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

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

#131

Post by rmason »

There was a time in the early 2000's when Indiana had three or more different time zones in the summer. In the winter the state was on eastern standard time except for three or four counties in the northwest part of the state that were on central standard time to sync with Chicago.

But in the summer there were counties that went on daylight time and others that did not. I had an important meeting with my startup in the Indianapolis area to discuss a partnership. I checked Wikipedia to find that Indianapolis was on daylight savings time. Since this guy was five miles outside Indianapolis I assumed he would be on the same time as well.

The end result was we arrived an hour early for the meeting. The guy was not pleased at all. He wasn't able to understand how I wasn't aware that he was over a county line that made all the difference in the world what time he was on. After all everyone in Indianapolis could tell you which counties used daylight time and which did not.

But it wasn't on the web and he didn't make a point of telling me. The meeting ended up going well but I left wondering how often this happened. Eventually the level of confusion resulted in Indiana moving the entire state to daylight savings time.

Guess I shouldn't be surprised. Michigan voters rejected daylight savings time twice at the polls. The state legislators finally voted to move everyone over. When there was a ballot initiative to reject what the legislature did the legislators fought it. The result was the state supreme court kept it off the ballot. But to be fair never at any time was the state on more than a single time zone.

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

#132

Post by bradgessler »

rmason wrote: post #131

There was a time in the early 2000's when Indiana had three or more different time zones in the summer. In the winter the state was on eastern standard time except for three or four counties in the northwest part of the state that were on central standard time to sync with Chicago. But in the summer there were counties that went on daylight time and others that did not. I had an important meeting with my startup in t…

I grew up in southern Indiana, across the bridge from Louisville, Kentucky. When I was a kid my parents would setup meetings with people and they’d ask if the time was in “fast time” or “slow time”. We’d also have to switch the times in our TV guides—ET in the summer, CT in the winter.

Then Indiana decided to observe daylight savings times and we had to start running around and changing our clocks.

I wish we’d just pass a federal law that does away with the time change.

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

#133

Post by Ndymium »

spiffytech wrote: post #20

This kind of thing is why it's important to store user-specified future dates as local time + IANA zone name. If a user wants a calendar event at 9am, they probably still mean 9am after accounting for time zone or DST changes. Storing dates as UTC is appropriate for dates in the past, or future dates that a user will never expect to happen at a certain wall-clock time. (An IANA zone name is something like America/New…

Storing datetimes as UTC is not enough for even past dates for all situations. If you need to know what local time an event happened in the past and there's more than one location your user may have resided in, you need to have stored the local time as well, since there's no reliable target you could convert that UTC to.

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

#134

Post by renewiltord »

aeyes wrote: post #96
mike-the-mikado wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For comparison, it looks as if Punta Arenas ("the most southerly city in Chile" according to Wikipedia) is about 53 degrees south. 53 degrees north puts you around Nottingham, England (or a little north of Berlin).

Can you link the article to see why it would say that? Puerto Williams is a lot further south. But Magallanes doesn't really matter, they don't have DST.

To save everyone else lookup trouble since I did: Puerto Williams has about 3k people and the other one has a 125kish.

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

#135

Post by GoblinSlayer »

rmason wrote: post #131

There was a time in the early 2000's when Indiana had three or more different time zones in the summer. In the winter the state was on eastern standard time except for three or four counties in the northwest part of the state that were on central standard time to sync with Chicago. But in the summer there were counties that went on daylight time and others that did not. I had an important meeting with my startup in t…

You don't need to be aware or guess time zones, just specify UTC offset and it becomes unambiguous to everyone around the globe.

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

#136

Post by jeroenhd »

aeyes wrote: post #97
jeroenhd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I dislike custom "we'll-do-it-ourselves" solutions. Updating your operating system's tz-database is easy; it's normally a single package with no dependencies that you can install without patching the rest of your outdated operating system full of security holes if you're in an "enterprise" environment where normal updates are seemingly impossible. If you need to rebuild your application or even your Docke…

Your post is completely missing the point. Here are some examples of what I have seen go wrong: * Microsoft didn't release an update, all Windows machines had incorrect time. * Google Calender never got the update, it was wrong for a week. Shifting everything by one hour in your head isn't too bad but for some reason meetings scheduled by people in other timezones weren't off by an hour. * Slack never got the update…

I'm sure I would, because many services I use daily are in fact written badly. I don't exactly expect much from tech giants like Microsoft and Google as they get localisation and feature detection wrong all the time if you're not living in the USA. As for Slack, I'm glad I use that minimally.

Managed databases not getting the patch are badly managed. Postgres deciding to do its own thing because it thinks it knows better is a bad decision if it doesn't know better. They've decided, probably for good reason, that the OS zoneinfo wasn't good enough, but that places the burden of maintaining zoneinfo files on them.

Temporary credentials and MFA should not be timezone dependent at all, if the difference in timezones between client and server are a problem then the software hasn't been designed right.

I'm not saying nobody will notice timezone changes and the bugs they cause; of course people do, because commonly used software tends to be written badly. That doesn't mean the responsibility of fixing this crap doesn't fall on the people writing software.

The real world moves fast sometimes and timezones are complicated; to fix that, either rely on someone else who's maintaining this stuff for you (distro packagers etc.) or take responsibility for your own solution. My shitty PHP code deals with the timezone change without issue by restarting the daemon process every other day at a random point in time; the fact these billion dollar tech giants can't work out a solution is a symptom of a much bigger problem to me. The FAANG people earning ridiculous amounts of money each month should be smart enough to figure out how do deploy a zonefile update in a day or two.

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

#137

Post by mcv »

notatoad wrote: post #123
kelnos wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> amazed at the kind of power the government wields just by having the ability to change our timezone. Who else would have that power, though? Every government has the power to set the time within their own borders.

i think the point isn't that somebody other than the government should have that power, but that the government should have less of that power. it's perfectly reasonable for goverments to self-limit themselves - for example, pass a law that daylight savings time can't be changed with less than 6 months notice.

But if not the government, then who? And what is their basis for that power? Do you want a separate election for just the people who decide timezones?

I've got to admit, there's an organisation deciding the grammar rules of the Dutch language, and I frequently disagree with them. I wouldn't mind being able to vote for more sensible spelling rules.

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

#138

Post by badcppdev »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #128
MichaelCollins wrote: post #121

Since we all carry veritable supercomputers with GPS in our pockets now, it's the perfect time for everybody to switch [back] to true solar time. Your noon is when the Sun is precisely at its zenith where you are.

Zones are for interoperation. 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 estima…

Game time would just depend on the location (and timezone) for the stadium.

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

#139

Post by badcppdev »

ithkuil wrote: post #52
tgv wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they can do that on their own, can they? There's still an EU wide rule on DST. They never revoked it, AFAIK.

In 2018, the European Parliament voted to get rid of twice a year clock changes. It came after a poll of 4.6 million EU citizens showed strong support for scrapping it. I'm not sure however what's the process of getting this actually implemented.

For context that's a bit over 1% of the total 447 million people who live in the EU

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

#140

Post by happymellon »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #135
rmason wrote: post #131

There was a time in the early 2000's when Indiana had three or more different time zones in the summer. In the winter the state was on eastern standard time except for three or four counties in the northwest part of the state that were on central standard time to sync with Chicago. But in the summer there were counties that went on daylight time and others that did not. I had an important meeting with my startup in t…

You don't need to be aware or guess time zones, just specify UTC offset and it becomes unambiguous to everyone around the globe.

Why not just specify in Unixtime? Definitely no confusion then!
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