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UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

zachholman.com

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Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#41

Post by masklinn »

> The Happy Monday System, which honestly I just loved based on the name of it alone. Shows how Japan has moved their holidays schedules around just to make people happier with a longer weekend.

In countries with significant amounts of legal leaves (e.g. most of europe), tuesdays and thursdays are also very nice as "burning" a single leave day provides for a 4 days weekend (and 3 days week). French even has an expression for this: "faire le pont" (bridging between holiday and weekend).

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#42

Post by blunte »

captaincrowbar wrote: post #39
blunte wrote: post #16

Sadly I didn't have enough time to read the whole article... But I wish we could all just use one time. For some, midday would be 12, and for others it might be 19, but we already all use the same dates regardless of whether February is winter for one location or summer for another.

"You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform..." https://qntm.org/calendar

Until software is uniformly correct with respect to timezone rules and auto-location-updating, there will be more problems with the current system than there would be with a fixed UTC-only system.

I'll take "better" even if better != perfect.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#43

Post by batbomb »

pquerna wrote: post #29

Love this article, but one thing it skipped on was more in-depth on Leap Seconds. You see, UTC, is kinda like another human-made-up timezone. Humans made up some rules, and UTC is a 37 second offset from TAI / International Atomic Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time

Really, it's TAI that should be enough for everyone.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#44

Post by blunte »

vikasg wrote: post #32
blunte wrote: post #16

Sadly I didn't have enough time to read the whole article... But I wish we could all just use one time. For some, midday would be 12, and for others it might be 19, but we already all use the same dates regardless of whether February is winter for one location or summer for another.

Software is built for humans to use in the real world. While reshaping the entire world might make the code simpler, it's not a practical solution.

If software worked correctly...

But if you do much international travel, at some point you will encounter the problem where your various calendars, clocks, and other tools don't do the right thing (perhaps they get incorrect location information, or any number of other problems occur).

Then you have dis-information. If you don't realize it, then you will suffer by missing something important or wasting your time.

The tools are far from infallible now, and there's really no hope that they will ever work correctly.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#46

Post by hinkley »

I have been thinking a lot lately that we are trying to solve class of XY Problem.

Universal time is in part about trying to order events in a strict order. Probelm is, nobody observed that order. Later we infer things about the system based on this chronology but it’s completely fictitious and we have to stretch our brains to explain the state of the system.

The Java Memory Model, and subsequently several other languages, agreed on “happens before” semantics. We don’t care what order certain things occurred in as long as these key events happen in the right order. Because those events cause the other events or are caused by them. Some transactional models have a flavor of this as well. This write happened based on a decision made by observing all of the transactions up to N, which may or may not result in a rollback because N+1 overwrote a read value.

I can’t help thinking that our logs should show something like “customer saw their balance was $102.75 and withdrew $100, and on another server a payment for $55 was honored around the same time, which is why they are now overdrawn”. The two events were independent, and maybe we should remember them the way the distributed system experienced them.

Or maybe that’s even harder to reason about than the fiction we use now...

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#47

Post by da_chicken »

> Properly storing timezone-aware times

I'd just like to point out that a lot of RDBMSs support storing date and time alongside timezone information directly without using two separate fields. SQL Server has datetimeoffset, PostgreSQL has timestamp with time zone, and Oracle has timestamp with time zone. I think MySQL does as well, but I seem to recall something strange about it. Or maybe that's just me expecting MySQL to do something weird.

Similarly, most programming languages have support for datetimes with time zones.

It's still all a huge pain in the butt, but you don't need to use two fields and ensure that you use both all the time. Also, you can meaningfully compare datetimes within the same database without translating the timezone if its all in one field.

Also, of course, remember that a even a time with timezone without a date attached to it is inherently ambiguous.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#48

Post by welder »

pquerna wrote: post #29

Love this article, but one thing it skipped on was more in-depth on Leap Seconds. You see, UTC, is kinda like another human-made-up timezone. Humans made up some rules, and UTC is a 37 second offset from TAI / International Atomic Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time

https://developers.google.com/time/smear

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#49

Post by dang »

anothergoogler wrote: post #6

Could people stop appropriating rap culture in their tech blogs (etc.) with patronizing garbage like "While I was initially building this talk, I found myself listening to the words of my absolute favorite modern-day philosopher: Nas"?

Please don't take HN threads on unrelated flamebait tangents. We're hoping for better than that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#50

Post by cryptonector »

jetrink wrote: post #30
setquk wrote: post #5

Slightly off topic but I wonder how you handle time where dilation is present. For example if a spacecraft travels to mars and there is mars local time, plus time dilation from the journey, when does a transmission start from a reference frame? Not UTC related for sure! Or is it? And then what happens if someone else goes there in a different orbital pattern and the dilation is different. and then there is the questi…

This is a very old problem and not limited to spacecraft. If you sail around the world eastward, each of your days is slightly shorter than the days of your countrymen and by the time you get home, you will have experienced a full additional day-night cycle. I think the solutions would be the same: separate timekeeping standards where it makes sense, like Mars, and frequent corrections to spaceships' clocks to keep i…

That was part of the plot of Around the World in 80 Days...
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