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Countdown to timestamp 1,500M (timestamp.online)
162 points by nitramm on July 13, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 60 comments



Wow, we're about to see the end of the 1,400M era. The 1,400M era saw me moving to the big city and getting pushed into project management.

Hoping the 1,500M era is nothing but good memories of getting my hands dirty again.


Good point. It saw me gain a teenager (second hand) by virtue of being in a relationship with somebody and I love it. Looking forward to 1.5, where we'll hopefully get our house bought together and make a proper life.


what's a proper life?


some info to save someone else from having to look it up

  1 400 000 000 was 5/13/2014, 11:53:20 AM
  1 600 000 000 will be 9/13/2020, 7:26:40 AM
  1 000 000 000 was 9/8/2001, 8:46:40 PM
  2 000 000 000 will be 5/17/2033, 10:33:20 PM
  2^32-1 (4 294 967 295) will be 2/7/2106, 12:28:15 AM

  100 million seconds is a little over 3 years
  1 billion seconds is almost 32 years.


You have skipped over one interesting date between 2e9 and 2^32-1 - 2038-01-19T03:14:07:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Although perhaps you have assumed that everyone already knows it!


I've been programming for a billion seconds since the timestamp was in 500 M. Good ol days with Turbo Pascal and Clipper Summer 85, now it's all about Swift and Kotlin.

Time flies.


I remember 1e+9 because it shifted a log file over by 1 character. And less than a week later I was out of a job (travel industry).


Are these events related to each other?


Was that a coincidence? Please don't leave us hanging.


1 billion Unix time was September 8, 2001.


Sep 9th actually. 0146 GMT.


Don't you see? Whether one event led to another is not important. We don't need to know for sure. It's like the end of Inception.


Log file break/fix did not result in termination. But I probably wouldn't have remembered the former if it weren't for the latter.


I've conjectured before that 9-11 happenening so close to the epoch flip was deliberate, as a hint that middle-east radicals weren't really disorganized, saber-wielding incompetents as Hollywood portrayed them.


What do you think are other interesting upcoming timestamps? - http://timestamp.online/countdown/1515151515 - http://timestamp.online/countdown/1579119751


As I mentioned in the Reddit thread, everyone is looking at decimal but overlooking the (arguably more interesting) base-16 dates.

Jan 13 19:13:30 2018 UTC will be 0x5A5A5A5A

0x66666666 will be Jun 10 2:35:18 2024 UTC

We just missed a good one:

  Sep 22 2016 16:00:00
  in base10 1474560000
  in base16 0x57E40000


http://timestamp.online/countdown/1610612736

Obviously. Programmers celebrating 1500000000 just make me sad.


See the answers to the earlier time that you asked this question.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14759814


And my favorite, π seconds is a nanocentury.


How so?

I had assumed there would be an error in there about forgetting that years don't have an integral number of days, but even at exactly 36500 days per century, a nanocentury is still over 3.15 seconds.


nano century = 100 * 365.25 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1e-9 = 3.15576

(nano century - π)/π = 0.45%

So a nano century is equal to π seconds within half a percent which is more than good enough for casual uses as an approximation.


It's also equal to 3 seconds within an error of 5.2%, which is also more than good enough for casual uses.

But when you're having fun with pi, you generally measure similarity in terms of being accurate to some number of decimal places, and this statistic is accurate to an unimpressive one place (3.1).


Well one second is a microfortnight



timestamp is stored as a signed value since it can also go backwards from the epoch, so you need 2^31-1


I remember staying up late (uk time), watching the seconds on my 17" 4x3 cry running on Debian tick over to 1e9 back in September 2001, with slashdot open on the side.

Now, 500 million seconds later I'll be watching the counter on an ubuntu laptop. Not quite as late as I'm in Washington DC on business, and I abandoned /. a couple of years ago.

It amazes me how much changes, but also how little things change.


Wow, in the last 100M seconds I've gotten married, bought a house, had two kids, graduated college, started my own company. That's one heck of a metric.


But be aware with your celebration. It can be slightly off due to leap seconds. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/327361/openbsd-6-0-...


A leap second coming between now and Unix time 1500000000 would certainly be unexpected. I doubt any software in the world is ready for that.


Really, your organization isn't prepared to handle an emergency leap second? Tsk, tsk.. /s


At the beginning of 1.4 I was just a freshman. Now, at the beginning of 1.5, I'm just a different kind of freshman.


Shouldn't we celebrate changes in the binary representations instead of decimal?. After all, that's how it's stored.


And only 7,494 days, 5 hours, 22 seconds until timestamp -2,147,483,648 (assuming your system uses the original Unix signed 32-bit integer time format).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem


And happy 1500000000!


Yay! Here's to the next 100 million! or 500 million! Cheers!


I'm going to have such a hangover in the morning.


Back in 2001 my social circle had a "gigasecond party" where we got together to cheer the moment of 1000000000. Like New Years, except that it was during the afternoon.


My wife and I calculated her 1 billionth second of life and observed the moment (I was already past mine when we thought of the idea). It occurs at 31.7097919838 years of age.


This is like New Year for geeks


It looks that next interesting timestamp will be in 4 months - http://timestamp.online/article/countdown-to-interesting-tim... :)



This post was for shirt time period first on hacker news. More than 2k people arrived during first hour. For more details you can check my analysis - https://goo.gl/iKM3kV


On a mac, you can keep track by opening the terminal and running the command "date +%s" (no quotes).


To see the countdown, you can use:

  while true; do echo $((1500000000 - `date +"%s"`)); sleep 1; done


Sleep 1 means that you could miss it, as the loop will take >1 second to run (the fork isn't instantaneous)


On UNIX likes systems*. Pro-tip: `watch -n 1 date +%s` will give you a live view of the timestamp


Oohhh, didn't know about watch, thanks! If you want it to count down instead:

$ watch -n1 'echo $((1500000000 - $(date +%s)))'


If you have an X server installed, you can also get a windowed unix time clock:

  xclock -utime -update 1


I tried this and noticed that you forgot -digital, which is apparently necessarily for -utime to have any effect.


    while true; do date +%s; sleep 1; done


watch date +%s


The website 'honors' the max time http://timestamp.online/countdown/2147483647 (it gives the same value for all URLs larger than it)


To truly honor it, it should overflow into negative seconds before the epoch.


I remember the 1234567890 celebrations. I saved the IRC log from #1234567890 on Freenode.


pastebin pls!


Okay, fine:

http://jordi.platinum.linux.pl/1234567890_prelim.txt.gz

I don't know what's going on with some of the encodings there, but I expect people were simply sending pre-UTF8 encodings.


Wow, thank you for that. I had no idea IRC still had that much energy in 2009!


There's still lots of IRC activity today, but I couldn't find a 1500000000 celebration.


That was epoch! ;)


Which means we're not getting younger




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