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The Unix timestamp will begin with 17 this Tuesday

330 points| dezmou | 2 years ago |unixtimestamp.com

75 comments

order

susam|2 years ago

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)
  >>>
GNU date (Linux):

  $ date -ud @1700000000
  Tue Nov 14 22:13:20 UTC 2023
BSD date (macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.):

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

scbrg|2 years ago

> 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!

Egads! 33 years! I spent my late 90:ies mudding[0] and for some reason we had a lot of save files named by their epoch timestamp. When I ended up responsible for parts of the code base, I spent a lot of time dealing with those files, and they were all in the 800- or 900- million range. At some point I was pretty much able to tell at a glance roughly what date any number in that range corresponded to, within perhaps a few weeks.

Weird environments foster weird super powers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon

midasuni|2 years ago

The spectacular events is in Jan 2038, when it reaches a nice round number of 2,147,483,648

reliablereason|2 years ago

I think 2222222222 is more special Sat Jun 02 2040 03:57:02 GMT+0000

I might even get to experience 3333333333 if I am lucky. What a day, what a day, yes indeed!

RedCinnabar|2 years ago

I used to follow your blog about 15 years ago, what a blast of nostalgia! I’ll add it to my RSS feed. Keep it up.

xavdid|2 years ago

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

function_seven|2 years ago

That website gonna crash so hard on Tuesday…

“Boss! We’re being dee dossed!”

“No, son, it’s Tuesday”

SLWW|2 years ago

You know how you can use a "death clock" to figure out when you should statistically expire?

I wonder if you can find a shirt that would print that

helsinki|2 years ago

This is quite clever. I'm going to get one.

pests|2 years ago

This reminds me of an idea I had - the 1BTC coffee mug - this was back during the early first rise to $20k.

mi_lk|2 years ago

internet is really wonderful sometimes

ta1243|2 years ago

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.

_kst_|2 years ago

Timestamp 1000000000 (Sat 2001-09-08 18:46:40 PDT) triggered a bug in the bug reporting system (Remedy) we were using at the time.

The system stored timestamps as a string representing seconds since the epoch, but it assumed it would fit in 9 digits. At 1000000000, it started dropping the last digit, so it went back to Sat 1973-03-03 01:46:40 PST, advancing at 10% of real time. It was fixed fairly quickly.

mongol|2 years ago

I didn't remember it was so close but those were the days I obsessively read Slashdot, which helped during 9/11, and which certainly covered the epoch event.

petrikapu|2 years ago

please explain

shizcakes|2 years ago

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

alexpotato|2 years ago

I was doing the late shift on a trading floor at a big bank.

The head of the derivatives tech support team pointed out it was about to hit so we opened up a shell and did a "watch" command + outputting the "date" command in epoch seconds and watched it happen.

Then we went back to working.

cryptoz|2 years ago

I remember that moment! I was out at a bar or something at the time but I was prepared and had my laptop with me haha. I was mashing the up arrow and enter to make sure I didn’t miss it.

clarkmoody|2 years ago

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.

blahedo|2 years ago

Yes! It is as a direct result of that book that I now know without having to look it up that a ksec is about a quarter hour and a Msec is on the order of a fortnight, which comes in handy when doing back-of-envelope estimation more often than you'd expect. (I'd already known that a Gsec was about a third of a century thanks to Tom Duff's observation.[0]) I don't see us moving to such a system anytime soon in general (tying to the circadian cycle is just too convenient) but I'm a little surprised I don't see it more often in discussions of humans in space.

[0] "How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury." --Tom Duff

cpeterso|2 years ago

Though the software archaeologists in the book mistakenly thought the time_t epoch marked the moon landing, not just 1970. :)

NoMoreNicksLeft|2 years ago

I also like the Emergents. Liberal progressives creating a utopia. 100% employment, palaces made out of diamond for everyone.

russellbeattie|2 years ago

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.

diego_sandoval|2 years ago

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

jrockway|2 years ago

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?

neomantra|2 years ago

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
Printing out these round ones. `tf` auto-detects at 10-digits, so I started there in the `seq`.

  > 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
Some funny dates. -g detects multiple on a line, -d includes the date:

  > echo 1234567890 __ 3141592653 | tf -gd
  2009-02-13 15:31:30 __ 2069-07-20 17:37:33
Enjoy... may it save you time figuring out time!

xyproto|2 years ago

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/

mgdlbp|2 years ago

Reminds me of sdate for the Eternal September epoch. 10000 Sep 1993 was 2021-01-16.

http://www.df7cb.de/projects/sdate/

one commit message for the QDBs:

    From 14df411817feda9decf9dd8a6cd555d71f199730 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
    From: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>
    Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 20:05:49 +0200
    Subject: [PATCH] Fix long --covid option
    
    
     scripts/sdate.in | 2 +-
     1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
Sep 17 2001 (1000684800) is a special date from git-format-patch. Its significance is lost to time.

ksaj|2 years ago

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

msavio|2 years ago

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

hiAndrewQuinn|2 years ago

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.

3np|2 years ago

FWIW these bash shortcuts are handy if you do this a lot:

    tss() { date -Is -u -d @$1 ; }
    tsm() { date -Ins -u -d @$( echo "scale=3; $1 / 1000" | bc) | sed -E -e 's/[0-9]{6}\+/\+/' -e 's/,/./' ; }
    tsn() { date -Ins -u -d @$( echo "scale=9; $1 / 1000000000" | bc) | sed 's/,/./' ; }

    $ tss 1700000000
    2023-11-14T22:13:20+00:00

    $ tsm 1700000000000
    2023-11-14T22:13:20.000+00:00

    $ tsn 1700000000000000000
    2023-11-14T22:13:20.000000000+00:00

anyfoo|2 years ago

Because the bases are all wrong. Common number bases are 10, 16, maybe 8 if you live in the 70s, and 2.

Except for the utterly unwieldy binary, none of those bases adapt well to the bases used in representing time, which are mostly the (partially related) bases 60, 12, and, annoyingly, thirty-ish.

So you always end up doing opaque arithmetic instead of “just looking at the digits” (which you still can do in decimal for century vs years for example, because we defined centuries to be exactly that).

PrimeMcFly|2 years ago

> I've always loved the idea of measuring time in computers by a single integer like the timestamp does

Why?

SirMaster|2 years ago

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?

leonidasv|2 years ago

>The Unix epoch is midnight on January 1, 1970. It's important to remember that this isn't Unix's "birthday" -- rough versions of the operating system were around in the 1960s. Instead, the date was programmed into the system sometime in the early 70s only because it was convenient to do so, according to Dennis Ritchie, one the engineers who worked on Unix at Bell Labs at its inception.

>"At the time we didn't have tapes and we had a couple of file-systems running and we kept changing the origin of time," he said. "So finally we said, 'Let's pick one thing that's not going to overflow for a while.' 1970 seemed to be as good as any."

https://www.wired.com/2001/09/unix-tick-tocks-to-a-billion/

neogodless|2 years ago

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

withinboredom|2 years ago

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.

wolfi1|2 years ago

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

gpvos|2 years ago

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

Ayesh|2 years ago

... which happens roughly every three years.

jefftk|2 years ago

Or roughly every 136 years.

asplake|2 years ago

How so?

hallman76|2 years ago

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

stkdump|2 years ago

Sure there is. But since it is not a continuous range there are the fixed separators --T::. between the parts. It is the javascript time format, which is a subset of the RFC3339 and ISO8601 time formats. The separators help at least to allow for a variable amount of sub-second digits.