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UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

zachholman.com

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Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#91

Post by scruple »

masklinn wrote: post #19

Having dealt with that crap… that should be an interesting read scroll scroll scroll nod nod nod scroll scroll scroll > Recurring events Whelp, shit just got very very real, and I actually disagree with Zach here: > If someone held a gun to your head and demanded in the next week you either 1) programmed a comprehensive system that included full support for recurring events, or 2) invent full-scale ready-to-go-to-mar…

Yeah. I've lived through this scenario (implement recurring events based on a calendar system in very little time). And even though I definitely had a longer runway than a week (a whole month! on top of the work that I already had on my plate), I would still agree to take the beating immediately if I was presented with that situation again.

Yeah, sure, I "got it done" but it was very challenging to maintain for a while. And, of course, I learned well after the fact that what I had designed and implemented had basically, rather poorly, implemented some existing solution / FOSS library (I had essentially written some pieces of the Ruby gem ice_cube without realizing it) that I hadn't been able to find via Google at the time.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#92

Post by jhayward »

TylerE wrote: post #87
hinkley wrote: post #46

I have been thinking a lot lately that we are trying to solve class of XY Problem. Universal time is in part about trying to order events in a strict order. Probelm is, nobody observed that order. Later we infer things about the system based on this chronology but it’s completely fictitious and we have to stretch our brains to explain the state of the system. The Java Memory Model, and subsequently several other lang…

Every bank I've ever been a sucker-err-customer of seemed to use whichever order results in the most fees. Not the only reason I use a credit union these days.

There used to be a law against that in the US, but the GOP repealed it early in Trump's first year.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#93

Post by madcaptenor »

masklinn wrote: post #41

> The Happy Monday System, which honestly I just loved based on the name of it alone. Shows how Japan has moved their holidays schedules around just to make people happier with a longer weekend. In countries with significant amounts of legal leaves (e.g. most of europe), tuesdays and thursdays are also very nice as "burning" a single leave day provides for a 4 days weekend (and 3 days week). French even has an expres…

Independence Day, in the USA, is always celebrated on July 4. One year in seven this creates some awkwardness: which weekend is "Fourth of July weekend" if the 4th of July is a Wednesday?

2012: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/07/serious...

2007: https://www.inc.com/news/articles/200706/independence.html

1990: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/04/garden/and-thank-god-it-s... (NYT)

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#96

Post by agumonkey »

akkartik wrote: post #25

"Did you hear about the clock maker who was the first to add a second hand to a clock? His first prototype was a complete failure, but he got it working the second time." Very funny, but here's the real reason ( https://www.etymonline.com/word/second ): > second (n) from Old French seconde , from Medieval Latin secunda , short for secunda pars minuta , "second diminished part," the result of the second division of th…

One of my most visited and favorited website. Donate to the author.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#97

Post by vorg »

sp332 wrote: post #3
ATsch wrote: post #2

The author expected this comment, but i'd still like to note that this website saturates at least one core of my laptop, more depending where I scroll.

There are tons of autoplaying videos, and each one takes a few % of my CPU. The biggest difference for me was the one just after the heading "Who needs December 30, 2011 anyway". Turning off autoplay (e.g. media.autoplay.enabled in Firefox) fixed it. You can still play each video by right-clicking on it.

The autoplaying videos are a pain, I couldn't find "media.autoplay.enabled" in my Preferences menu in Firefox, and this in the article calling me "clueless" doesn't help:

> it is predictable that some clueless commenter on Hacker News will complain that this page has autoplaying video on it

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#98

Post by welterde »

cryptonector wrote: post #89
welder wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leap smearing isn't related to TAI, it's just a way to minimize the effect of leap seconds on machines using NTP servers.

Ah, I confused this with a proposal (IIRC discussed on the ietf@ietf.org list a while back) for a new time standard that involves guesstimating leap seconds.

I wonder if it would be possible to just straight-up use UT1 instead of UTC (or is UT1 only available post-facto?). This would essentially be near-infinite smear.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#99

Post by thaumasiotes »

dalore wrote: post #82
oconnor663 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If two spacecraft start going fast enough in different directions, they can disagree about what order two different events happened in. At that point, it's not enough to give an event a single time coordinate in some reference frame; you also need to know its position in space.

So you would need to know both the position and momentum? Good luck with that.

At the scale of a spaceship, it's easy.

Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?

#100

Post by Erwin »

ssijak wrote: post #60
jeremyevans wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd just like to point out that a lot of RDBMSs support storing date and time alongside timezone information directly without using two separate fields. SQL Server has datetimeoffset, PostgreSQL has timestamp with time zone, and Oracle has timestamp with time zone. PostgreSQL's "timestamp with time zone" doesn't store timezone, it converts the time to UTC and stores that, and on retrieval converts the value to the…

That sounds dumb (if column type is called like that text in the quotes)

SQL data types have some verbose names, like "NATIONAL CHARACTER VARYING (20)". PG adds a "TIMESTAMPTZ" as alias for "TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE" (which I'm not sure whether is a sql ansi standard type or just convention).
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