Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 37 posts

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#21

Post by notatoad »

rmc wrote: post #19
grimlck wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing everything in UTC is a huge improvement, but is still an imperfect solution because the Tz database changes over time. Suppose you are writing a appointment tracking system, and, at some point before the olson tz database has been updated with this change, the user in the Samoa timezone creates an future appointment for Jun 2, 2012. That would be stored in UTC. Now, you upgrade the olson TZ database file on y…

Yes, you're right. In cases like that you should store future events as local time, and wait until a resonable time before the event (e.g. a week) to convert from local to UTC. Then you will have (hopefully) an updated tzdata file.

what? no, that is a horribly convoluted solution to account for a rare edge case. store UTC and an olson string, and if people live in an area where the dates change, it is their responsibility to move their appointments. if you want to be really nice, you could run a batch job to switch all effected events a day forward.

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#23

Post by alecperkins »

ars wrote: post #4

I'm quite curious if local churches will follow along with the change. I know Jews wouldn't, and I doubt Muslims would, but I don't think there are any Jews there anyway, not sure about Muslims.

What's to follow? It's just a one-time change that makes a lot of sense given their location. They aren't permanently getting rid of Friday. Besides, Hebrew and Muslim calendars are lunar-based and I would imagine not affected by this.

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#24

Post by andrewaylett »

notatoad wrote: post #21
rmc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you're right. In cases like that you should store future events as local time, and wait until a resonable time before the event (e.g. a week) to convert from local to UTC. Then you will have (hopefully) an updated tzdata file.

what? no, that is a horribly convoluted solution to account for a rare edge case. store UTC and an olson string, and if people live in an area where the dates change, it is their responsibility to move their appointments. if you want to be really nice, you could run a batch job to switch all effected events a day forward.

I disagree -- in this case, you should consider storing local time and the Olson tz it's due to be in. Microsoft make the mistake of doing it your way in Outlook, meaning that everyone had to update their calendars when the US changed their DST rules.

Events in the future are commonly scheduled relative to what the time is going to be in a specific place, regardless of how the tz rules change in the meantime. Automated actions in the future, however, may well need to be fixed to a UTC time. In short: you need to think about how your system will actually be used, and possibly store values differently depending on how they will be used.

On no account ever use a raw UTC+n offset.

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#25

Post by marquis »

redthrowaway wrote: post #15

Who decided to cancel Friday ? Surely there would have been greater agreement for cancelling Monday.

Then tuesday is the new monday.. you can't escape it. Also, easier to cope with changes over the weekend for those doing international business.

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#26

Post by marquis »

languagehacker wrote: post #17

Samoa will do anything to make it easier to trade with Australia, including switching what side of the road drivers should use. It's getting a little ridiculous.

Samoans mostly live and work in/with Australia and New Zealand. Doesn't that make more sense, than pretending they are closer to the U.S.?

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#27

Post by ars »

alecperkins wrote: post #23
ars wrote: post #4

I'm quite curious if local churches will follow along with the change. I know Jews wouldn't, and I doubt Muslims would, but I don't think there are any Jews there anyway, not sure about Muslims.

What's to follow? It's just a one-time change that makes a lot of sense given their location. They aren't permanently getting rid of Friday. Besides, Hebrew and Muslim calendars are lunar-based and I would imagine not affected by this.

Not the calendar, the day of the week. There is no provision in the religious rules for Jews or Muslims for a "one time change".

I'm not super familiar with the Muslim rules, but I know the Jewish rules have their own date line that does not correspond to the international one.

I don't know what the Christian rules are about the international date line and that's what I was asking.

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#29

Post by ars »

jonknee wrote: post #11
ars wrote: post #4

I'm quite curious if local churches will follow along with the change. I know Jews wouldn't, and I doubt Muslims would, but I don't think there are any Jews there anyway, not sure about Muslims.

Why not? It's arbitrary anyways--as the article mentions the same place previously switched (which means if the Jews didn't like change they would still be on the time that everyone is now switching back to).

The Jewish religion has it's own date line that does not correspond to the international one.

My question was what does Christianity do, and I guess no one here knows.

Post reply on HN