14 ms·
The tight-knit time zone data maintenance community
- nofunsir 5y agoReminds me of Ken Nordine’s word jazz performance What Time Is It? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVYpCdY4Y_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVYpCdY4Y_0
- kfprt 5y agoDependency https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- riffic 5y agoThe right time zone is UTC.
- Afforess 5y agoYou misspelled TAI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
- jjeaff 5y agoTAI is not a timezone.
- adolph 5y agoIs UTC not a time zone? Apparently UTC is based on TAI. International Atomic Time (TAI, from the French name temps atomique international[1]) is a high-precision atomic coordinate time standard based on the notional passage of proper time on Earth's geoid.[2] It is a continuous scale of time, without leap seconds. It is the principal realisation of Terrestrial Time (with a fixed offset of epoch). It is also the basis for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is used for civil timekeeping all over the Earth's surface. UTC deviates from TAI by a number of whole seconds. As of 1 January 2017, when another leap second was put into effect,[3] UTC is currently exactly 37 seconds behind TAI. The 37 seconds result from the initial difference of 10 seconds at the start of 1972, plus 27 leap seconds in UTC since 1972.
- jjeaff 5y agoYes, UTC is a timezone. And it is calculated based on TAI.
- funcDropShadow 5y agoNo.
- high_byte 5y agoI 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 5y agothat's why you either collect everything as utc or a timestamp with time zone so things can be properly compared.
- Hokusai 5y agoGreat 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 5y agoAt 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.
- atty 5y agoI 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 5y agoYou'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 5y agoThat’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 5y agoYou 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.
- Nadya 5y agoThat'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.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago> 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
- topspin 5y ago"
- lifthrasiir 5y agoPaul Eggert is demonstrably male. (EDIT: Also he didn't request any other pronoun so far.)
- gh02t 5y 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 5y agojust 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.
- boringg 5y agoWait what? When did that deal happen? Seems like an interesting piece of political science history i never heard of.
- atticmanatee 5y agoIn 1884, at the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC
- EdwardDiego 5y agoHuh, what was their competing Prime Meridian?
- adrian_b 5y agoObviously, the meridian of Paris. The importance of the meridians was determined by the publications, e.g. nautical almanacs, which were issued by the astronomical observatories located on those meridians. Prior to the establishment of a unique origin for meridians, the navigators were divided in those who used nautical almanacs from the Royal Observatory of Greenwich, those who used nautical almanacs from the "Observatoire de Paris" and so on, for almanacs from other less important observatories. All observatories published coordinates based on their own meridian (which was precisely where their meridian telescope was located).
- Sporktacular 5y agoRambling and nearly unending
- smabie 5y agoCompletely agree what a terrible post.
- apozem 5y agoI 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.
- coldpie 5y agoI 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 5y agoIt strongly reminded me of The long read articles from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/the-long-read https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/the-long-read
- smabie 5y agoThose are sometimes actually well written though.
- tpmx 5y agoIt'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 5y agoCompletely 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 5y agoIt wouldn't be a Medium article if you didn't have to wade through five pages of utter dreck to get the significant information.
- ape4 5y agoThere 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"
- yellowait44 5y agoIn 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.
- macintux 5y agoI 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.)
- InitialLastName 5y agoOur 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.
- mappu 5y agoThere is also this excellent summary from LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/870478/ https://lwn.net/Articles/870478/ Although it seems like a few more events have passed since then.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- joebob42 5y agoHoly 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 5y agoNothing 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/43dbb43381487a253fdc4462c0bdce073f79e286/africa#L551 https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/43dbb43381487a253fdc4462c0... for Mauritius is representative
- wodenokoto 5y agoDoes 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.
- boringg 5y agoAll 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 5y agoI 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 https://github.com/lcurses/lcurses/blob/master/bootstrap
- gorgoiler 5y agoYou 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 5y 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-ethiopia-you-better-double-check-time https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-30/if-you-have-meeting-e...
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoI 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/43dbb43381487a253fdc4462c0bdce073f79e286/asia#L3537 https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/43dbb43381487a253fdc4462c0...
- SergeAx 5y agoHere's a mandatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- disgruntledphd2 5y 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_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_Republic_of_Irelan...