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Timezone Bullshit

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Re: Timezone Bullshit

#191

Post by creeble »

mabbo wrote: post #150
davidgh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 2018, 13 states in the US passed resolutions to get rid of the semi-annual clock changes but also that daylight saving time become permanent. Of course, federal law doesn’t allow them to do such (a state only has the option to not observe DST, but not the option to permanently observe it). It probably depends somewhat on latitude and longitude, I for one would prefer year round daylight saving time as I like th…

But the public does adjust to changing opening and closing times. We just all change the clocks as well and pretend that we didn't. And it's stupid.

I don't know what you mean by "pretend we didn't". We don't pretend anything - we change the clocks and observe that change.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#192

Post by k_sze »

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #131
Ayesh wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tzdb has the date and time that location starts/reverts DST. It is updated regularly to keep up with regions changing the time zones. It happens frequently than many of us like.

I'm not sure I follow (and this week, timezones and time handling are really important for my job, so I really want to understand)! If a user provides a time of 11/7/2021 1:50 AM America/New_York, how does the library determine if it's a -5 or -4 offset given that's when daylight savings time ends? I believe that's the ambiguity GP is referring to. I'm trying to align time across a few systems I work with. One provid…

This also reminds me of the post Jon Skeet wrote about using UTC: https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a...

Also discussed on HN back in the days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19500640

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#193

Post by davidgh »

mabbo wrote: post #150
davidgh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 2018, 13 states in the US passed resolutions to get rid of the semi-annual clock changes but also that daylight saving time become permanent. Of course, federal law doesn’t allow them to do such (a state only has the option to not observe DST, but not the option to permanently observe it). It probably depends somewhat on latitude and longitude, I for one would prefer year round daylight saving time as I like th…

But the public does adjust to changing opening and closing times. We just all change the clocks as well and pretend that we didn't. And it's stupid.

The previous discussion was talking about adjusting work hours as an alternative to daylight saving time. My comment is that’s not viable a alternative as I don’t think people want to try to determine if the post office closes at 4:00 or 5:00 depending on the date. Additionally, if everyone shifts working hours based on the time of year, how is that different than just changing the clock?

My point is not for or against daylight saving time, just that shifting work hours is not a viable alternative to it. And if we do get rid of changing clocks, there’s a decent chunk of the population that has expressed a preference for permanent daylight saving time rather than standard time.

It’s worth nothing that in Russia they experimented with permanent daylight time some years ago, and at first it was highly supported. However, after some years support for it dropped and they moved to permanent standard time. However, Russia deals with some unique geographical scenarios such as cities with extreme northern latitudes.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#194

Post by dhimes »

fishywang wrote: post #179
ceilingcorner wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...no, actually it’s extremely logical. Changing clocks society wide is far easier than getting every single person and company to adjust its schedule.

>than getting every single person and company to adjust its schedule but by using DST we are just pretending that we didn't ask people/companies to adjust their schedules. in reality they did, just the "clock" stayed the same.

Exactly. Changing our clocks is changing our schedules, the easy way.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#195

Post by andruby »

Tepix wrote: post #54

It's not just timezones names that are bullshit (they are!), the whole calendar is dumb. Ideally the world should switch to an "earth calendar" where the year begins on the shortest day (currently Dec 21st for 90% of the population) and there are four yearly planet-wide holidays: 1. northern solstice 2. southern solstice 3. northward equinox 4. southward equinox While we are at it, we could also do something more cle…

I have often wondered why 10 days after the shortest day was chosen to start the year (Jan 1). Does anyone know why they chose that?

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#196

Post by steerablesafe »

phoronixrly wrote: post #3

> Let's take take a look, using the disastrously bad unix libc timezone tools It seems to me that the author did not initially read the documentation they linked to ( https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/TZ-Variab... ) and is now complaining in an annoying and entitled manner.

Let's pick apart that documentation and the actual behavior, shall we?

By the documentation "EST", "EDT" and "America/Los_Angeles" are not valid TZ environment variable values, as none of them matches any of the formats. offset doesn't seem to be optional, and within offset hours are not optional.

Ok, maybe it is too pedantic, a permissive implementation can interpret no offset as 0, right? But that's not what happens here. The implementation looks up the timezone by the provided name somewhere, and only when it doesn't find it it falls back to 0 as an offset.

This lookup behavior doesn't seem to be documented on that page. It's not described in the GNU date man page either even though it uses TZ='America/Los_Angeles' as an example.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#197

Post by creeble »

CydeWeys wrote: post #175
ghaff wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those who argue for eliminating DST but somehow still preserve some form of winter/summer hours are basically arguing for eliminating DST and then recreating it poorly. You either do DST or you mostly just pick a timezone and stick with it year round.

I like the latter approach: year-round DST. Not even sunlight in the evening is frequently a problem for me, but not enough sunlight in the morning isn't.

People forget that we (the US) actually had year-round DST once - in 1974.

But a couple of kids got hit by buses in the morning, and there went that experiment:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-sav...

Edit: got the year wrong!

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#198

Post by FabHK »

Unklejoe wrote: post #168
FabHK wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless sub-second accuracy is required, I'd be in favour of UT1. It doesn't use SI seconds (while TAI and UTC do), but it has the advantage that a day has exactly 86400 seconds, so you don't ever have to deal with "23:59:60" timestamps. Summary: UT1 - noon is when the sun is above you, day has 86400 seconds (not SI seconds) TAI - noon drifts away from when the sun is above you, day has 86400 SI seconds UTC - noon is…

I'd rather just use TAI and never have to worry about anything. Let the conversion to UTC be the client's problem. Having the length of a second always be the same is kind of important.

For logs, fine. But you do deviate more and more from what the world is using (as of 2017, TAI is exactly 37 seconds ahead of UTC, according to Wikipedia)

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#199

Post by kevincox »

throw0101a wrote: post #92
Hamuko wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EU is currently one timezone for most of its area, the whole continent excluding Portugal has the same timezone. That's definitely not accurate.

A good portion of the EU is in CET when they probably shouldn't be when it comes to solar time: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Europe France should probably, AFAICT, be in WET (like the UK) and Spain definitely should be. Solar time offsets are quite off for them: * http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t... * https://github.com/stefano-maggiolo/solar-time-vs-standard-t... * https://24ti…

I hope that we can stop trying to sync noon to the local sun at some point. I think it made sense when communicating over distances was hard and rare. In that case giving local time some meaning (ex: "People tend to wake up around 8") had some value. However now that communicating with people around the word is commonplace I think that benefit is outweighed by the value of knowing what time people are talking about. Because if you try to schedule something before I want to wake up it is incredibly obvious to me. However if we mess up the timezone math by and hour no one will notice unless they think to explicitly check.

The only real downside I see is that if the day number changes during your "day" it could be confusing. However I think we will quickly learn to deal with it (overnight shifts have been a thing forever and doctors seem to manage). Plus we already have a weaker form of this when we are talking about late-night activities so I think we will figure it out.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#200

Post by jonathanberger »

juddgaddie wrote: post #29

'There is no good reason to use short timezone codes like EST, CST, PST — doing so will only bring you pain. Either use the tzdb name like America/New_York, or use an offset from UTC, depending on what you want.' All you need to read/remember is this, this applies everywhere not just with date.

Unfortunately the statement is not true. One good reason to use short timezone codes like EST, CST, PST is that most people prefer them.

One of the first surprising things you learn after launching a timezone conversion website https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1133613 is that one of the top feature requests is to display short timezone codes.

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