131–140 of 466 posts
A friend of mine has been visiting places with weird time related things going on, because it is interesting and takes you funny places. He has been to Lord Howe. Now I know why. He has a user account on HN. I will ask him if he wants to make an appearance here...
Earlier this year I had to write a function to find the current local time given a US address. The naive way to do so would be via a static mapping of state to time zone but there are a few edge cases that preclude doing this; in the interest of cost and speed relative to this specific application I spent a few dollars on a CSV that maps every US ZIP code to UTC offset and whether DST is followed (among other data).…
> The naive way to do so would be via a static mapping of state to time zone but there are a few edge cases that preclude doing this More than a few, state is really the wrong resolution here, US timezones follow counties and native reservations borders. ZIP codes should probably be good enough but I'd be careful too. If your volume of addresses isn't too crazy, the robust way is to reverse geocode them and use a lib…
Can't remember the code for it now, had a lot of interesting timezone issues in a previous job.
Excellent read around the acrobatics of timezone software. It really is quite flexible. It leads me to wonder. If it's all just an automated and finite offset, there's no reason for daylight savings policies to hew to 60 minutes adjustments. Couldn't a nation decide to have a continuously changing offset throughout the year? It might make their offset lookup table substantially longer, but this could 'solve' daylight…
What I like about the tz database is that's it's technically a diff of a diff. It stores the difference across history, of the difference of each timezone with UTC. Right? So it's a diff^2. But! The tz database gets updates! So those commits are diffs of diffs of diffs, or diff^3. Can we go further? You bet! It has a changelog, and that changelog is stored in git, so commits to the tz changelog are diff^4: they are c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's very similar to how the romans conceived of time. Wonder if it's an old relic from when north africa was a bunch of provinces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_timekeeping
"An hour was defined as one twelfth of the daytime" That must have been fun for the Romans here in Scotland - an hour would be roughly two and a half time as long in winter as in summer!
Excellent read around the acrobatics of timezone software. It really is quite flexible. It leads me to wonder. If it's all just an automated and finite offset, there's no reason for daylight savings policies to hew to 60 minutes adjustments. Couldn't a nation decide to have a continuously changing offset throughout the year? It might make their offset lookup table substantially longer, but this could 'solve' daylight…
I find it slightly ironic that a blog that’s educating (and entertaining) us on time and timezones does not itself mention when its blogposts were published, at least on mobile. This one appears to have been published in the summer of 2024.
"Summer" in certain parts of the world, at least.
The article says that "Nuuk is in Greenland, and is part of the greater EU cinematic universe." It is correct that Greenland is part of Denmark, and Denmark is a member of EU. But Greenland voted several years ago to stay out of the EU.
Which is why it's part of the greater universe, not the regular one.
Excellent read around the acrobatics of timezone software. It really is quite flexible. It leads me to wonder. If it's all just an automated and finite offset, there's no reason for daylight savings policies to hew to 60 minutes adjustments. Couldn't a nation decide to have a continuously changing offset throughout the year? It might make their offset lookup table substantially longer, but this could 'solve' daylight…
The article says that "Nuuk is in Greenland, and is part of the greater EU cinematic universe." It is correct that Greenland is part of Denmark, and Denmark is a member of EU. But Greenland voted several years ago to stay out of the EU.
Which is why it's part of the greater universe, not the regular one.