Did it just build.. a clock? | Hacker News Reader

Did it just build.. a clock?

theclock.online

16 pointsDirkJanMeijer40 comments

I really needed a clock on my second screen. Needed it badly.

No! That is a lie. Clocks are everywhere already. Did not need it at all.

Also don't have time to build a clock. Imagine what I could have done with all that precious time spent on flip clocks, station clocks, you name it. I could have taught my son how to tell time.

Wait!

Did you build a really fancy flip clock!? Yes! I really like that one! That is not a lie.

Phone in landscape mode during cooking? Sure. Timeboxing during study. Alright alright.

But why did you (woow!) took all the effort to make the favicon a realtime clock? Did your agent do it? Didn't read the memo that token-maxing is so 2025?

Well, am I crazy? I liked building it anyway.

I am very confused about this comment and this submission.

Whoops! Just now I realize I made a typo in the title :) It must be: "Did I just build.. a clock?"

That doesn't really clarify things much. Surely you can answer that question yourself?

ngl thats a nice looking clock!

Thank you!

I'm thoroughly confused. Did what build a clock? AI?

The link is indeed to a clock.

Same here. What is special in this simple clock, and why does it deserve to be in the front page of HN?

It reached the frontpage of HN? Super cool! I did not know that.

I admit, not sure whether a clock in general deserves that. But apparently this clock had his lucky day.

Sorry for the confusion. I am human.

We need a new category: "AI Shows HN".

I am so confused as well

One of my very first BASIC programs was an analog clock. That’s how I learned sine/cosine before being officially introduced to them at school… I’m deeply concerned about future generations of programmers and mathematicians.

I only truly understood logarithms when I had to use them in a plot drawing module I had to make. But I started with BASIC and people at the time said that basic leads to less understanding from students. Now I've commercially developed in C,C++,Java and Erlang, so it seems that the kids will be all right. The curious ones will find their way to more knowledge also thanks to AI, because it can be the most patient tutor explaining everything in the way you understand the best.

Now that you mention BASIC, I had a TI-84PL graphing calculator. One of the first programs I wrote were a school calendar and snake. Good old days.

I was able to use the AI, guessing. After a while, I notices that the configuration says "Taal Kies je voorkeurstaal." and then something that looks like "Nederland" so I guessed it was possible to change the language. I suggest to add some icon like A文 there.

Following your suggestion, I added the A文 icon.

Problem was: the fallback language was Dutch. Now it is English. Should make more people happy.

And why only 2 languages when I can add 22? In different locales? Ok.

So now the clock supports English, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Estonian and Icelandic.

Should cover 3 billion people worldwide.

I tried the Spanish version. I found no obvius error in the localization but the site only works for "nl" and "en"

https://theclock.online/es/classic/ --> error

https://theclock.online/en/classic/ --> ok

Well it works on my machine but I guess it was the rate limiter. That should be more generous now. Can you try again?

As a bonus, I added a bunch of features like Stopwatch, Focus mode, World clocks converter and Daylight saving time.

Meh, with AI you can do better. I stopped adding languages to one of my (not public) pet projects when we started hitting cultures without a tradition of written language.

For the record that point was 168 languages.

Haha, 168 languages, cool! Just curious which cultures without a tradition of written language you've hit?

Weird, I just stumbled upon this one yesterday: https://clockfaces.com

Nice! (I still see some anti-aliasing problems and subpixel accuracy issues.)

I didn't make this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Too bad the stationsklok doesn't actually do the Swiss-style minute break ;)

AI does something better than humans, and now you want it to break the implementation?

Good point! Added that option now: settings > authentic

I wondered when this reaction would appear. No, it doesn't run through 60 second s in about 58 seconds, waiting for the time sync pulse to start the next minute cycle because it doesn't need to since it has direct access to the accurate time. Adding this interval is just a single prompt away though, or - gasp - a few edits to the source.

Add webapp install option for mobile

This alone just got it a place on my iOS Home Screen. I’ve always wondered why Apple never provided a simple full screen analog clock with second hand.

the flip movement just appears a few times and disappear?

Yes, I think animations are still bad here and there. Also in the menu (when you flip the seconds switch, the menu jumps instead of animates).

AI is not very good at animations yet, but to be honest I find the various animation APIs e.g. in CSS also quite convoluted and difficult to use even for human programmers. It's like the abstractions are wrong.

Menu transitions and toggling seconds on/off are now animated.

Could not reproduce this one yet

Firefox on Win10

Better now?

nope

"it lacks the slight overshoot and recoil of the hands, when they progress."

Now they do

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