Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes chaos

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 174 posts

Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes chaos

#1

Post by csense »

The government of Chile changed the local rules for daylight savings with approximately 30 days notice.

A lot of chaos has resulted, at least according to Reddit [1], which is where I found out about it.

Media doesn't seem to be reporting much on this, the most I've been able to find is one article from before the changeover [2] and a changelog for the IANA tzdb [3].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/x9kr4...

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/07/microsoft_windows_chi...

[3] https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb/NEWS

Re: Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes chaos

#2

Post by gerikson »

In my previous job we had to deal with sudden DST changes in Jordan, Russia, Turkey... it's amazing politicians don't realize what a big deal sudden changes can be.

Edit it appears the switch was delayed due to the constitutional referendum. Turkey had national exams as a reason, I believe.

Re: Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes chaos

#4

Post by toomuchtodo »

gerikson wrote: post #2

In my previous job we had to deal with sudden DST changes in Jordan, Russia, Turkey... it's amazing politicians don't realize what a big deal sudden changes can be. Edit it appears the switch was delayed due to the constitutional referendum. Turkey had national exams as a reason, I believe.

I would love to read a blog post from you on this topic!

Re: Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes chaos

#5

Post by hilbert42 »

No doubt changing daylight saving rules at short notice is difficult but we should be asking ourselves why is it so.

The major problem adjusting to daylight saving should be as it's always been - that of human adaptation to the sudden change of time. That our computers cannot adapt at a moment's notice simply says there's fundamental problem with their design.

Moreover, the problem should have been long solved by now. Remember the huge kerfuffle over the Y2k problem 22 years ago? You'd think we'd have learned from that and fixed the problem back then.

Either we're lazy or slow learners or both.

Re: Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes chaos

#6

Post by readthenotes1 »

iwwr wrote: post #3

Some call it "chaos", others might call it "badly written software".

Some might call it "chaos", others might call it "stupid government policy compounded by (the expected) moronic government implantation guidelines"

Re: Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes chaos

#7

Post by DougN7 »

hilbert42 wrote: post #5

No doubt changing daylight saving rules at short notice is difficult but we should be asking ourselves why is it so. The major problem adjusting to daylight saving should be as it's always been - that of human adaptation to the sudden change of time. That our computers cannot adapt at a moment's notice simply says there's fundamental problem with their design. Moreover, the problem should have been long solved by now…

In my opinion it’s because it’s so easy to assume a day has 24 hours. Coding for an occasional day that has 23 and another with 25 just doesn’t occur to most people.

Re: Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes chaos

#8

Post by onion2k »

iwwr wrote: post #3

Some call it "chaos", others might call it "badly written software".

A lot of the time it's not really a matter of how well or badly the code has been written. It's more that an app hasn't been deployed in a long time and the infrastructure has changed, so now you have to update the deploy process. Or that the people who worked on it have moved on and now there's no understanding of the functionality, or documentation, so running a QA check is hard. Or that the test suite has broken so you need to fix that first. Or even that you don't know which systems rely on dates so you have to audit everything.

Code quality doesn't help if things are coded in inflexible ways, but there is so much more to ops in a big company.

Re: Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes chaos

#9

Post by tomrod »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #6
iwwr wrote: post #3

Some call it "chaos", others might call it "badly written software".

Some might call it "chaos", others might call it "stupid government policy compounded by (the expected) moronic government implantation guidelines"

The latter is too wordy. "chaos" suffices!
Post reply on HN