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

Of course, times sometimes do need timezones. But calendar dates (like Christmas, or your birthday) almost never do and having things automagically do adjustments based on that and give the wrong results is just a pain.

That's one thing I don't like about many standard libraries. They'll have a DateTime object that does all kinds of automagic stuff for you (or against you), but no concept of just a date itself. Many bugs occur between 2300 and 0100 due to that (and sometimes between 1100 and 1300 because people try to compensate for the buggy adjustments by setting the unwanted time component to noon).

Another problem arises when the server's timezone is set to X, the database's timezone is Y, the software's timezone is Z, and one user's entering data in timezone A while another is reading it in timezone B - and all of the software parts along the way are each trying to automagically adjust it. A good reason we should just all switch to UTC and drop the idea of timezones entirely.

Furthermore, it'd be much easier to coordinate activities with people who are far away from us if you could just say 2300 and they'll know when that is because it's the exact same time for them on their clock. Timezones are what makes that bad in the first place!

This idea that we for some reason need to keep changing and tinkering with the labels on the clocks due to flaky political reasons is just a silly old superstitious tradition. Just pick one timezone and let's all use it already.

In fact, you can already see how well that can work if you live away from the equator. As the year progresses, the days get shorter and longer day by day - but we don't adjust the clocks by a couple of minutes every single day. Because it doesn't matter whether the clock labels match up with the sunlight.

If it did in fact matter, then we'd need special clocks that sometimes run faster during daylight and sometimes slower, depending on latitude and date so that we get the same number of 'minutes' of daylight at the same 'times' each day even though the actual lengths and times vary. But we don't do that of course both because it would be totally nonsensical, and also because it doesn't matter.

In normal everyday usage, most of the time, people will understand by context and convention what is meant by "5:30" even without specifying AM or PM, let alone the timezone or TZDATA version associated. Yes, there are times specificity matters, and thinking about that can be goos, but the social frictions imposed may exceed any other benefits achieved, at least much of the time. At the same time, even where those ambiguities exist it's typically mentally jarring for people to be constantly reminded of this, even where they should be.

Where there's an opportunity for ambiguity, yes, nail down specifically what is meant. I read delecti's comment in that context, and note that they're describing themselves as the pedant. Which I interpret as "a stickler for accuracy and precision".

Seriously though, everyone having slightly different individual times could be real confusing.

For example, two people, a couple of hundred miles/kilometres apart share a phone call, one of them asks: "What time is the game on?"

Also, I am picturing the engineer who work on Google Maps crying at the time adjustments required for traveling east/west on the journey time/arrival time estimate.

My wife and I, we once had three switches to daylight saving time one spring. This was during a trip to the US. Once in NYC where we missed our train. Once in Arizona, we just arrived one hour "later" than planned. The last time after we returned to Switzerland. I missed an important meeting at my job still jetlagged.

That was confusing as hell even without rule changes.