The hectomegaseconds fly by so fast

Edit: here was the front page of the New York Times at 1600000034,

https://web.archive.org/web/20200913122714/https://www.nytim...

and here's 1500000301 and 1400000634, and 1300007806

https://web.archive.org/web/20170714024501/http://www.nytime...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140513170354/http://www.nytime...

https://web.archive.org/web/20110313091646/http://www.nytime...

Unix timestamp 1 600 000 000 was not too long ago. That was on 2020-09-13 12:26:40 UTC. Discussed on HN back then here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24452885

My own blog post here commemorating the event: https://susam.net/maze/unix-timestamp-1600000000.html

Given that 100 000 000 seconds is approximately 3 years 2 months, we are going to see an event like this every few years.

I believe the most spectacular event is going to be the Unix timestamp 2 000 000 000 which is still 9½ years away: 2033-05-18 03:33:20 UTC. Such an event occurs only once every 33 years 8 months approximately!

By the way, here's 1700000000 on Python:

  $ python3 -q
  >>> from datetime import datetime
  >>> datetime.utcfromtimestamp(1_700_000_000)
  datetime.datetime(2023, 11, 14, 22, 13, 20)
  >>>

  $ date -ud @1700000000
  Tue Nov 14 22:13:20 UTC 2023

  $ date -ur 1700000000
  Tue 14 Nov 2023 22:13:20 UTC

Perfect time to fire up https://datetime.store/ and try your luck on the perfect shirt!

I remember staying up late to see the tick to over from 999,999,999 to 1 billion, thinking "I'll remember this week my whole life". Little did I realise how 60 hours later the whole world would remember.

I went to a 1234567890 "gathering" in a hotel lobby in Boston in 2009

One of my favorite bits of Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is the use of base-10 time: ksec, Msec, etc. There is a nice time log scale with Earth time to base-10 time conversions.

5,148 days left until January 19, 2038.

Assuming I live that long, the next day will be my 65th birthday. Just in time for digital Armageddon.

It makes more sense to celebrate when a (relatively) high order bit changes from 0 to 1, not when the decimal representation changes.

I like the unit of 100 million seconds. Longer than a year, shorter than a decade. The era of 1.6e8 was the pandemic. What will 1.7e8 bring?

I love that others get excited about this. UNIX Timeval Aficionados should try out this tf tool [1]. I used my buddy's C/Lex/Yacc one daily for 1.5 decades, then ported it to Golang + Homebrew to share the love:

[1] https://github.com/neomantra/tf

  brew tap neomantra/homebrew-tap
  brew install tf

  > for TV in $(seq -f %.f 1000000000 100000000 2000000000); do echo $TV $TV | tf -d ; done
  2001-09-08 18:46:40 1000000000
  2004-11-09 03:33:20 1100000000
  2008-01-10 13:20:00 1200000000
  2011-03-12 23:06:40 1300000000
  2014-05-13 09:53:20 1400000000
  2017-07-13 19:40:00 1500000000
  2020-09-13 05:26:40 1600000000
  2023-11-14 14:13:20 1700000000
  2027-01-15 00:00:00 1800000000
  2030-03-17 10:46:40 1900000000
  2033-05-17 20:33:20 2000000000

  > echo 1234567890 __ 3141592653 | tf -gd
  2009-02-13 15:31:30 __ 2069-07-20 17:37:33

In relation to UNUX time; the 20000th UNIX day is at 2024-10-04 (the 4th of October).

It's a special day, since the next round UNIX day is 30000, at 2052-02-20.

https://github.com/xyproto/ud/

The next one lands on a nice round hour, since it'll be at exactly 3:00:00 AM.

@ date -d '@1800000000' Fri Jan 15 03:00:00 AM EST 2027

The Unix timestamp inspired me to throw a birthday party on the day when I got a billion seconds old: 31,7 years :)

Instant bookmark for me. I've always loved the idea of measuring time in computers by a single integer like the timestamp does, but it always seems like such a pain to work with outside of that.

When did Unix time start being used?

Was it being used in 1970 and actually started at 0?

Or did they just pick a date to start it and if so what was the initial Unix time when it was first used?

Starting Tue Nov 14 2023 22:13:20 GMT+0000 to be exact!

Yesterday, I was digging into some stuff in the database and saw some events scheduled for 17*. My initial reaction was that it was some far-off date. Then I realized ... nope, not far away at all.

I'm more interested in such events when these coincide with a beginning of a year, month or week but it's a little too early to work out the math now

It's now!

When I first used Unix it started with 6. I feel old.

... which happens roughly every three years.

There's a lot of epoch love in the comments. For me, it's never "clicked". I assumed that after seeing a ton of timestamps that I'd have a Neo-seeing-the matrix moment with timestamps but it just hasn't happened. Can you all easily decode them?

Is there talk anywhere of using a human-readable timestamp instead? e.g. YYYYMMddHHmmssSSSSZ