Time zone news • Hacker News Board

Re: Time zone news

#81

Post by fanf2 » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 8:05 AM UTC

0x0 wrote: post #76

scrollaway wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what would meta-metadata about the datetime solve? What you're looking for is faster updates to timezone libraries. And for governments to stop being idiots — "I'm delaying DST because it inconveniences me", pah, what a load of garbage. It's a symptom of how much DST sucks. If anything, this couldve been a good occasion to repel DST in turkey.

If you stored it in the DB as "2015-10-30 17:00:00 SOMETIMEZONE" then it would be unambiguous when the event is going to happen. If you stored an UTC timestamp, well, then you'd get two different values depending on whether you had the updated tzdata or not when the value was entered and converted to a timestamp. If you think this problem can be solved by declaring today's version of tzdata immutable and final, then…

Storing the timezone name does not work when the boundaries between timezones change. Best to store local time and location. http://fanf.livejournal.com/104586.html

Re: Time zone news

#82

Post by fanf2 » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 8:10 AM UTC

vorg wrote: post #68

Mz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's get rid of Roman legacy code in our civilization :) I think that's a bridge too far. We can't even rid the world of QWERTY keyboards. :-)

Or Imperial measurements in the U.S., or driving on the left in the Commonwealth countries, or non-Unicode encoding in Japan, or right-to-left writing in the Middle East. Whenever an agreement on anything is reached in most of the world, there's often some conversion benefits for whoever holds out signing up to it.

The US does not use Imperial measures, they use Queen Anne measures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units

Re: Time zone news

#83

Post by madcaptenor » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 1:43 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #42

bostonpete wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Northern areas, there's a lot of practical value that gets overlooked. In Boston, the sun is rising close to 5:00 AM as it is at the height of summer. Without daylight savings time, it would be rising at 4:00 AM. I think most people would rather have extended daylight late in the day than have all that extra sunlight wasted when we're sleeping. The counter to that is -- well, let's always stick with daylight savin…

The fun trick is that on the western edge of the Eastern time zone, kids have to travel to school in the dark. It's probably reasonable that we defer to population though.

I live in Atlanta. Central time starts about sixty miles west of me at the Alabama line. Sunrise was at 7:54 this morning. That means when I woke up at 7 there was no visible light.

The solution to this would be for Atlanta to be on Central time (which it actually was, historically) but that won't happen - time zone boundaries generally shift west over time, and this one overshot the mark.

Re: Time zone news

#84

Post by tempodox » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

tempodox wrote: post #2

fork(2) me, Optima for display & body text. Say what you will, it looks beautiful.

Apparently, some time zone fans are opposed to the praise of beautiful fonts. Have it your way.

Re: Time zone news

#85

Post by maxerickson » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 5:30 PM UTC

madcaptenor wrote: post #83

maxerickson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fun trick is that on the western edge of the Eastern time zone, kids have to travel to school in the dark. It's probably reasonable that we defer to population though.

I live in Atlanta. Central time starts about sixty miles west of me at the Alabama line. Sunrise was at 7:54 this morning. That means when I woke up at 7 there was no visible light. The solution to this would be for Atlanta to be on Central time (which it actually was, historically) but that won't happen - time zone boundaries generally shift west over time, and this one overshot the mark.

Sunrise here was 8:25.