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UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

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Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#211

Post by goodpass »

_asummers wrote: post #182
dpark wrote: post #175

> If you're like me and immediately said ohhhhhhhhhhhh, so THAT'S why there's twelve hours in a day! and immediately followed it up with: wait, why the fuck are they using twelve instead of ten? ... > It's most likely because you have twelve joints in your hands: three in each of the four fingers, excluding the thumb. I thought that was pretty nifty to discover. Like, I had never looked at my hands before, really. Ha…

I might not be remembering my History of Math correctly, but my recollection is that the Babylonians used Base 60, and 12 is an even subdivision of that. I also recall other Asian number systems having base 12 in some capacity, so there may be something to the counting methodology he outlined if it showed up in a few separate parts of the world. Counting that way on one hand and then using the other hand to tally the…

Wait, doesn’t that just give you 25?

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#212

Post by incompatible »

Arubis wrote: post #35
vikasg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I could force everyone on HN to read one comment today, it'd be this one.

Why? It's depressing.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#213

Post by mildweed »

zifnab06 wrote: post #206
saagarjha wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s so predictable that developers will pooh-pooh having to write timezone code, almost as much as it is predictable that some clueless commenter on Hacker News will complain that this page has autoplaying video on it. And then someone will calmly quote this passage in response, quietly pleased with themselves that the initial commenter was rude and certainly didn’t read the post at all. Then a third person will c…

The author played us all like a fiddle.

It was too long to start with

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#214

Post by henrikschroder »

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

It's so funny how every discussion on times and dates bring out the same idiotic "let's abolish timezones!" proponents.

It's almost like... ( •_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ clockwork (⌐■_■)

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#215

Post by dpark »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #197
dpark wrote: post #175

> If you're like me and immediately said ohhhhhhhhhhhh, so THAT'S why there's twelve hours in a day! and immediately followed it up with: wait, why the fuck are they using twelve instead of ten? ... > It's most likely because you have twelve joints in your hands: three in each of the four fingers, excluding the thumb. I thought that was pretty nifty to discover. Like, I had never looked at my hands before, really. Ha…

> Probably not. This explanation of duodecimal is really farfetched and I’m pretty sure it arose from someone staring at their hands desperately trying to come up with a way to count 12 on their fingers to explain this. You are mistaken. Finger counting by using your thumb against one of the 12 segments of your fingers is common in many asian cultures. It's utterly simple and immensely practical as it allows you to c…

That is an interesting fact I wasn't aware of. I have doubts about the actual relevance of this, though. e.g. Chinese seems (so far as I can tell) to have always used decimal numbering systems, making this essentially a clever counting trick.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#216

Post by giaour »

pishpash wrote: post #196
Jedd wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 12ths are handy enough that we have a special word for “12 of something” (dozen) even though our numbering system is decimal. My understanding is that the etymology of dozen is originally traced back to duodecim (Latin for twelve) via French dozeine. Which is interesting, but doesn't really explain why it's special beyond your observation that it's a highly composite, but comfortably small, number.

It's special because we don't have a word for, e.g., "13 of something", say, "trezen".

Modern French allows the "aine" suffix to be applied to many numbers, meaning "a group of X." I've mostly heard it used with 10 ("dixaine") or 12 ("douzaine"), though if you asked for a "treizaine" (13) of something, you would be understood.

It is interesting that "dozen" made it into everyday English but other group sizes did not.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#217

Post by Hemospectrum »

Iv wrote: post #189
Jedd wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 12ths are handy enough that we have a special word for “12 of something” (dozen) even though our numbering system is decimal. My understanding is that the etymology of dozen is originally traced back to duodecim (Latin for twelve) via French dozeine. Which is interesting, but doesn't really explain why it's special beyond your observation that it's a highly composite, but comfortably small, number.

> dozeine. French nitpicker here. We now write it "douzaine" but spellings have changed through the ages.

Yep. Most of the "French" words in English (beef, butcher, danger, very, act...) actually come from dialects brought over by the Normans when they conquered England in 1066. That's closer on the timeline to Latin than modern French.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#218

Post by _asummers »

goodpass wrote: post #211
_asummers wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might not be remembering my History of Math correctly, but my recollection is that the Babylonians used Base 60, and 12 is an even subdivision of that. I also recall other Asian number systems having base 12 in some capacity, so there may be something to the counting methodology he outlined if it showed up in a few separate parts of the world. Counting that way on one hand and then using the other hand to tally the…

Wait, doesn’t that just give you 25?

No, counting to 12 using the sections between your knuckles of your 4 fingers using your thumb on same hand will give you 3x4 and then 5 of those is 60. If you were doing fingers as a single digit, you'd get 25, though.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#219

Post by lopmotr »

A tiny bit of good news recently was North Korea getting rid of their fraction-of-an-hour different time zone and harmonizing with South Korea. Sadly, Australia and New Zealand are still some of the few holdouts with stupid pointless not-on-the-hour time zones :(

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#220

Post by Neeek »

0x0 wrote: post #33

So the article seems to imply you should store all timestamps as UTC (with an additional timezone string ID). But for events in the future that needs to happen on a specific "wall clock point in time", it might be better to actually store the yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss as a string with a timezone next to it, because timezones can and do change often unpredictably. If you pre-calculate what "4.00pm next August 1st" is as a U…

I might not be understanding your scenario correctly, but isn't it stated that UTC has 00:00 offset and should be stored that way? You would then add an offset based on current tzdata for that timezone string which would make it dynamic and accurate for the situation you described.
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