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One thing that's tricky about analog clocks if you're not used to them - the hour hand sweeps unnecessarily over the course of an hour so you have to find the hour hand then go backwards. We have the technology to make clocks where the hour hand actually points to the hour that it is. I don't understand why the jump hour feature isn't more common.

Wouldn't 4:58 with jump hour look too much like 4:00?

Some (the worst) clocks do that.. It's convenient that the hour hand is moving continuously because it means that unless you need to be able to say "it's five seconds past two minutes past four _in the morning_", you simply look at the hour hand, if it's in the middle of two hours, well it's half past the smaller.. if it's one forth past the smaller, it's.. yes, quarter past.. if it's one forth from the larger then it's quarter to.. and well, honestly, if you need to read the time more precisely than that and chose to use an analogue clock for it, you've chosen the wrong type of clock, a digital clock with seconds and 24 hour display is a superior tool for telling the time anyway.

That's a good point. The hour hand moves continuously as an artifact of technical constraints on the original clocks -- which I think is a great example of achieving a balance between UI and technical feasibility -- but we don't technically need them to work that way anymore, and digital clocks work exactly like that.

With that said, it's not obvious that we should use the jump hour UI[1]. It's desirable to have the hour hand be close to 4 when it's close to 4 o'clock. Like the neighbor comment says, that prevents you from confusing 4:58 with ~4.

[1] See my "continuity heuristic": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11687391


Having discrete jumps on a mechanical analog clock is not a particularly hard problem. Certainly easier that shrinking an accurate mechanical time keeping device down to wrist watch size.

For that matter getting a purely digital display out of a mechanical clock is not diffucult either either.

If there was a strong demand for such a product, they would have caught on before the 7 segment display made them the cheapest option. Possibly as a luxury or status symbol depending on how the cost worked out.


>Having discrete jumps on a mechanical analog clock is not a particularly hard problem.

I meant at the creation of the first clocks.

>For that matter getting a purely digital display out of a mechanical clock is not diffucult either either.

I don't know where I implied otherwise.


That would make it discontinuous, which means there's no information beyond the integer.

I think, though I don't know how I'd prove, that anyone truly used to an analogue wristwatch probably only looks at the hour hand when casually checking.

Many watches don't even have face markings.


I disagree with this. I read analogue clocks without having to do any conscious mental effort, but the minute hand is definitely a part of it.

If I have to think about how I parse them, I think the minute hand is more important than the hour hand. I'm usually roughly aware of what hour it is, and if I'm looking at a clock, it's to know what minute it is.


This is part of the learning curve. When you vibe code you produce something that is as if someone else wrote it. It’s important to learn when that’s appropriate versus using it in a more limited way or not at all.


A different way to look at it is language models do know things, but the contents of their own knowledge is not one of those things.


Do you think each person is responsible for enforcing federal laws? Like if you personally are not spending your own time and money to round up those in violation of federal statute then you're doing something wrong?

And if not, is it true of your neighborhood? Of your town? What level of grouping of people is big enough that they are required to help Washington with whatever thing they have asked for? Keeping in mind that our constitutional system is designed around a federal government that is supposed to be responsive to the desires of the people from the various states, not the other way around.


Maybe think about it narrowed down to an individual level - maybe you installed a camera or two around your property for whatever useful reasons like monitoring your children, and then later you find out that you are required to share all of your footage with some other entity (e.g. the police) in a way you did not sign up for. Would you choose to release your footage, or would you take the cameras down?


I'm wearing a ~$4000 MR-G today and I'm really happy with my choice. IMO the best thing about Casio as a brand is that they sell $15 watches and $8000 watches that do basically do the same things but appeal to different people. The existence of the higher end models doesn't diminish the utility or value of the classics. There's really something for everyone.


Ideally, the government wouldn't be doing anything that requires tracking like this. We got by for hundreds of years without it.


Photons reflected off of objects are not the actual objects. I wouldn't go so far as to say that sensing these is a particularly special way to know about things compared to hearing or reading about them. Further, many humans do not sense photons yet seem to manage to have perfectly fine working world models.


Generous is a strange choice of word - it's like implying the government is entitled to its own citizens' money, and we should consider ourselves lucky that they weren't taking as much of it.


I mean in the US constitution it is explicitly stated that interstate commerce is under the USG hat. So yes the government is entitled to it's citizens money when they cross the border.


Grey markets aren't the same black markets. Ideally the government would be omniscient, efficient, and benevolent so that it could properly regulate things to the benefit of the masses, but in practice it government isn't very responsive and in many cases has to consider different viewpoints on an issue. Even worse, regulations usually create winners and losers in a way where even if it's beneficial to change the regulation, whoever would lose out will automatically be opposed to the change. Americans - mostly working and middle class, not wealthy - bought 50+ billions of dollars of goods imported this way last year. The American people have voted with their wallets but the government is not responsive to their desires in this case.


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