Probably went with the simplest implementation, if starting from the current “seconds since epoch” value. Let the user do any calculations needed to translate three days into that measurement.
It also efficiently annoys the most people at once: those what want hours will complain if they set it to days, thought that want days will complain if hours are used. By using minutes or seconds you can wind up both segments while not offend those who rightly don't care because they can cope with a little arithmetic :)
Though doing what sleep(1) does would be my preference: default to seconds but allow m/h/d to be added to change that.
Hence the way I would do it (and have for other purposes), as stated in my final sentence. Have the human state the intent and convert to your own internally preferred units as needed.
No no no, see now we just say "computer! do tedious math!", and it will do some slightly different math for us and compliment us on having asked it to do so.
The one true unit of time is hexadecimal encoded nanoseconds since the unix epoch. (I'm only half joking because I actually have authored code that used that before.)
I actually think it is not too bad a design, because seconds are the SI base unit for time. Putting something like "x days" requires additional parsing steps and therefore complexity in the implementation. Either knowing or calculating how many seconds there are in a day can be expected of anyone touching a project or configuration at this level of detail.
Seconds are also unambiguous. Depending on your chosen definition, "X days" may or may not be influenced by leap seconds and DST changes.
I doubt anyone cares about an hour more or less in this context. But if you want multiple implementations to agree talking about seconds on a monotonic timer is a lot simpler
Could you explain what you mean re: ambiguity? I understand why “calendar units” like months are ambiguous, but minutes, hours, days, and weeks all have fixed durations (which is why APIs like Python’s `timedelta` allows them).
The minute between December 31, 2016 23:59 and January 1st 2017 is 61 seconds, not 60 seconds. The hour that contains that minute is 3601 seconds, the day that contains that hour is 43201 seconds, etc. If you assume a fixed duration and simply multiply by 43200, your math will be wrong compared to the rest of the world.
Daylight savings time makes a day take 23 hours or 25 hours. That makes a week take 7254000 seconds or 7261200 seconds. Etc.
That’s what I mean by calendar units. These aren’t issues if you don’t try to apply durations to the “real” calendar.
(This is all in the context of cooldowns, where I’m not convinced the there’s any real ambiguity risk by allowing the user to specify a duration in day or hour units rather than seconds. In that context a day is exactly 24 hours, regardless of what your local savings time rules are.)
"exactly 24 hours" could still be anywhere between 86399 and 86401 seconds, depending on leap seconds. At least if by an hour you mean an interval of 60 minutes, because a minute that contains a leap second will have either 59 or 61 seconds.
You could specify that for the purposes of cooldowns you want "hour" to mean an interval of 3600 seconds. But that you have to specify that should illustrate how ambiguous the concept of an hour is. It's not a useless concept by any means and I far prefer to specify duration in hours and days, but you have to spend a sentence or two on defining which definition of hours and days you are using. Or you don't and just hope nobody cares enough about the exact cooldown duration
Leap seconds are their own nightmare. UNIX time ignores them, btw, so that the unix epoch is 86400*number of days since 1/1/1970 + number of seconds since midnight. The behavior at the instance of a leap second is undefined.
In the UK last Sunday was 23 hours long because we switched to BST, and occasionally leap seconds will result in a minute being something other 60 seconds.
No it wasn't. The country instantaneously changed timezones from UTC+0 to UTC+1 (called something else locally), it was no different to any other timezone change from e.g. physically moving into another timezone.
I came here to argue the opposite. Expressing it in seconds takes away questions about time zones and DST.
I think you're incorrect to say that second are also ambiguous. Maybe what you mean is that days are more practical, but that seems very much a personal preference.
I understand the [flawed] reasoning behind "x seconds from now is going to be roughly now() + x on this particular system", but how does defining the cooldown from an external timestamp save you from dealing with DST and other time shenanigans? In the end you are comparing two timestamps and that comparison is erroneous without considering time shenanigans
that kind of complexity is always worth it. Every single time. It's user time that you're saving and it also makes config clearer for readers and cuts out on "too many/little zeroes on accident" errors
It's just library for handling time that 98% of the time your app will be using for something else.
This has always worked like this. Let the person working on the ticket discover the implementation details, break it down into tasks, maybe delegate some after they’ve dipped their toes and know how to split it into sub-tasks better.
imagined tasks == Jira
discovered tasks == Dark Jira
IMO, tickets for planned work are an anti-pattern. Tickets are good for reactive work: bug reports, support, etc. Use Kanban board for tracking them.
Planned work should be organically discovered from the plan by the developers (or agents) who will be implementing it, not assigned via Jira tickets by the project manager. Shape Up recommedns using Hill Charts for per-scope (vertical slice) progress updates.
For Japan in specific, you’ll want to look into JCFC. Not a tax or legal advice, but IIRC it boils down to: if your company (assuming 100% ownership) is paying less taxes than a Japanese company would, and you’re a Japanese tax resident, you would need to pay the difference in Japan. It is probably similar in other jurisdictions that have CFC laws.
Also do read up on permanent establishment rules as well.
Ah, sorry. I was using Japan as an example of "living somewhere very far outside of the EU" to highlight the sense of distance between the two. I have listened to a little bit about how difficult it is to open a business in Japan (as a foreigner, at least) and how stressful tax time can be [1], but I'm not well versed in the specifics of how they do things.
Japan as an example of anything not specific to Japan is problematic.
Almost nothing is handled in a similar means or approach to Japanese standard practices, anywhere else.
Speaking as someone with 30+ years experience in both Japanese and non-Japanese business dealings and having had and being currently in the process of renewing work and residence permission in Japan under a different classification than before, and having visa sponsors who just finished 'Tax Season' there; the system is both at once extremely linear, and somehow opaque, and the actual paperwork is more easily measured in centimeters than in numbers of pages.
However; that being said, the actual costs of taxes and other fees including retaining the services of an administrative scrivener (not quite the same as a paralegal accountant) are very logical and reasonable for the resultant social/infrastructure outcomes.
But, if one is not already fully fluent in Japanese and does not have a driving requirement to reside and do business in Japan; the system is simply not designed for participation from the outside like the EU or US. When foreigners attempt to participate directly, even the Japanese know that the local system is complex in puzzling ways, and the most common comment I have personally observed is, "Why would you voluntarily do this; we all do it because we must, but if you don't have to, WHY?"
I still believe Rust is a red herring here. Your ‘uv but written in Python’ would probably have the same success as uv does now, if you did focus on speed over correctness. And I’ve yet to hear about pipx or Poetry getting trashed, but if it is a problem, I don’t think it’s impossible to solve in Python vs Rust.
> The politics looked intractable so I gave up.
So yeah, this is your actual problem. (Don’t worry, I’m in the same camp here.)
As much as I'm a Python fan I strongly disagree here that rust is a red herring.
Having a static binary makes distribution way simplier. There are a bunch of ways you could try to achive something like in python but it would be significantly larger.
Performance-wise writing it in python would have heavy startup overhead and wouldn't be able to get close to the same level of performance.
Obviously you could achive the same thing in many other languages, but rust ends up being a really good fit for making a small static binary for this workload of network heavy, IO-bound, async/threading friendly with the occasional bit of CPU heavy work.
uv is nice, but not irreplaceable. An open source, maintenance mode fork would work just as fine. And even if all of uv disappeared today, I’d go just back to Poetry. Slower? Sure, a bit.
...and then I’ve read the rest of your comment. Please do go read the HN guidelines.
(The IndieWeb wiki is probably the best resource for exploring the personal website-based social networking tech nowadays. I recommend the author check it out and maybe iterate on that instead :)
Is any of this stuff sort of out there working and I maybe used it without realising?
Or it's all super niche for "personal website-based social networking" enthusiasts and never took off, because big players didn't implement it and we need them to, or whatever?
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