were just odd as I've come across no one else that had the same opinion.

My friends do something similar, so you're not alone. I think it's just something that night-owls do.

Your girlfriend is correct, obviously, they always are, even when they aren't. Especially if you're planning on getting anything other than sleep in that next "full 24 hours"

You're both wrong. If I don't sleep for 48 hours (which has happened more than once), I haven't only elapsed one day. Her definition means that "tomorrow" can only ever refer to one instant in time which doesn't seem to fit the "common man" definition of "tomorrow".

I had a miscommunication with an old boss once. He had sent me an email asking me to do a few tasks. He had written "do x or y and z" His intent in the email was for me to do either task x or task y, and regardless then do z. However the way he had written it I had parsed it as

if(x){ taskX(); else { taskY(); taskZ(); }

He was pretty angry when I had only done task x.

When not using parenthesis, humans speak in an unqualified (as in no special clarifications) left to right order.

Think of someone vocally (because that's often how people type --- as though they're speaking) telling you a series of arithmetic:

One plus two times three minus four plus three times two.

To vocally say that, in the above order, with proper math, it would probably be something like: One, plus the result of two times six, minus four plus the result of four times two.

For reference, we have no idea what you meant by "One plus two times...". There is no meaning to us until you add commas or add some intonation or canter so that we can determine pauses to do sort of local evaluation. I can pretty easily read that to mean:

One + (2 * 3) - (4+(3 * 2)) ("One; plus two times three; minus four plus 3 * 2")

Or (One + (2 * 3) - (4+3) * 2) ("One; plus two times three, minus four plus three; [1] times two).

But in reality, even the times two is still quite vague, even being generous with taking pauses as groupings. That's why people say things like "... all times two." or more importantly why we rarely do math purely vocally and why we have "The quantity [...] plus the quantity [...]" etc.

edit: HN, it's 2012. Frigging implement Markdown and get it over with.

I was recalling how my mother would, in the past, relay me numbers for accounting, for example. Usually it was a large sequence of plusses; and, people don't always put pauses when they're rattling off numbers. That was my point. Glad to hear it confused you :)

In Japan (where they use a 24 hour clock), opening hours for stores/restaurants, or broadcast times for TV shows will often be written as something like "27:00", which would mean 3 AM (24+3).

Although I've also seen a "Track 0" at a train station.

I really really love that here in Germany, places will refer to e.g. "Friday 24:00" to mean 00:00 on Saturday.

The phrase "Friday at midnight" actually means six hours after 6PM on Thursday, of course, so using 24:00 versus 00:00 to disambiguate which day is meant is wonderful.

One way to avoid any confusion when timetabling things is to always schedule stuff for 23:59 or 00:01 -- then it's unambiguously inside one of the days.

Math in spotlight on os x showed me that there is someone in the company who pays attention to how a user uses the system. Not just the math part, but the fact that you can copy the result to the pasteboard with the keyboard shortcut

But it always annoys me when selecting the result doesn't open the same math problem in the calculator app (like how QuickLook will open a video at the exact same playhead position + window position)

True, very true. I hate when I mistakenly hit enter and it opens a blank calculator. One would assume that the calculator has an api where you can send queries to it, maybe it doesnt have one for 'open with predefined equation'

I wouldn't assume that — a Cocoa application process is an insane amount of overhead for a simple arithmetic expression evaluator, so who'd bother using it? Assuming Spotlight uses the same underlying evaluator, it's a safe bet that it's implemented as a library shared between the Spotlight search UI and the app. To be even more specific, on 10.8 at least, both Calculator.app and Search.bundle link to a private framework called Calculate, which may be relevant.

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