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

Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

ssoready.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 466 posts

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#211

Post by Tor3 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #156
aniforprez wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you can propose a proper way to locally represent time where a person is currently present in relation to the position of the sun then no, time zones will never go away. I know time zones suck for us as programmers but it's a practical way to separate different regions that will experience different times of day differently. As long as we have clocks and times with "midnight"s and "noon"s, time zones will exis…

Just because you personally are used to a specific type of clock doesn’t mean you can’t imagine a different kind. Submarines use 24 hour clocks and give no hecks about where the sun is. The solution is to just use UTC. That’s it. That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, which used to be 9am-5pm. That’s it. Your whole transition has been completed. The rest is just what your calendar says. Ni…

>That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00,

Fine.. so I'm going to have a teleconference with a company in NYC. Due to what you wrote above I now have an idea of what UTC time window to plan for - after all, I want to be able to reach them during their working hours.

Then on Friday I have to schedule a teleconf with a company in Japan. When do they work, relative to UTC? You forgot to add that, so I have to find it somewhere.

Hm, wouldn't it be nice if my computer could keep track of the working hours everywhere in the world. Let's make a database of that.. There's just one issue: How is this any better than using the timezone system we already have? Using that, I can figure out the local time in those places, and I can safely assume that they'll at least be working from around 09:00 local time. Having to instead keep track of their working hours relative to UTC doesn't seem like much of an improvement to me.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#212

Post by Aidevah »

> Unless you’re doing some fairly exotic things where you’re finding yourself saying things like

>> Oh yeah the OCR on Japanese driving licenses pops out things like “平成 8”, that’s just how they sometimes say 1996 over there. That’s why we have this in the parser: eras = { "大正": 1912, "昭和": 1926, "平成": 1989 }

>> One of these days we’ll need to add "令和": 2019, but it hasn’t come up yet.

Taiwan also uses the ROC calendar[1] which is directly descended from the regnal calendars of imperial china.

But it's quaint that the Japanese name their year after one person, while us enlightened westerners simply use a calendar where it's simply the 2024th year of the, erm, hmmmph...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_calendar

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#214

Post by Tor3 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #188
pavel_lishin wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I recommend you read this article titled "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"? https://qntm.org/abolish

Look at it from the other direction for a moment: say we started with universal time. The whole world used UTC. Now try suggesting timezones. The idea would look absolutely insane. It would be a non-starter discussion. On the other hand the transition from timezones to UTC has some challenges but the idea itself is very worth considering. What does this tell you?

Why would that look insane at all? It's like saying that letting everybody everywhere be able to say "I work from nine to five" is insane. Or that saying that the date changes to the next day when it's midnight is insane.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#215

Post by Maxamillion96 »

wakahiu wrote: post #180
guidedlight wrote: post #18

Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows. Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia

This is common across East Africa, including Kenya where I’m from. The night ends at 6:00AM, with 7:00AM being saa moja (first hour) of the day. Similarly, the day ends at 6:00PM (thenashara). Intuitively, this clock makes much more sense than the English clock. There’s rarely confusion between times because it’s embedded in the language.

Same with Somali. The first hour of daylight is hal saac (Hour 1)

7 AM is 1 Saac ( Hour 1)

6 PM is 12 Saac ( Hour 12)

7 PM is 1 Saac

6 AM is 12 Saac

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#216

Post by rswail »

hugh-avherald wrote: post #162
IgorPartola wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you personally are used to a specific type of clock doesn’t mean you can’t imagine a different kind. Submarines use 24 hour clocks and give no hecks about where the sun is. The solution is to just use UTC. That’s it. That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, which used to be 9am-5pm. That’s it. Your whole transition has been completed. The rest is just what your calendar says. Ni…

Why don't people just do this then? There's no overwhelming obligation on individuals to use the local timezone. I also think that your using the example of submarines -- notoriously an onerous lifestyle that very few are capable of living -- pretty much torpedoes your implicit suggestion that this would not be too much of a change.

> pretty much torpedoes your implicit suggestion that this would not be too much of a change.

You did that on porpoise I hope.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#217

Post by lokar »

I recall working on some calendar software and finding that at some point in the past (you have to deal with all the rules from the past) a country (Saudi Arabia?) had an offset like every day to keep solar noon in line with civil time.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#218

Post by Tor3 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #159
coldpie wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Any solution you come up with that accounts for how humans actually use time will just reinvent time zones. Could they be more cleanly specified than they are? Sure. But that's just an artifact of grandfathering in historical practices.

See my reply to a parallel comment.

The point is really that as long as we don't live on Discworld we have to divide the world into time zones. Either using different local time zones, or using local awake/sleep zones. Either way you have time zones.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#219

Post by pavel_lishin »

School-Cotton wrote: post #206
pavel_lishin wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The date of Ramadan is not well known because it's based on being able to see the moon from the local position on Earth. Note to self, look up what Islamic scholars think should be done about Ramadan on a moon base.

Not quite a moon base, but for Muslims on the ISS: > the Malaysian government called a gathering of 150 Islamic legal scholars, scientists, and astronauts to create guidelines for Dr. Shukor. The scholars produced a fatwa, or non-binding Islamic legal opinion, intended to help future Muslim astronauts, which they translated into both Arabic and English. They wrote that in order to pray, Muslims in space should face M…

Prayer and pointing to Mecca seems pretty simple on the moon - but if Ramadan is based on when you can see the moon, it seems that Ramadan would start as soon as the person in charge walks by a window.
Post reply on HN