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Not as big a problem as it sounds. "System time" used for scientific and engineering purposes should continue to use UTC and should ignore changes to civil time

by waqf 9y ago

Not as big a problem as it sounds. "System time" used for scientific and engineering purposes should continue to use UTC and should ignore changes to civil time statutes. It becomes more complicated to translate between system time and civil time, but there are relatively few applications for which you really need to be able to do that conversion — and libraries that handle those cases are complicated already.

bena 9y ago
It's a huge problem. Your "system time" proposal is already the way things are done. But people like to know when they did something based on their own clock. Already that one hour shift causes goddamn headaches in showing the proper time to the user for past events. Now instead of just figuring out if we're across one threshold or another and adjusting another hour, we have to figure out what time of what day it was and figure out what the offset was at that time? No. Just get rid of DST.
- squiggleblaz 9y ago
  Nonsense. The headaches aren't caused by daylight savings. They're caused by incompetently programmed libraries and systems. If I travel to Indonesia for a week, I want my reminders that are set to occur at 4pm to occur at 4pm. But Google decides that they should happen at 4pm - time zone offset in my home location + time zone offset in my current location. It's insanity. Also, it's insanity that there aren't standard libraries to let me say "4pm". And that programmers think timestamps solve all problems. And that you can use a timestamp to represent a day. But these are all issues that need to be fixed even if we get rid of daylight savings. Deciding there are gradual drifts to standard time on a daily or weekly basis will cause some hassle. But it will not create a new class of problem that doesn't already exist and which doesn't already need to be fixed. And time is absolutely the kind of problem that needs to be solved with a few standard libraries, rather than every two bit programmer thinking "i can add two hours to this number, it's a piece of cake".

by waqf 9y ago

bena 9y ago

It's a huge problem. Your "system time" proposal is already the way things are done. But people like to know when they did something based on their own clock. Already that one hour shift causes goddamn headaches in showing the proper time to the user for past events. Now instead of just figuring out if we're across one threshold or another and adjusting another hour, we have to figure out what time of what day it was and figure out what the offset was at that time? No. Just get rid of DST.

squiggleblaz 9y ago
Nonsense. The headaches aren't caused by daylight savings. They're caused by incompetently programmed libraries and systems. If I travel to Indonesia for a week, I want my reminders that are set to occur at 4pm to occur at 4pm. But Google decides that they should happen at 4pm - time zone offset in my home location + time zone offset in my current location. It's insanity. Also, it's insanity that there aren't standard libraries to let me say "4pm". And that programmers think timestamps solve all problems. And that you can use a timestamp to represent a day. But these are all issues that need to be fixed even if we get rid of daylight savings. Deciding there are gradual drifts to standard time on a daily or weekly basis will cause some hassle. But it will not create a new class of problem that doesn't already exist and which doesn't already need to be fixed. And time is absolutely the kind of problem that needs to be solved with a few standard libraries, rather than every two bit programmer thinking "i can add two hours to this number, it's a piece of cake".