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

111–120 of 174 posts

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

#111

Post by firecall »

macintux wrote: post #36
toast0 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The user interface can be akward, but you can ask them for the timezone of the event. If it's for a live event in another place, they would ideally put in the local time in the other place and the timezone there. Or if it's a fixed time, not to be moved by DST changes anywhere, they could specify it in UTC. It's also a good idea to calculate and save the offset when editing. Then, if the offset changes later, you can…

I can’t even get employees at the company where I work to understand and communicate EDT instead of EST. I don’t think calendaring tools are going to have much success asking people what timezone they want.

My experience with Google Calendar, iCal and Outlook is that they do default to the meeting creators TimeZone.

Which is often what we want!

So on that regard, I find calendar invites rather than a causal email invite to be essential.

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

#112

Post by tzs »

Zekio wrote: post #14

This is why I personally want everything to just be utc without timezones

We live on an approximately spherical world, its rotation is not tidal locked to its star, its rotational axis is not perpendicular to its orbital plane, we evolved to synchronize our biological rhythms including our sleep/wake cycle to local sunrise and sunset, we occupy a wide range of latitudes and longitudes, and we need to coordinate activities with people who are far away from us.

Switching to worldwide UTC doesn't change any of that, and you end up needing to add something that is essentially equivalent to timezones.

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

#113

Post by jtbayly »

userbinator wrote: post #109
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.

Not if everyone uses mean solar time... or just chooses something like GMT.

…which they would do via government.

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

#114

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

Krisjohn wrote: post #91

Western Australia had a three year daylight saving trial imposed on us with short notice back around 1999. A decade later it was still dangerous to try to sync a calendar through iCloud from a Mac to a PC running Outlook. And I discovered a couple of years ago that Yealink VOIP phone still get the time wrong here during summer.

Oh man, so that's why?? I remember working on an issue for a client in Perth where their calendar was out of sync by an hour, and yep it was iCloud connected to Outlook on Windows. Being based in Victoria, I had never heard of WA's flirt with daylight savings time, but that totally explains the gremlins I was seeing.

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

#115

Post by ruined »

jtbayly wrote: post #113
userbinator wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if everyone uses mean solar time... or just chooses something like GMT.

…which they would do via government.

there are areas of the world where the government disagrees with the population on the appropriate timezone, most notably in Xinjiang

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time

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

#116

Post by mapmeld »

elashri wrote: post #89
petre wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Why would they change for Ramadan? the fasting times are determined by sun rise and set. It is not going to change and prayer times wouldn't be affected ( except the numerical shift of time only). The second part about arab world are not correct through. I grew up in Egypt which used to have daylight saving change but this ceased to happen from 2011 I think.

The schedule of Ramadan (the Islamic calendar month) may be delayed or extended in countries which use a physical sighting of the crescent moon to end the month, and can even differ by country if they go to different astronomers. This wouldnt affect DST I think, but more the timezone info - database. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-islam-ramadan-idUS... https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/06/12/...

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

#117

Post by hiyer »

spoonjim wrote: post #107
edbaskerville wrote: post #33

Not the worst example I've heard. In 2016 the Haitian president canceled daylight savings by decree two days before the changeover. I was flying out of the country the morning after the change, and had a really hard time explaining to airline customer service (who hadn't gotten the memo) what exactly the problem was. "When does my flight leave?" "At the scheduled time." "According to what clock?" "Huh?" I just showed…

Somewhat saved by the fact that the world pretty doesn’t pay much attention to what does or doesn’t happen in Haiti

Which is unfortunate. More people should know about the atrocities heaped upon Haiti by the "civilized" French [1] and Americans [2].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_...

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

#118

Post by beiller »

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…

Fyi we ran into an actual real life example of this being a real problem since Arizona doesn't do daylight savings time it can cause miscommunication and people can miss meetings if you put the wrong S vs D. It's even worse when you consider some countries switch over at different times from S to D. Edit Sorry I missed the Arizona part of your comment but there are rare occasions where it can mislead people.

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

#119

Post by dotancohen »

baskethead wrote: post #95
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…

How do you fix the computers? It must take a long time to roll out changes for the computer code to deal with this

On Debian, and most *nixes I believe, the update consists of a single file. All applications read from this file.

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

#120

Post by sohkamyung »

Interim guidance from Microsoft [1]

>Microsoft plans to release an update to support this change; however, there may be insufficient time to properly build, test, and release such an update before the change goes into effect. In the meantime, we recommend that organizations with devices in the Republic of Chile temporarily disable automatic DST adjustments in Windows to reflect the correct local time between September 4, 2022 and September 11, 2022.

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-...

Post reply on HN