[HN Gopher] Exploring 120 years of timezones (2021)
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Exploring 120 years of timezones (2021)
Author : colinprince
Score : 77 points
Date : 2024-10-14 05:44 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.scottlogic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.scottlogic.com)
| docdeek wrote:
| > In 1900 this dataset of 282 named timezones indicated 220
| different offsets (from UTC), and while some of these were
| integers, (e.g. Europe/Prague, Europe/Rome), the majority were
| not - for example Moscow was 2 hours, 30 minutes and 17 seconds
| ahead.
|
| Moscow changed after that to 2 hours, 31 minutes and 19 seconds
| for a few years before aligning with a 'whole hour' timezone.
| Fascinating - thanks for sharing!
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Needs a 2021 in the title. I was curious if it took into account
| the controversial changes in the tzdb from 2021
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/28/time_zone_database_co...
| since those would have changed the pre-1970 data.
|
| But the visualisation was made around Jul 2021, so it avoids
| those changes (but also the more recent ones):
| https://github.com/colineberhardt/timezone-viz
| thomasdziedzic wrote:
| posted 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41818394
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Originally in 2021:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28537438
| ape4 wrote:
| I imagine the Linux timezone database has grown a lot over the
| years
| ck2 wrote:
| we are getting a moon time zone, maybe, eventually, requires
| international agreement so maybe never
|
| https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243405460/space-news-moon-na...
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| Why does it require international agreement? This seems like
| the kind of thing even a private entity like SpaceX could just
| declare, and everyone else would fall in line naturally out of
| convenience and not-really-caring.
| ck2 wrote:
| US government has given spacex like $20 billion, I think you
| misunderstand who controls who and how
| euroderf wrote:
| Are you ready for Trump Lunar Standard Time ?
| thecosas wrote:
| Makes my head hurt thinking about long timeframe datasets across
| geographies and accounting for all of that as these continue to
| shift.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| In the name of logic it seems to me that a worldwide paradigm
| shift away from human-(un)friendly time zones to UTC with 24
| hour clocks would do wonders. We're stuck with our present
| system, and instransigence means we probably always will be.
| ghaff wrote:
| Those of us who travel in particular like to know that,
| absent some cultural anomalies like eating dinner in Spain,
| local time roughly corresponds to activities where we're from
| without constantly doing mental conversions.
|
| Yes, there are a lot of weird often politically-motivated
| time zones out there but for the most part it works
| limitedfrom wrote:
| Except the perception of anomalous dinner time in Spain is
| also due to time zones. Spain switched to CET in 1940 to be
| in solidarity with Germany[0] (nowadays it will still
| translate to easier coordination with France, Germany, and
| Italy), meaning that despite much of the country being west
| of London, it shares the same time zone as Serbia and
| Poland. This means that if you live your normal life
| according to the sun, the clock time will 1 to 1.5 hours
| behind depending on where you are in Spain[1].
|
| [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/11/30/24499
| 5264/... [1] https://imgur.com/source-http-wp-me-poxsk-
| pq-8IFLFoJ
| growse wrote:
| Ah, yes, the evergreen comment that suggests it would be
| better if people living far from the meridian experience the
| joy of Wednesday turning into Thursday at some point whilst
| they're awake.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| I said for years that we should just use UTC everywhere and
| that people should wake up at offsets. One day my wife told
| me she was tired of hearing it and it was a stupid idea. That
| she could walk into nearly any town anywhere and know that at
| 9am she could walk into any bank, grocery, or diner.
|
| Sure there are other ways we could communicate offsets, days,
| whatever, but having everyone on the same daily schedule and
| just adjusting the schedule itself keeps it simple for most
| of the population.
| romanhn wrote:
| My favorite video about the madness of timezones:
| https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY. Many great examples, but the one
| that blows my mind is Israelis and Palestinians living in West
| Bank observing different timezones in the same geographic
| location.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I just had a huge and surreal argument with Google's Gemini about
| the current time in other time zones.
|
| It was Sunday, 10/13. I asked what time it was in London:
| It is currently 1:39 PM MST. As GMT timezone is 7 hours behind
| MST, the current time in London is 6:39 AM GMT on Sunday, October
| 13, 2024.
|
| Well, no, it's not.
|
| So I started grilling it on simple math ("What is 13:39 plus
| seven hours") and the real offsets of the time zones, and it
| would respond correctly, and then I'd ask for the current time
| again, it'd apologize profusely, and give me some B.S.
| calculations right on the same line!
|
| I started inquiries about other places, like NZ and across the
| International Date Line, and it was spectacularly wrong. Some
| places like PDT it was OK. And it was repeatedly getting tripped
| up and apologizing and immediately supplying the wrong info
| again.
|
| I was not trying to trick it; I was not going into ambiguous
| situations or half-hour zones. My locale doesn't observe DST, but
| it was clearly adapting for MST vs. DST zones.
|
| The other comical thing was that Gemini would sometimes refuse
| outright to give the current time, referring me to other methods,
| as if there were some security blocks on that query. But only
| sometimes!
|
| I simply must conclude that time zones are one of the most
| difficult programming problems. And I don't know how LLMs do
| time/date calculations. But Gemini clearly has a long way to go
| from these simple math confabulations!
| mtsolitary wrote:
| LLMs don't do time/date calculations at all. They're just good
| enough at predicting the next word to trick us into thinking
| they can.
| jasomill wrote:
| WolframAlpha is my go-to for one-off calculations involving
| either durations and units.
|
| For your example, the WolframAlpha query "time in London at
| 1:39 pm MST on October 13" returns the correct answer,
| "9:39:00 pm BST | Sunday, October 13, 2024"[1].
|
| While WolframAlpha's natural language processing is hit-or-
| miss, its responses clearly state assumptions made in the
| face of ambiguity. In this example: Assuming
| "MST" is a named time zone Assuming "time" is referring
| to a calendar computation Assuming month/day
| Assuming Mountain Time (United States; no observed DST rule)
| Assuming London (United Kingdom)
|
| [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=time+in+London+at+1%
| 3A3...
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Exploring 120 Years of Timezones_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28537438 - Sept 2021 (9
| comments)
| taeric wrote:
| This is always a fun discussion, as the reality is the local time
| makes enough sense for people to just use it. Having to deal with
| times across the globe is the anomaly, not the norm. Such that it
| is unsurprising that it is difficult to do.
|
| Even more amusing, the time being fixed length days is
| definitionally not the norm. Is why the Pacific Northwest is
| miserable right now. Sun is barely up by 8, and largely down by 5
| in the evening. Moving the agreed offset for when we should be
| awake, as we will do in a couple of weeks, does little to help.
|
| And I want to double down on how I worded that. I often see it
| proposed that we should all move to UTC or some such, but just
| change when working hours are. But, largely, that is exactly what
| daylight saving's time is. Yes, it is couched in silly phrasing
| of "saving daylight," but it is functionally the same as everyone
| agreeing to move school hours by an hour.
|
| I will also double down on my silliest of hot takes. With
| computers in control of most clocks, I think the problem with DST
| is that it moves everything by an hour. We could, with today's
| technology, move to something where the clock moves +10 minutes
| for 6 months and then -10 minutes for 6 months every year and
| nobody would even really notice.
| TypicalHog wrote:
| Timezones are just so, so, so nasty. Why couldn't we just somehow
| make out shit function on UTC or something?
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