Hacker News with Generative AI: Time

Time for a Change: The long, contentious history of time shifts (worldhistory.substack.com)
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, the United Cigar Stores Company was really into Daylight Saving Time.
History, Time, Change
18 points by crescit_eundo 3 days ago | 14 comments
Opposing arrows of time can theoretically emerge from certain quantum systems (surrey.ac.uk)
What if time is not as fixed as we thought? Imagine that instead of flowing in one direction – from past to future – time could flow forward or backward due to processes taking place at the quantum level. This is the thought-provoking discovery made by researchers at the University of Surrey, as a new study reveals that opposing arrows of time can theoretically emerge from certain quantum systems.
Quantum Mechanics, Physics, Time, Science
96 points by jnord 20 days ago | 97 comments
Conciousness May Be Retrocausal (popularmechanics.com)
In the quantum realm, the past, present, and future blur into a boundless structure. But consciousness may operate on a plane beyond this timeless mist.
Consciousness, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Time
13 points by OmarShehata 22 days ago | 2 comments
A decade later, a decade lost (2024) (meyerweb.com)
I woke up this morning about an hour ahead of my alarm, the sky already light, birds calling.  After a few minutes, a brief patter of rain swept across the roof and moved on.
Time, Reflection, Nature, Writing
548 points by ZeWaka 22 days ago | 170 comments
Slicing the Fourth (axalatar.github.io)
What is the fourth dimension? What does it mean for there to be another?
Mathematics, Physics, Time, Space
27 points by radeeyate 39 days ago | 1 comments
Doomsday clock set at 89 seconds to midnight (thebulletin.org)
In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, the Science and Security Board sends a stark signal:
Doomsday Clock, Time, Nuclear War, Science, Global Security
10 points by jpbadan 39 days ago | 1 comments
The surprising struggle to get a Unix Epoch time from a UTC string in C or C++ (berthub.eu)
So how hard could it be. As input we have something like Fri, 17 Jan 2025 06:07:07 in UTC, and we’d like to turn this into 1737094027, the notional (but not actual) number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.
Programming, C++, Time, Unix
131 points by PascalW 48 days ago | 90 comments
Time Dilation Formula / Calculator (timedilationformula.com)
Time dilation is like a magic trick that happens when you travel really fast. The faster you go, the slower time moves for you compared to people standing still on Earth!
Physics, Time, Relativity
50 points by mpclarkson 58 days ago | 52 comments
All clocks are 30 seconds late (victorpoughon.fr)
OK, this is going to sound crazy: I believe all clocks are 30 seconds late.
Time, Physics, Opinion
370 points by fouronnes3 61 days ago | 357 comments
Killing Orson Welles at Midnight (2011) (nybooks.com)
It’s two in the afternoon. No one is groaning; no one turns over in bed or hits an alarm clock—it’s much too late for that. Love set you going like a fat gold watch.… But by two o’clock the morning song is just a memory. We are no longer speculating as to what set us going, we just know we are going. We are less sentimental in the afternoon. We watch the minute hand go round: 2:01 becoming 2:02 becoming 2:03.
Time, Literature, Death
19 points by bookofjoe 63 days ago | 4 comments
Dark Energy May Not Exist: Something Stranger Might Explain the Universe (sciencealert.com)
There might not be a mysterious 'dark' force accelerating the expansion of the Universe after all. The truth could be much stranger – bubbles of space where time passes at drastically different rates.
Cosmology, Physics, Universe, Time
74 points by NelsonMinar 64 days ago | 76 comments
A brief history of Time Scales (ucolick.org)
A definition for the term "time scale": 16th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union Grenoble, France (1976) Resolution No. 4 by Commissions 4 (Ephemerides) and 31 (Time) 3.(a) a useful time scale is generated by any process which enables dates to be assigned to events
Astronomy, History, Time
4 points by geerlingguy 66 days ago | 0 comments
Experimental evidence photon can spend negative amount of time in an atom cloud (arxiv.org)
Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Time, Experiments, Atomic Physics
4 points by belter 66 days ago | 0 comments
An Unreasonable Amount of Time (allenpike.com)
Years ago, Teller performed a magic trick.
Magic, Time, Performance
545 points by memalign 68 days ago | 89 comments
The Long, Painful History of Time (1999) (naggum.no)
The programming language Common Lisp offers a few functions to support the concept of time as humans experience it, including GET-UNIVERSAL-TIME, ENCODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME, DECODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME, and GET-DECODED-TIME. These functions assume the existence of a timezone and a daylight saving time regime, such that they can support the usual expression of time in the environment in which a small number of real-life applications run.
Programming Languages, Time, History, Common Lisp
27 points by b-man 69 days ago | 7 comments
What is a second? (johndcook.com)
The previous post looked into the common definition of Unix time as “the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 GMT” and why it’s not exactly true. It was true for a couple years before we started inserting leap seconds. Strictly speaking, Unix time is the number of non-leap seconds since January 1, 1970.
Time, Unix Time, Programming, Computer Science, History
74 points by zdw 69 days ago | 33 comments
Maps that show time instead of space (youtube.com)
Maps, Visualization, Time, Data
5 points by hydrolox 70 days ago | 1 comments
Seconds Since the Epoch (aphyr.com)
This is not at all news, but it comes up often enough that I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem. People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00.
Unix, Programming, Time, Software
298 points by zdw 73 days ago | 220 comments
Scientists observe 'negative time' in quantum experiments (phys.org)
Scientists have long known that light can sometimes appear to exit a material before entering it—an effect dismissed as an illusion caused by how waves are distorted by matter.
Quantum Physics, Science, Time
16 points by pseudolus 76 days ago | 8 comments
Eliminating Daylight Savings Time would make the average American’s life darker (natesilver.net)
Last week, President-elect Trump pledged to “eliminate” Daylight Savings Time1, which he called “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation”. The idea may have been inspired by DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, an agency set to be run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, after Musk and Ramaswamy pitched a similar plan earlier this month.
Politics, Time, Science, Social Impact
28 points by JeremyNT 81 days ago | 60 comments
RFC 9557: Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps with Additional Information (rfc-editor.org)
This document defines an extension to the timestamp format defined in [RFC3339] for representing additional information, including a time zone.
Networking, Time, Standards, RFC
31 points by rdpintqogeogsaa 91 days ago | 23 comments
The mind-bending new science of measuring time (ft.com)
The mind-bending new science of measuring time
Science, Physics, Time
14 points by gronky_ 105 days ago | 3 comments
Railroads inspired the creation of time zones (bbc.com)
The invention of railroads ushered in a new era of land travel, and forever changed the way humans perceive time.
History, Transportation, Time
5 points by rmason 109 days ago | 0 comments
The Charms of Catastrophe (1978) (nybooks.com)
“All things,” said Charles Peirce, “swim in continua.” At what wave length does blue become green? When does a child become a grown-up? Are viruses alive? Do cows think? It is also obvious that there are discrete “things” that swim in these spectrums, and sometimes jump from one part of a spectrum to another. Day fades into night, but a flicked switch produces instant darkness.
Philosophy, Science, Language, Time
44 points by mitchbob 121 days ago | 9 comments
UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good (theregister.com)
The streets of Soho aren't alive with disco or bellbottoms anymore, so maybe it's time to ditch another '70s icon we should have outgrown by now, says the British Sleep Society (BSS).
Time, Health, United Kingdom, Daylight Saving
28 points by DamonHD 133 days ago | 28 comments
Sinusoidal Sunlight (leancrew.com)
I started my morning walk earlier than usual today, and it was still fairly dark out. I thought about this post from last year and the Daylight line in the graph:
Photography, Daylight, Time
100 points by surprisetalk 136 days ago | 33 comments
Time is a dimension, but not like space (bigthink.com)
The fabric of spacetime is four-dimensional, with three for space and only one for time. But wow, time sure is different from space!
Physics, Time, Space, Dimension
173 points by belter 142 days ago | 198 comments
Puzzle took me three years and required thinking in 3721 dimensions [video] (youtube.com)
Puzzles, Mathematics, Video, Time
18 points by f1shy 148 days ago | 0 comments
On the Nature of Time (stephenwolfram.com)
Time is a central feature of human experience. But what actually is it? In traditional scientific accounts it’s often represented as some kind of coordinate much like space (though a coordinate that for some reason is always systematically increasing for us). But while this may be a useful mathematical description, it’s not telling us anything about what time in a sense “intrinsically is”.
Time, Physics, Philosophy, Science
361 points by iamwil 151 days ago | 262 comments
Evidence of 'Negative Time' Found in Quantum Physics Experiment (scientificamerican.com)
Time can take on negative values in the quantum realm.
Quantum Physics, Time, Science
18 points by zonovar 158 days ago | 2 comments