The tight-knit time zone data maintenance community

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.

dexterdog3• 5 years ago

that's why you either collect everything as utc or a timestamp with time zone so things can be properly compared.

Hokusai• 5 years ago

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.

champtar• 5 years ago

At my first job we had an home made CalDAV server. One feature is the Free/Busy letting people ask for other people availability. Once you try to handle 'exceptions to recurring calendar events with a side of timezones and DST' you know why you should use existing libraries.

atty2• 5 years ago

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.

bombcar• 5 years ago

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.

atty2• 5 years ago

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)

dexterdog3• 5 years ago

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.

jazzkingrt• 5 years ago

I agree. Maybe in a few decades we'll just stick to China Standard Time.

coldpie3• 5 years ago

So You Want To Abolish Time Zones, 2015-01-16 by qntm https://qntm.org/abolish

fanf2• 5 years ago

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.

jareklupinski• 5 years ago

I spent the entire article wondering why the author doesn't just send his uncle an SMS or an email :)

bscphil4• 5 years ago

The argument is utter nonsense, so much so that I've often wondered if it was even intended to be plausible and not a (failed) joke. Neither part of it works.

Take the argument that it is currently easy to tell whether or not it's a good time to call someone on the other side of the world. Currently, supposedly, all you have to do is look up what time it is there. This is, frankly, bullshit.

I call someone with roughly a 12 hour difference from me every two weeks. If you haven't pre-cleared a time to call, then you do need to know whether it's daytime there. Even if you assume the best case scenario for the argument: where you need to call someone now if possible, and want to know whether that's okay, time zones are absurdly enough not better than the no-time-zone case. I fail to see how at all how asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" is any better than "is the sun up in Melbourne". Moreover, both of them run the same risk: your uncle likes to sleep in on Saturdays, is busy, has an unusual schedule, etc.

So the correct question to ask Google would be "is it daytime in Melbourne?" Furthermore, if we abolished time zones, a fairly standard nomenclature for talking about "daytime" in a localized way would surely develop. Asking Google a question like "what time is it in Melbourne" would respond with e.g. "it's 2 hours after sunset". Why assume Google would respond with useless information?

But more importantly this puts aside the fact that very few people actually interact this way with people on the other side of the world, or even most of us with friends and family who live on the other side of town! If you're calling someone you don't see often for a nice long chat, you don't know what their schedule is like! Instead you pre-clear a time to call with them, through some asynchronous method like text or email.

In this case the no-time-zone situation really shines, and that's why the other half of the argument doesn't work. Your uncle writes you back: "yeah, call me at 4!" and you instantly know what that means.

When I talk to my friend on the other side of the world, it's hell currently. "Wait do you mean your time or mine?" Usually he means his, so I have to go to a website, figure out the hour difference between his time zone and mine, and figure out what that time is in my time zone. If that doesn't work for me, I have to suggest an alternative, and he has to wonder if that's in his time zone or not. It's a mess! The worst part is that if you're writing each other asynchronously it could take you days to figure out what a good time to talk would be!

You can't even count on getting days right, currently! The other day he messaged me: "can't wait to talk on Friday!" And I had to think, "Friday? I thought it was Thursday. Wait, he probably means my Thursday and his Friday. I guess it is Friday for him. Maybe I still need to check..." This is absurd! Without time zones, there would be universal agreement about what day it is.

lifthrasiir• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Step0: change laws everywhere.

tobyjsullivan2• 5 years ago

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.

pbalau• 5 years ago

Apart Facebook, Facebook does PST...

galkk• 5 years ago

There is a meme on my current job.

We support multiple timezones. PST and PDT.

alistairSH2• 5 years ago

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).

t-3• 5 years ago

Can't you just use UTC? Isn't that basically exactly what it is?

ciabattabread• 5 years ago

Your thoughts remind me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/592

jaqalopes• 5 years ago

Also this one: https://xkcd.com/927/

culi• 5 years ago

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

peeters2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

ceejayoz• 5 years ago

Congratulations, you just killed the entire population of Murmansk.

peeters2• 5 years ago

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.

beebeepka• 5 years ago

Your second paragraph doesn't make any sense to me.

If I know where you are, then I already know what you meant by "yesterday". If I don't, then local time has no upside in that regard.

This is the internet. I don't make assumptions as to where people are located unless it is relevant to the topic

ballenf• 5 years ago

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.

mikestew• 5 years ago

And then I'd love a watch that was a digital sundial

First, go buy an Apple Watch...

https://www.macstories.net/linked/the-beauty-of-the-apple-wa...

(It is a pretty cool watch face, and I use it a lot in the Pacific Northwest winter with its early sunset.)

jccalhoun2• 5 years ago

Swatch Beats! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

mech4222• 5 years ago

I always wonder how fast the world forgets when this comes up..

TLDR; Swatch make a decimal based 'world time' and watches/programs to track it ('beat time'). Put a huge 'beat time' clock on their HQ. It was supposed to cure all the internet scheduling woes...and then it died.

gremloni2• 5 years ago

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.

cogman102• 5 years ago

Why not just use UTC and be done with it? The arbitrary choice of "what country" was already made decades ago.

cogman102• 5 years ago

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".

atleta2• 5 years ago

The problem with working (or communicating) with people in other timezones is not simply time conversion. The problem is that they are at a different phase in their day. So even if you flip everyone to UTC, you'd still have to figure out and understand what the others might be doing over there. The only issue is that now it's harder. Because now it's not enough to know the time difference, you also have to understand (or somehow convert) to their local phase. E.g. if you are just after lunch in the US on the East coast (what used to be 1PM in EST for you but now 5PM UTC for everyone) then you'll now that it's 5PM for your Indian and European colleagues but will have no idea whether they might still be at the office. So you'll have to know when their day starts and ends in UTC. And keep that in your mind.

The current system is a lot simpler. You have a rough idea when people sleep and work: it's the same time in their time zone as it is for you in yours. (Unless you are as shifted as e.g. me :) . But even then, the 'normal' people follow a normal schedule.) You just have to convert it to yours. Not that hard.

bellyfullofbac2• 5 years ago

Seems like some people think "The whole world should just change to accomodate me!". I guess they should imagine if the world standardize it but based on e.g. Beijing time, if they'd like to start their work days at what used to be 9PM local, have lunch at what used to be 2AM local, and finish his day at what used to be 6AM local.

gh02t• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

boringg2• 5 years ago

Wait what? When did that deal happen? Seems like an interesting piece of political science history i never heard of.

EdwardDiego2• 5 years ago

Huh, what was their competing Prime Meridian?

Sporktacular• 5 years ago

Rambling and nearly unending

smabie2• 5 years ago

Completely agree what a terrible post.

apozem• 5 years ago

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.

coldpie3• 5 years ago

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.

frant-hartm• 5 years ago

It strongly reminded me of The long read articles from The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/the-long-read

smabie2• 5 years ago

Those are sometimes actually well written though.

tpmx• 5 years ago

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.

jccalhoun2• 5 years ago

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.

Causality1• 5 years ago

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.

broabprobe• 5 years ago

Agreed, despite the fascinating topic I gave up skimming the article halfway through due to low signal:noise

ape4• 5 years ago

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"

macintux3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

InitialLastName• 5 years ago

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.

jonny_eh• 5 years ago

most people stay up after 6pm and wake up after 6AM, regardless of when the sun rises and sets in their locale

ok, but how is daylight time better? Just open and close stores at the times people are awake and active.

cyberpunk• 5 years ago

Yeah, in Scotland we actually pretty much universally dislike the “return to winter time” change (that’s coming up). Perm summer time please. :)

yellowait44• 5 years ago

In Eastern Canada (Montreal for instance) when we go back to normal time the sun will set at around 4:30pm which is depressing to say the least. I think most people would rather have an extra hour during the evening than in the morning.

mappu• 5 years ago

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.

joebob42• 5 years ago

Holy cow was this unreadable. It kept pulling me in with something I was interested in, then never clearly explaining before jumping to the next thing. I oddly sort of enjoyed the whimsy of the writing, but I came away with essentially no new information.

TAForObvReasons• 5 years ago

Nothing does justice to the actual TZ database and the comments within. There is quite a bit of detailed commentary and sourcing for the actual offsets.

https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/43dbb43381487a253fdc4462c0... for Mauritius is representative

wodenokoto• 5 years ago

Does the article ever return to tell the reader what the timezone community was up in arms about? I gave up finding out, as the article just continued on tangent after tangent.

boringg2• 5 years ago

All I can think of when I see this is the pain of managing timezones in python and then integrating utility energy data that uses their own random skip hours to comp for their terrible data systems.

akkartik• 5 years ago

I read this, switched to another tab -- and found this sentence staring at me:

"Inspired by a script written by Paul Eggert."

https://github.com/lcurses/lcurses/blob/master/bootstrap

gorgoiler• 5 years ago

You have a number: the amount of seconds that have elapsed since some standard moment in time. (Usually the seconds since the start of 1970-01-01, London.)

The have a problem: how do you take this information and use it to render the time on your local time rendering device, in your current legal jurisdiction or place on Earth organized enough to make decisions about time?

tzdata solves this problem.

You’re usually working with a clock with a 12h or 24h output and a minutes output. But what about non-standard time-rendering-devices / wallclocks? Are there cultures that do something different to 24h days, similar to the global diversity in date-rendering?

robocat• 5 years ago

Are there cultures that do something different

  # Unfortunately tzdb records only Western clock time in use in Ethiopia,
  # as the tzdb format is not up to properly recording a common Ethiopian
  # timekeeping practice that is based on solar time.  See:
  # Mortada D. If you have a meeting in Ethiopia, you'd better double
  # check the time. PRI's The World. 2015-01-30 15:15 -05.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-30/if-you-have-meeting-e...

bellyfullofbac2• 5 years ago

I guess it's not worth the headache having your own clock if you want to deal with the rest of the world, but in S. Arabia it was once common to set your watch to 6 am at sunrise:

https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/43dbb43381487a253fdc4462c0...

SergeAx• 5 years ago

Here's a mandatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/2347/

disgruntledphd2• 5 years ago

And here’s something else I learned: Pre-independence Ireland once operated its own time zone — Dublin Time — which was stamped out by the British as punishment for the Easter Rising.

Does anyone know where the author got this from?

Wikipedia suggests that it was done to facilitate telegraphs, which makes a lot more sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_Republic_of_Irelan...

The tight-knit time zone data maintenance community

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