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by flatiron 1207 days ago
Reminds me of a call I was on a few weeks ago where someone went off that Unix epoch with milliseconds wasn’t the Unix epoch. Made it a huge point that it wasn’t and would correct everyone who tried to refer to it as that. I did Google it and he technically is right. But it’s also a stupid hill to die on.
1 comments

Your colleague is absolutely correct. That was the same objection I had to this. Unix timestamp format is only seconds. This page shows a timestamp but not a Unix timstamp, so the hill people are dying on here is to take and reuse a name for a different format out of their own stubborness - even after they learned they are wrong. It's very confusing and rejected by tools that only work with unix timestamps.

That said, this appears like a very minor point, but it's not. This is how bugs are created.

I added a comment to this effect at https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...

I'll contact the original author as well. This is definitely an issue that should be listed in "falsehoods that programmers believe about time".

exactly. people using milliseconds and calling it a unix timestamp are wrong. provably wrong. so for them to dig in, or anything other than say "oh you are right, sorry", is just a waste of everyone's time. Accept that you made a mistake, and move on.