GitHub search for 84600 seconds. Oops.

https://github.com/search?q=84600+seconds&type=Code

by jeremycole • 12 years ago

43 53 12 years ago

github.com

Kiro• 12 years ago

I don't understand.

nycmattw• 12 years ago

I actually don't understand either. Explain OP?

krzrak• 12 years ago

86400 seconds = 24 hours

84600 seconds = typo ;)

dandandan• 12 years ago

It's the number of seconds in a day.

ggreer2• 12 years ago

A day is 86,400 seconds.

tantalor2• 12 years ago

Sometimes.

squidfood• 12 years ago

86,400 is the number of seconds in a day. This searches for the number of times a piece of code transposed the 6 and 4.

Avalaxy• 12 years ago

Probably the fact that there are 86400 seconds in one day and apparently lots of people typed 84600? Not really my sort of humor, but mmkay.

ethann• 12 years ago

There are 86400 seconds in a day

JosephRedfern• 12 years ago

Number of seconds in a day = 60 * 60 * 24 == 86400, rather than 84600.

rubiquity• 12 years ago

There will eventually be 84,600 replies to you telling you that there are 86,400 seconds in a day.

chubot• 12 years ago

Haha, should be 86400, not 84600.

tshaddox• 12 years ago

I liked this one:

    SECONDS_PER_23_5_HOURS = 84600

markcarlson2• 12 years ago

That is a very common value to use when you want something to either occur a bit more than once a day, or time out in a bit less than a day.

CanSpice• 12 years ago

Except it shouldn't, because when you have a leap second occur, suddenly you're off by a second.

A day is a day, it's not 86400 seconds.

rossy• 12 years ago

Most operating systems and frameworks don't expose the concept of leap seconds to user code. For example, Unix time is the number of seconds since the epoch ignoring leap seconds, so a program that compares timestamps generated by time() would be correct in assuming that a day is 86400 units of time_t.

akerl_• 12 years ago

Humorous as this is, it doesn't seem newsworthy. Maybe submit to The Daily WTF next time?

elwell2• 12 years ago

I don't think it's right to judge someone just because they have 23.5 hour days. To each their own, I say.

memnips• 12 years ago

86400 seconds is 24 hours. It is surprisingly commonly mis-entered as 84600 seconds, as evidenced by this search. As such, many unintended consequences can ensue.

tantalor2• 12 years ago

A day is not always 24 hours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

fletchowns• 12 years ago

But 24 hours is always 24 hours

afternooner• 12 years ago

I believe more in a day having 24 hours than I believe in daylight savings.

pkamb• 12 years ago

`60 * 60 * 24`

joshstrange3• 12 years ago

I wonder if Github will ever reconsider allowing bots [0]. There are bunch of things like this that would be cool to have pull-requests automatically generated for. Security fixes would be another place where I can see bots helping to fix common mistakes.

[0] http://www.wired.com/2012/12/github-bots/

XaspR8d• 12 years ago

Yeah, I'd love to help in some way, but the number of results is huge and without bots I'm discouraged from doing anything manually.

Maybe we can create a resource of common typos in numerical constants that would auto-detect by edit distance? But I suppose most people willing to check a resource like that probably already double check their arithmetic. (That said, I've probably had this exact bug somewhere in my coding history, so no shame.)

joshstrange3• 12 years ago

Yeah, maybe the answer is a hybrid, bots that look for common mistakes and a website that lets people login to github and displays the potential fixes so they can fix the code in the browser and send the pull request. Like a way to try and introduce people to open source through guided fixes more or less.

ejo0• 12 years ago

check out 48600 seconds for ruby, https://github.com/search?q=48600+seconds&type=Code&ref=sear...

grantismo• 12 years ago

Looks like it's all coming from use of the tzinfo gem. See: https://github.com/tzinfo/tzinfo/blob/61fdd4359117e9a406c546...

Xylakant2• 12 years ago

eh - and what is that supposed to show? That there's roughly 13.000 projects that vendored a version of activesupport containing a file that allows converting "48600" to a rational value?

j03w• 12 years ago

I think that's timezone offset

elwell2• 12 years ago

And none of them have any Stars: https://github.com/search?q=84600+seconds+stars%3A%3E0&type=...

Steuard• 12 years ago

Honestly, I think there's a little something to this submission beyond the "Ha ha, lots of people made typos that could cause big problems" factor.

A public repository like GitHub makes checks for common errors like this really easy. Would it be feasible for GitHub or the community to automatically recognize broad classes of these likely errors and notify the authors? How sophisticated could that sort of tool become?

Maybe "given enough bots, most bugs are shallow".

wdewind• 12 years ago

Yes, in fact Amazon already does this. It will frequently warn you if your AWS keys are published in Github.

joshstrange3• 12 years ago

I agree, it's too bad they banned bots [0], one alternative I see is:

> Yeah, maybe the answer is a hybrid, bots that look for common mistakes and a website that lets people login to github and displays the potential fixes so they can fix the code in the browser and send the pull request. Like a way to try and introduce people to open source through guided fixes more or less. [1]

[0] http://www.wired.com/2012/12/github-bots/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717694

markcarlson2• 12 years ago

Many of those are legitimately meant to be 23.5 hours, not 24 hours (TTL defaults, approximates for converting seconds to days, etc.)

strommen• 12 years ago

HN Challenge: name a scenario in which defining a constant as 86400 is better then defining it as (60 * 60 * 24).

Or, are there languages where you can't declare a constant with a multiplication expression?

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

To me it's a coding style thing. The argument for 86400 would be, too many operators makes things damn confusing. When your define expands in the preprocessor to a function sixteen operators long, you have made a mess.

zemo• 12 years ago

are there languages where you can't declare a constant with a multiplication expression?

obviously PHP.

  php > const X = 1;
  php > echo X;
  1
  php > const Y = 1 * 2;

  Parse error: parse error, expecting `','' or `';'' in php shell code on line 1
  php > echo Y;
  Y

mappu• 12 years ago

Fixed in the (upcoming) PHP 5.6.

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/const_scalar_exprs

quaffapint• 12 years ago

I find myself with pre-optimization issues on my new code and define constants multiplied out rather than add that .000000001% extra overhead of doing the multiplication - it's a sickness.

wlievens• 12 years ago

Actually in all likeliness your compiler will do tgat for you anyway.

Aaron1011• 12 years ago

I first read this as 'Github search takes 84600 seconds'. Oops :)

Xylakant2• 12 years ago

It's actually not that many places where it's wrong: Anything from page 57 to 100 is one repo that does it consistently wrong: https://github.com/sconklin/solardata, then there's quite a few places that are partial matches only (seconds, but not 84600), there's quite a few places where it's a least not obviously wrong (page 38, where it matches on "PHI( 1) +6.18900e+05-7.84600e+05i Hz") and a ton of places that get copied around (the first pages are all bundled versions of the sonata cache interface).

nkozyra2• 12 years ago

Disturbing enough that - despite having used 86400 a bazillion times (yes, literally) that it didn't look wrong at first glance.

nperez• 12 years ago

Even if you're using 86400, remember the possibility of leap seconds if you need absolute precision.

Time makes my brain hurt sometimes.

nicklovescode• 12 years ago

https://github.com/search?q=%22%3D+funtion%28%29%22&type=Cod...

beagle32• 12 years ago

Easy mnemonic: 60 * 60 * 24 = 864e2 (scientific notation). Take down 2 each time, and shove an e.

mcosta• 12 years ago

Easier mnemonic: 60 * 60 * 24

The compiler is going to do the operation for you.

beagle32• 12 years ago

Of course. I use 864e2 to remember that it is 86400 when I do calculations on paper.

oxplot• 12 years ago

This should never be entered like that. Not only it's prone to typos, it also requires a comment to accompany it. Since just about every compiler/interpreter folds constants, one should write it as 60 * 60 * 24 which would run without a performance hit.

GitHub search for 84600 seconds. Oops.

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