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

Timezone Bullshit

blog.wesleyac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 334 posts

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#91

Post by bombcar »

XorNot wrote: post #58
Lvl999Noob wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the topic of DST... can you explain why some countries use DST? Anytime I look for the reasoning of it, it says that DST helps "make better use of daytime" but how? The earth isn't gonna say "Damn! These people changed their clocks. I better change by rotation and give them more sun time." Whether you have DST or not, you still have the same amount of time with sunlight in a day.

For the same reason that work from home turns out to be viable for a huge number of people, and the main reason office's are as big as they are is because middle managers don't believe work happens if they don't watch someone sit in an office chair. There's no possible way businesses are going to adjust their hours twice yearly to let employees get more sunshine, but DST does that effectively by ensuring official tim…

The even dirtier secret is that NOBODY KNOWS if work is getting done because often the work is pointless or ill-defined.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#92

Post by throw0101a »

Hamuko wrote: post #79
corty wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is currently one timezone for most of its area, the whole continent excluding Portugal (edit: and Finland, Greece, Baltic states) has the same timezone. But actually it should be 3 or 4 timezones if you want to be close to solar time. Also, there are people who would prefer having solar zone time +1 (so e.g. UTC+2 in Germany instead of UTC+1). The EU decided to chicken out and let the members decide for themse…

> 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://24timezones.com/world-time-zones#toc-0

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#93

Post by majewsky »

datejfktn wrote: post #84
Hamuko wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it makes laws without popular consultation That's not accurate. > This online consultation, which ran from 4 July to 16 August 2018, received 4.6 million responses from all 28 Member States, the highest number of responses ever received in any Commission public consultation. According to the preliminary results (see annex), 84% of respondents are in favour of putting an end to the bi-annual clock change.

Selection effect. Those who really cared about this commented. But what about the 99% rest of population? It's a mistake thinking that because they dont realllly care they will accept either way. Resistance to change is huge, especially when it plays into the narrative "Bruxelles demanded it" And what I meant by lack of popular consultation is that if you go on EU streets and ask about this change 95% of people will…

No representative democracy is asking the electorate to vote on each and every bill. It defeats the purpose of having a parliament in the first place.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#94

Post by outadoc »

de_Selby wrote: post #20
c0l0 wrote: post #17

The problem highlighted here causes one of the few gripes I have with PostgreSQL, and its logging capabilities in particular: It seems to only support logging time in one single format, which does contain a timezone identifier - but using the potentially ambiguous shorthand name. A few moons ago, that led me down a whole new rabbit hole of its own that is Golang's time zone parsing capabilities ( https://github.com/g…

I'd say the moral is that server side should always be in UTC.

Not true. Say you want to save an event that you know will happen on the 14th of July at 15:00 Paris time, in the year 2025. Current time zone rules tells you this will be at 13:00 UTC. Well, if France decides to abolish DST and stick to standard time before then, you'll be wrong.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#95

Post by majewsky »

qwertox wrote: post #78

What an important article to read. I've dealt over a decade with timezones, and this short article has shown me something new (EDT is not unique, gets silently set to UTC). I am in the habit of using "Country/City" on everything that is not UTC, so I never encountered this issue. But it's so good to know.

Nitpick: "Continent/City".

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#96

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

I work with a proprietary programming language that internally models a date_time as a UNIX epoch offset. The to_string method of a date_time results in a nice human readable string in the local timezone, but crucially not including the TZ itself. There were also accessors for the HH:MM:SS parts of the date_time.

At some point, the problem must've come up "if it's 5pm here in SFO, what time is it in MIA?", or some variation on that theme.

Someone decided that the best way to answer this was to write a function that took a date_time, then altered it to apply an offset between timezones. e.g. time_local_to_tz.

So you can could take a date_time in SFO, do time_local_to_tz (supplying Miami's TZ) and get back a date_time value that would to_string in SFO to show "the time in MIA". These functions made their way into a standard library and then to a lot of code.

The only problem is that the assumptions are literally all wrong. Adding the offset changes the actual point in time being addressed, which can change the timezone in effect in the current location, which results in the result skewing. This was compounded by some developers assuming that maybe they should convert their times to UTC before persisting them.

Of course, the usage of these functions is now embedded in a bunch of code no-one dares to touch, because it is full of hacks to "make it work" and quite possibly there is other code somewhere else (separated by a network connection, or a file, or persistence into a database) that is predicated on undoing those same set of hacks.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#97

Post by yen223 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #57
throw0101a wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closer one is to the poles, the more the number of hours of daylight shifts over the seasons. So at/near the equator, in a place like Panama, you will get roughly 12 hours of daylight in both the December and June Solstices. * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/panama/panama Whereas in the Edinburgh you go from having 7 hours of daylight in December to over 17 hours in June: * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/edin…

The infuriating thing is that our solution to this is to change the clock instead of just changing our schedules. It's completely ridiculous.

We should embrace this pragmatic approach. We can solve climate change by collectively shifting our thermometers down a few degrees!

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#98

Post by kjakm »

Lvl999Noob wrote: post #66
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.

Perhaps it was easier in the times before the internet. Now a consistent timeline should be far more convenient than not having to change your habits by a little bit. Edit: If changing schedule is normalized, then it would be just as convenient as changing the clock. In countries without DST, if someone started using DST instead of changing their own schedule, it would be just as difficult.

It's even easier post-internet. Your clocks automatically change for you now. In the past you had to remember when the change occurred and updated all your clocks manually - and if you forgot you ended up an hour late/early to any Sunday appointment after the change.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#99

Post by cfstras »

The part about "using the text of the invalid timezone" seems to be fixed in latest GNU date (8.32):

  $ TZ=EDT gdate
  Wed Feb 10 13:22:23 UTC 2021
  $ gdate --version
  date (GNU coreutils) 8.32
  ...
8.30 (shipped in debian buster) still has the problem.

The BSD version of date shipped with MacOS 10.15 also does not seem to have this bug.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#100

Post by kjakm »

datejfktn wrote: post #56
kenniskrag wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you have to implement?

For once pretty much no one is aware of this supposed change. There was like a couple of articles on the day it was voted and that's it. This will 100% not happen, it's another one of those things that the EU parliament votes that everyone ignores, and it's perfect ammunition for those complaining that it makes laws without popular consultation. Trying to go forward with this change will generate massive anti EU back…

>> And then you have the UK problem. Having variable time offsets between EU and UK would add yet another layer of disruption on top of Brexit.

It's worse than just EU/UK offset. You would have Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in different timezones.

Post reply on HN