GitHub search for 84600 seconds. Oops.

Honestly, I think there&#x27;s a little something to this submission beyond the &quot;Ha ha, lots of people made typos that could cause big problems&quot; factor.<p>A public repository like GitHub makes checks for common errors like this <i>really easy</i>. 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?<p>Maybe &quot;given enough bots, most bugs are shallow&quot;.

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.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.wired.com/2012/12/github-bots/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;12&#x2F;github-bots&#x2F;</a>

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.

Haha, should be 86400, not 84600.

It&#x27;s actually not that many places where it&#x27;s wrong: Anything from page 57 to 100 is one repo that does it consistently wrong: <a href="https://github.com/sconklin/solardata" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sconklin&#x2F;solardata</a>, then there&#x27;s quite a few places that are partial matches only (seconds, but not 84600), there&#x27;s quite a few places where it&#x27;s a least not obviously wrong (page 38, where it matches on &quot;PHI( 1) +6.18900e+05-7.84600e+05i Hz&quot;) and a ton of places that get copied around (the first pages are all bundled versions of the sonata cache interface).

HN Challenge: name a scenario in which defining a constant as 86400 is better then defining it as (60 * 60 * 24).<p>Or, are there languages where you can&#x27;t declare a constant with a multiplication expression?

Disturbing enough that - despite having used 86400 a bazillion times (yes, literally) that it didn&#x27;t look wrong at first glance.

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

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s right to judge someone just because they have 23.5 hour days. To each their own, I say.

Humorous as this is, it doesn&#x27;t seem newsworthy. Maybe submit to The Daily WTF next time?

And none of them have any Stars: <a href="https://github.com/search?q=84600+seconds+stars%3A%3E0&amp;type=Repositories&amp;ref=advsearch&amp;l=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;search?q=84600+seconds+stars%3A%3E0&amp;type=...</a>

<a href="https://github.com/search?q=%22%3D+funtion%28%29%22&amp;type=Code&amp;ref=searchresults" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;search?q=%22%3D+funtion%28%29%22&amp;type=Cod...</a>

I don&#x27;t understand.

Even if you&#x27;re using 86400, remember the possibility of leap seconds if you need absolute precision.<p>Time makes my brain hurt sometimes.

This should never be entered like that. Not only it&#x27;s prone to typos, it also requires a comment to accompany it. Since just about every compiler&#x2F;interpreter folds constants, one should write it as 60 * 60 * 24 which would run without a performance hit.

I first read this as &#x27;Github search <i>takes</i> 84600 seconds&#x27;. Oops :)

A day is not always 24 hours.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Daylight_saving_time</a>

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

check out 48600 seconds for ruby, <a href="https://github.com/search?q=48600+seconds&amp;type=Code&amp;ref=searchresults" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;search?q=48600+seconds&amp;type=Code&amp;ref=sear...</a>

`60 * 60 * 24`