Top all-time · #727
Noah Sussman
Personal blog · infiniteundo.comprogrammingwriting
Noah Sussman writes Tumblr, a personal blog at infiniteundo.com about programming and writing. Since 2012, 89 different Hacker News readers have linked it 134 times, most often “Falsehoods programmers believe about time”. The last post was in 2019, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its 'Falsehoods programmers believe about time' posts (parts one and two), a list of wrong assumptions about dates, times and time zones that commenters use to explain why time code is hard.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called a good read and worth reading; one commenter loves the series as ready-made failure test cases.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Software As Narrative How-To Articles Devops Reading List CC Sharealike © 2020 by Noah Sussman
Most-linked posts?
- Falsehoods programmers believe about time37 people · 45 mentions · first linked 2018-09-21
- Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time24 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2012-06-18
- More Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time (2012)12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-08-24
- /post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-04-08
- More falsehoods programmers believe about time5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2012-09-04
- 108 Counterintuitive Things About Testing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-09
What Hacker News says?
Needs to write what? https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program... ?
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent”Submitted Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time as a story · 364 points
HN discussionMe, a 13 years old kid who was experimenting with QBASIC in 1999, thought that it was just switching from LEFT$(x, 2) to LEFT$(x, 4) when parsing dates. I still chuckle when I think how massively I had underestimated that problem. Meanwhile, the industry still doesn't know how to deal with dates and times correctly: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says”Submitted Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time (2012) as a story · 183 points
HN discussionThat has its own tons of cans of worms... See: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “Text Editing Hates You Too”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about time as a story · 178 points
HN discussionTime to trot this out again: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “Microsoft Exchange stops passing mail due to bug on 1/1/22”Submitted Software is narrative as a story · 92 points
HN discussion>Breaking a seconds-since-epoch out into year/mo/day/etc. is "simple" math, and shouldn't require a filesystem access. To do it simply yes, but not correctly. See the "Falsehoods programmers believe about time" series. http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm... http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-pro...
Comment linking /post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “How setting the TZ environment variable avoids thousands of system calls”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about time (2017) as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI disagree about obvious. Some are not, IMO, obvious, and some are actually true within reasonable bounds. From one of the previous lists[2]: > DST is always an advancement by 1 hour I'd point to this one as not "obvious": it is false. Some extreme northern/southern locations (where the seasonal day lengths get really long/short, since you're so close to the pole) adjust by 2 hours. (E.g., the aptly named Antarctica…
Comment linking /post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time”Submitted More Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time (2012) as a story · 17 points
HN discussionhttps://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program... I'm very thankful for the creators of https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ handling time zone weirdness, etc, so that I can still get to Zoom calls on time (usually). I don't know how the Moment developers can ever think it's "done" - "We now generally consider Moment to be a legacy project in maintenance mode. It is not dead, but it is indeed done."
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “Nokia selected by NASA to build cellular network on the moon”Submitted Help the Lawyers are teaching lawyers to use Twitter as a first-responder tool as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI laughed, but this reminds me of an article that was posted here a while ago: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm... It's very easy to get dates wrong.
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “List of oldest companies: Before 1300”Submitted Etsy's former Test Arcthitect wrote up 13 howtos on dev environment lifehacks as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHe’s referencing this classic blog post: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program... Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32548085
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “X5.1 solar flare, G4 geomagnetic storm watch”Submitted 100 Counterintuitive Things About Testing by the Author of Falsehoods About Time as a story · 4 points
HN discussionA couple of references for why building a time-based application is difficult: Falsehoods programmers believe about time: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program... Falsehoods programmers believe about time part 2 (this one contains most of the timezone related madness): https://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-pr...
Comment linking /post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “ProtonMail takes aim at Google with an encrypted calendar”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about time as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe "S" stands for "Summer", and I strongly recommend reading things like https://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-pr... and http://creativedeletion.com/2015/01/28/falsehoods-programmer... before confidently making statements on this subject.
Comment linking /post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about time as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI"m just going to leave this here: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “2020 Leap Day Bugs”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about time (2017) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionReminds me of https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “So you want to write your own CSV code (2014)”Submitted Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time (2012) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFalsehoods programmers believe about time: "3. Years have 365 days." Dinosaurs had 372 days per year! https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “Ancient shell shows days were half-hour shorter 70M years ago”Submitted The way tech manages workers runs counter to all current science on productivity as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI saw this one first, but seems patio11 was first: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Comment linking /post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time
on “Falsehoods programmers believe about TCP”Submitted Counterintuitive Things about Testing as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
