
Tell HN: My usability pet peeve – am/pm times with a leading zero - FearNotDaniel
I don&#x27;t know why I&#x27;ve started noticing this a lot more recently on websites, but it seems to be getting more common to see times-of-day stated in the am&#x2F;pm format but still using a leading zero on the hour. E.g. &quot;03:00 pm&quot; instead of &quot;15:00&quot; or &quot;3:00 pm&quot;. My brain has got so used to parsing the 24-hour clock such that I see a leading zero and assume it&#x27;s a morning time, then there is the moment of cognitive dissonance when I spot the &quot;pm&quot; and have to recalculate in my mind (especially if the time in question is in a foreign time zone). Does anyone else anecdotally get this? Has anyone measured whether it is a problem on a larger scale?
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alexvoda
This is potatoes. Want to rage? Read this:
[https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-
US/d77...](https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-
US/d77ee438-9789-4d04-ab93-5df001bf539d/set-language-british-causes-date-
format-to-change-to-yyyyddmm?forum=sqlsetupandupgrade)

Who in their right mind thought YYYY-DD-MM is a good idea. (It's "smart",
recognizes the YYYY part and moves it to the end and interprets as DD-MM-YYYY)

The ISO standard specifically used "-" as the delimiter for the standard date
format because no one was using it. And MS had to ruin it.

~~~
taneq
> Who in their right mind

Probably the same people who thought MM/DD/YYYY was sensible?

~~~
StavrosK
At least that's far back enough that they aren't around for us to be angry at.

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tluyben2
My pet peeve is am/pm time; I have no clue why people use it vs 24 hour
clocks. Even worse when people leave off the am/pm; 'the meeting is today at
2!'.

~~~
elbows
I use am/pm because that's how I was taught to tell time growing up, and in my
corner of the world (northeast US) nearly everyone uses it. "2 pm" is
immediately meaningful to me, but to parse "14:00" I have to subtract 12 in my
head. Even when the am/pm is left off, it's usually clear from context.

I'm not arguing for the inherent superiority of am/pm notation, but I do get
frustrated with people who use 24-hour time because "it's more logical",
without seeming to realize that it's more difficult for the majority of people
to understand.

~~~
wattengard
You don't subtract it though. Once you are used to it your brain just
correlates 14 with 2 and 17 with 5 and 23 with 11 without thinking. In Norway,
and I think in most of the 24-hour world, we still use the 12hr clock in
speech. I don't go around saying that "the clock is quarter past fifteen", I
say "quarter past three" and the context usually makes it clear when I'm
talking about.

~~~
gpvos
Indeed. It is written 15:15, but pronounced three-fifteen (or quarter past
three etc.).

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majewsky
I always quip that if I were to achieve world domination, my first decree
would be about harmonizing all these bullshit idiosyncrasies that we
developers have to deal with. 24-hour format everywhere. Metric system
everywhere. Celsius everywhere. And so on.

~~~
d_runs_far
Not sure if you're old enough to remember this one:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)

~~~
majewsky
I do! But no. Just no.

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PunksATawnyFill
Even worse: Apple's "time-zone support" in their iOS calendar, which changes
the times of your appointments behind your back.

If you buy plane tickets and then enter the dates and times in Calendar...
Apple will change them without telling you if you travel through time zones.
AS IF ANYONE ENTERS TIMES LIKE THAT.

If I have a meeting in London next week at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, I'm not going
to sit here in the U.S. and do the math so I can enter the meeting time at
some crazy hour to "fool" Calendar.

DEAR APPLE: WE WANT THE ALARM TO GO OFF WHEN THE CLOCK ON THE PHONE SAYS THE
TIME FOR WHICH I SET THE ALARM.

This is NOT an option on iPhones currently. Unfuckingbelievable:
[https://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic-
time-...](https://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic-time-zone-
support-sets.html)

~~~
richrichardsson
Google Calendar is also guilty of this nonsense, I missed a flight exactly for
this reason.

~~~
devadvance
At least for Google Calendar, it's pretty easy to avoid the mental math by
using the built-in time zones. You can select the time zone when creating the
event[0].

[0]
[https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064](https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064)

~~~
reaperducer
iOS does this, too. There's and entry for "time zone" immediately beneath the
time setting spinny thing.

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Spooky23
The biggest temporal fail of the web is date. For some topics, it’s impossible
to tell whether the author was working in 2012 or 2019.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Especially on blogs where the design only gives the month and day, and it's
impossible to find out which year, because that's the only date to be seen on
the page.

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ggambetta
Lately I've tended to use military time even in very informal circumstances,
although only in written form. E.g. I'd text my GF "dinner w/friends Saturday
2000?".

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filleokus
A similar issue, but perhaps not as bad, is the incorrect use of currency
identifiers, like "SEK 100" ("$10"), or incorrect decimal symbols.

Another interesting case I've seen sometimes is when people are helpful and
convert from imperial to metric units, but don't change the underlying value.
Stuff like comparisons, "price per 28.3 grams" ("price per oz").

Units and locales are hard.

~~~
StavrosK
What, you don't measure things in multiples of 28.3 grams?

~~~
hexo
We have standardized 13.37 gram units here

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fouc
I don't see a problem with "03:00 pm" because I spot the : immediately. I see
2 digits and then 2 digits, so it's consistent.

------
dusted
decimal time

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StavrosK
15:00 am

~~~
majewsky
[https://xkcd.com/1179/](https://xkcd.com/1179/)

