[HN Gopher] One Guy Keeps the World's Computers Running on the R...
___________________________________________________________________
One Guy Keeps the World's Computers Running on the Right Time Zone
Author : xrayarx
Score : 107 points
Date : 2021-10-18 11:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (onezero.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onezero.medium.com)
| riffic wrote:
| The right time zone is UTC.
| Afforess wrote:
| You misspelled TAI.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
| [deleted]
| topspin wrote:
| "
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Paul Eggert is demonstrably male. (EDIT: Also he didn't request
| any other pronoun so far.)
| nofunsir wrote:
| Reminds me of Ken Nordine's word jazz performance What Time Is
| It?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVYpCdY4Y_0
| gh02t wrote:
| > These are the people for whom adjudicating upon such matters as
| France's attempted move to the decimal system and the
| International Atomic Agency's periodic decision to add nuclear
| seconds to the world time system are the bread and butter that
| they grapple with at work every day.
|
| I believe the author is referring to leap seconds? International
| Atomic Agency is I think jumbling up the International Atomic
| Energy Agency and International Atomic Time. The agency
| responsible for leap seconds is the International Earth Rotation
| and Reference Systems Service (IERS); the IAEA is not involved in
| timekeeping standards as far as I know.
| fsckboy wrote:
| just as an aside, he's separately and also referring to the
| deal between UK and France where the French agreed to accept
| Greenwich being the Prime Meridian in exchange for the UK
| adopting the metric system.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Rambling and nearly unending
| mappu wrote:
| There is also this excellent summary from LWN:
| https://lwn.net/Articles/870478/
|
| Although it seems like a few more events have passed since then.
| high_byte wrote:
| I wonder what DST does to data collection such as weather and
| stuff. just imagine one team collecting data with DST and another
| without DST and then merging the data.
| dexterdog wrote:
| that's why you either collect everything as utc or a timestamp
| with time zone so things can be properly compared.
| kfprt wrote:
| Dependency https://xkcd.com/2347/
| Hokusai wrote:
| Great text on why it's so difficult to put into code human
| activities. Do you want a library to deal with complex math
| equations? No problem, you can define clear unit test that will
| stand the trial of time. Do you want to code time zones or
| addresses? Thought luck.
| apozem wrote:
| I don't mean to be rude to the author, but I found this style of
| writing difficult to read. Too verbose, too full of asides, to
| focused on himself and not the actual information. Makes getting
| useful information out of the text needlessly difficult.
| tpmx wrote:
| It's perfectly fine to be 'direct' to Youtubers doing these
| kinds of things. They are (often) the ones abusing the social
| contract, not you.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Completely agree. It was painful and it was weird the things he
| explained and the things he didn't. The listserv looks like a
| listerv. When that isn't going to make any sense to anyone who
| doesn't knkow what a listerv is. Then there was the reference
| to the Hashemite Republic of Jordan. I was like, "is that some
| breakaway part of Jordan? But no, it just seems like the
| Hashemites are the royal family? ugh.
| coldpie wrote:
| I agree, but it was mercifully not full of animated meme GIFs,
| so I still found it to be relatively pleasant reading. Not
| everyone's a writing master, and not every writing style is to
| everyone's taste. On balance I found it worth the read.
| Causality1 wrote:
| It wouldn't be a Medium article if you didn't have to wade
| through five pages of utter dreck to get the significant
| information.
| frant-hartm wrote:
| It strongly reminded me of The long read articles from The
| Guardian
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/the-long-read
| atty wrote:
| I don't know how everyone else feels, but I would happily have my
| "'normal" hours be completely changed if the whole world could
| just define a single, global time. I'm sure it would be a massive
| undertaking, but it would make my life so much easier to be able
| to talk to my globally spread out teammates and never wonder
| about what time zone they're referring to, or worry about time
| conversion when traveling.
| culi wrote:
| I'm with you. Abolish timezones and make times based on
| sunrise/sunset again. E.g. the workday shouldn't be "8am to
| 5pm" but "one hour after sunrise till sunset". This makes a lot
| more sense for our health and biology
| peeters wrote:
| That's not what OP is suggesting. You're suggesting infinite
| timezones (i.e. use solar time). OP is suggesting to only
| have one universal timezone.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That doesn't make sense for anyone far from the equator. Here
| on the shortest day the sun rises at 9 and sets at 4 (7 hours
| daylight). On the longest it rises at 5 and sets at 10 (17
| hours).
|
| The different between the longest and shortest day's amount
| of daylight is a whole workday.
| coldpie wrote:
| So You Want To Abolish Time Zones, 2015-01-16 by qntm
| https://qntm.org/abolish
| fanf2 wrote:
| Another good read on this topic is "Saving the Daylight" aka
| "Sieze the Daylight" by David Prerau
| http://www.savingthedaylight.com/ which describes at length
| the confusion and arguments in the USA when some
| organizations had different summer and winter timetables and
| others did not.
| coldpie wrote:
| I'm a fan of proposals to eliminate (or make permanent)
| DST, but I admit in the back of my head I hear that story
| about moving a fence. https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-
| fence-down/
| FredPret wrote:
| Chesterton's fence is a good thing to keep in mind.
|
| Chesterton.org, on the other hand, had me going through
| not one but two select-all-the-boats captchas to even see
| the content.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| I spent the entire article wondering why the author doesn't
| just send his uncle an SMS or an email :)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I have my phone set to make an annoying sound when I
| receive an SMS.
| seized wrote:
| There are solutions to that though, so that you don't
| annoy yourself at inopportune times.
| eikenberry wrote:
| You should setup your do no disturb settings so you don't
| get those when sleeping. You should do this even with
| timezones still in use. Sleep is important.
| t-3 wrote:
| Can't you just use UTC? Isn't that basically exactly what it
| is?
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| The classic reading: https://qntm.org/abolish
|
| Not to mention that a lot of countries mandate that the civil
| time should follow the Sun.
| djbusby wrote:
| Step0: change laws everywhere.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| As a more problem-specific solution, I'm an advocate for any
| team/company/etc. with employees in more than one timezone
| standardizing on UTC for everything. We do it with servers and
| it works pretty well.
|
| It seems the status quo for remote companies is to standardize
| on whatever timezone the top-most boss is in. Doesn't seem
| optimal.
| alistairSH wrote:
| How does using UTC help? You still have to remember the time-
| offset between EU and USA and India to make sure your meeting
| is during somebody else's dinnertime (or worse).
| eikenberry wrote:
| It doesn't help with that but neither do timezones. When I
| communicate to people internationally I'll need to know
| their daytime hours in terms of _my_ timezone anyways, so
| why not know them in terms of UTC? Then everyone can start
| on the same page.
| pbalau wrote:
| Apart Facebook, Facebook does PST...
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| As does Google. I'm curious if either engineering team
| would make the same choice today.
| galkk wrote:
| There is a meme on my current job.
|
| We support multiple timezones. PST and PDT.
| peeters wrote:
| If you're saying we should have a global standard reference
| time, sure I agree but we already do: Zulu/UTC. e.g. the US
| military uses it despite it not being local to anywhere in the
| US.
|
| But you don't just want to throw away local time. Local time is
| important shared nomenclature for "point in a day". If you
| throw away local time and just say "I had a visitor at 0300
| yesterday" you're leaving it up to the listener to both figure
| out where you live and do the math for whether you had an
| unexpected night visit or somebody interrupted your dinner.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| Your thoughts remind me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/592
| jaqalopes wrote:
| Also this one: https://xkcd.com/927/
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Also this one: https://xkcd.com/1726/
| lapetitejort wrote:
| The hover text just needs to be updated slightly to USB 3.2
| 4x4 or whatever the current nonsense is and it'll still be
| relevant.
| ballenf wrote:
| And then I'd love a watch that was a digital sundial. I just
| want to know where the sun is in the sky even when it's not in
| immediate view. And Outlook synced to my personal time. I'd
| also have the "default" time zone available for when I'm
| communicating with others.
| gremloni wrote:
| As in one global time where for some places in the world
| daylight is always between 11p and 6a. Good luck trying to set
| the baseline country.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Why not just use UTC and be done with it? The arbitrary
| choice of "what country" was already made decades ago.
| gremloni wrote:
| It's easier but if you want every country to adopt this
| there's going to be a fight about a new baseline country
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'd be happy if we said "There are 24 time zones and no
| daylight savings or half hour zones or whatever, they are
| distributed evenly from GMT starting point".
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Swatch Beats!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
| bombcar wrote:
| You'd save a bit in some cases but now you'd have the problem
| of trying to schedule meetings because "8 am" is no longer tied
| to an area, so you have to now take location into account,
| _which is what timezones already do_.
| atty wrote:
| That's a problem I already have, because I can never remember
| what time zone people or places are in. On the other hand,
| with a single time zone, there is never any ambiguity about
| what time someone/something is referring to (Eastern or
| Western? DST or non-DST? Etc)
| alistairSH wrote:
| You still have to remember where people live. Just because
| it's 9am everywhere doesn't mean people on he opposite side
| of the globe will work through the night.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| > because I can never remember what time zone people or
| places are in
|
| Good thing time zones are there along side UTC+/- whatever
| to help you out with that
| Nadya wrote:
| That's already a solved case: communicate using UTC times
| when dealing with people in other timezones. It then
| becomes their responsibility to know their time relative to
| UTC. There are even sites that you can set a clock for a
| specific UTC time and when people visit the URL it will use
| their local time so they don't even need to deal with
| converting to/from UTC at all - technology does it for
| them.
| dexterdog wrote:
| 8am is already not tied to an area. If you say "let's meet at
| 8am" in an email to a bunch of people and don't know where
| they are there is a good chance that most or maybe even all
| of them will show up at the wrong time.
| _jal wrote:
| Which... is why, when working with my international team, I
| type things like '9am PDT'.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Which is fine when you know the other people are in
| another zone, except they then have to do the conversion
| in their heads. If you speak like most people do when not
| thinking about time zones you just say a time. If time is
| the same for everybody then there is never any confusion.
| The computers are all doing it in UTC under the covers.
| The conversion is just because we have arbitrary layers
| on top of that.
| tialaramex wrote:
| PDT meaning? The reason for using Continent/City is that
| it's unambiguous and it's easy to find out what the time
| is in a city -worst case you can ask someone who lives
| there.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Pacific Daylight Time because we are in daylight time.
| Some places don't observe daylight time like Arizona.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I always just basically ignore TZs and always use UTC
| when communicating with my international team. Only using
| a single timezone for everything simplifies things a lot.
| jazzkingrt wrote:
| I agree. Maybe in a few decades we'll just stick to China
| Standard Time.
| ape4 wrote:
| There is a trend to move to permanent daylight savings time in
| some places. I understand wanting to avoid the twice annual time
| changes but why "permanent daylight savings time" - why not
| "permanent time"
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Our society has stabilized on a business schedule and sleep
| pattern that is asymmetrical about noon; most people stay up
| after 6pm and wake up after 6AM, regardless of when the sun
| rises and sets in their locale. If you live in the perfectly
| calibrated point for your time zone (such that the sun is
| directly at its apex exactly at noon, with the caveat that you
| aren't on the equator) you will experience the sun rising
| before 6AM for half the year, and setting before 6PM for the
| other half, leaving you with wasted daylight in the summer and
| lots of darkness during waking hours in the winter. Since a
| larger portion of our waking (and non-working) hours are after
| 6PM, the thinking goes that it is beneficial for more of the
| year to bias your daylight to the evening by an hour than to
| actually be perfectly calibrated to solar noon.
| macintux wrote:
| I would wager it's a combination of psychological factors: most
| people in the northern hemisphere prefer summer to winter, and
| falling back an hour in the fall in combination with the
| shorter days in general means that most people waking up
| _hours_ before sunrise, which is unpleasant.
|
| (Shorter winter hours are universally unpleasant, so it's not
| obvious there's a good answer regardless.)
| hibbelig wrote:
| Falling back in fall means that there is more light in the
| morning and less in the afternoon, the opposite of what you
| were saying.
| [deleted]
| macintux wrote:
| You're right. Oops.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Yeah, in Scotland we actually pretty much universally dislike
| the "return to winter time" change (that's coming up). Perm
| summer time please. :)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-19 23:00 UTC)