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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

#151

Post by kragen »

kelnos wrote: post #101
kragen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a pedantic difference; if you calculate the time as PST when it's PDT or vice versa you'll be an hour off. Holding a meeting an hour early or attending it an hour late can have serious consequences.

One way to look at pedantry is that it's when someone emphasizes technical correctness, even when another person's actual intent is understood. If it's the middle of July, and someone in California sets up a meeting with someone in New York, but tells them "9am PST", it would be understood to actually mean "PT" or "PDT". I suspect only certain kinds of neurodivergent people would show up for the meeting an hour off.…

Neurodivergent people, or people who aren't in California, which is actually more than 99% of people, and who therefore have to look up the timezone offset somehow.

It's probably true that the <1% of people you hang out with most of the time can correct the error without even thinking about it because they live in California too. But that doesn't make it a pedantic error; it's an error that regularly has serious consequences, precisely because people's actual intent is misunderstood.

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

#152

Post by hilbert42 »

mike_hock wrote: post #90
hilbert42 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"an ill-conceived concept," That's just an opinion, not an absolute fact. There's nothing fundamental about it. After all, over the last hundred years or more most countries have had DST so that's the opposite opinion - and for DST to be so widely adopted many millions thought it was a good idea. I'm only stating facts. Frankly, I couldn't give damn whether we had DST or not and I can never understand why people get…

I literally lose sleep twice a year over DST :D Yes, twice. When the clock suddenly moves back, that also causes jetlag.

No doubt that's a significant problem for you and others like you.

But then how do we reconcile your requirements with those of others, especially when their requirements differ significantly from yours?

The usual answer is to base this on a democratic decision. Either way, the minority loses out.

On that point, my comments to this story turned out to be provocative but that definitely wasn't my original intention. Nevertheless, what has been very informative has been the voting on my comments, they've oscillated continually but on average they've ended up pretty close to neutral.

This tells me that strongly opposing views are held in relatively equal numbers across the population and other surveys seem to indicate this depending on country, location etc. That said, the opponents of DST seem to be making a stronger pushing politically at the moment (fashions change, where I am DST was overwhelming supported when first introduced and it still has relatively strong support although its opponents are more vocal nowadays).

As a person who doesn't care one way or other, it seems I'm part of a rather small minority.

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

#153

Post by utucuro »

rmujica wrote: post #11

Chilean here. Unfortunately our governments have had the bad habit of changing the date DST starts on every two-three years, and that wreaks havoc everywhere in the country. We are kind of used to having a couple of days where we assume everyone will run an hour late because of this. I just hosted some Peruvian friends this week and were amazed at the kind of power the government wields just by having the ability to…

A someone who is living in a country where the chosen timezone is 3 hours ahead of solar time, I wish governments had NO authority whatsoever over timezones.

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

#155

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

Volundr wrote: post #84
kragen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a pedantic difference; if you calculate the time as PST when it's PDT or vice versa you'll be an hour off. Holding a meeting an hour early or attending it an hour late can have serious consequences.

It is a pedantic difference. While it's technically incorrect to say PST when it's currently PDT, it doesn't inhibit communication. Both parties will understand it to be that "we meeting at 9am, whenever that happens to be for our California staff" as opposed to "we are meeting at 9am PST, even though no one is currently on PST" Even my colleague in Arizona is able to follow this despite them not joining the daylight…

When someone sets up a meeting with me in a different time zone I'll google "what time is it in [timezone]?" then calculate the difference with my timezone and apply that the day of the meeting.

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

#156

Post by peckrob »

bradgessler wrote: post #132
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 p…

Similar story for me. I went to college at Auburn, which is located in eastern Alabama about 20 miles from the Eastern/Central timezone border. Half of our broadcast TV stations came from both Columbus, Georgia (Eastern) and the other half from Montgomery, Alabama (Central). You had to remember which station you were watching and where it was from whenever a time was listed.

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

#157

Post by PotterSys »

Well, news regarding the plebiscite ate up any attempt to talk about the time change issue.

To clarify, this has been a constant from 2011. We jumped from a well defined schedule on March/October, to May/August, to DST all year round, to a new timezone for people down south, to the new April/September schedule… interrumpted by the plebiscite.

And well, "commissions" are always on the works to a definite schedule once and for all; but…

(BTW, for the person who said there are cities in lower longitudes than Punta Arenas: yes, but think of a country that goes from Tallinn [Estonia] to the south border of Egypt)

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

#158

Post by notatoad »

mcv wrote: post #137
notatoad wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you read my comment at all? You’re replying to a comment that quite specifically answers the question in your reply.

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

#159

Post by MichaelCollins »

_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…

The differences in true solar time between people living in different parts of the city will be slight enough to simply ignore, no conversions needed. Other sources of error, like traffic, easily dominate the matter. If you're trying to meet up with somebody local, it works the same as it always has.

For the google maps engineer, the matter is not so complicated. Given a geo coordinate and UTC time (within 1 second of mean solar time at the prime meridian, which is good enough), they can call into a standard routine to derive the true local time at that time and place, and display that time to the user.

> "What time is the game on?"

"Computer, what time is 6pm in Denver?"

"6pm in Denver is 8:26pm for you."

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

#160

Post by tsimionescu »

mason55 wrote: post #63
tsimionescu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes you know what timezone the user intended. If I read somewhere that some football match in Chile is happening on November 1st at 1 o'clock, I may well put in a reminder for November 1st at 1 o'clock, without specifying a timezone or location. The calendar/reminder app would of course be unable to notify me that Chile's time for November 1st has changed, since I never told it anything about Chile.

What exactly do you expect it to do? Asking the user for the location of the event for time zone purposes might be confusing but there’s no better option.

The more common option is not to do that, and accept that in the rare cases of a timezone change, there's nothing you can do from software.

Either way, the only completely fool-proof way to make sure you never return the wrong time is to ask not for a timezone, but for GPS coordinates, and preferably some extra cultural information - since the timezone of a particular location may change completely, and that change may only be recognized by certain entities.

For example, when Russia annexed Crimeea, they could have changed the timezone (I believe they didn't, but they could have), but more nationalistic Ukrainians in Crimeea would have probably not recognized the timezone change. So, if someone had set an event for some time in the future and chose Ukraine's timezone, they may not have gotten the right reminder if the event was public (so presumably forced by Russian authorities to respect the new timezone), since you couldn't know they meant to watch something in Crimeea.

To be clear, I'm arguing it's not worth trying to solve this problem in a fool-proof way in software, not that I expect software to help in situations like the above.

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