14 ms·
Semi-related: if you ever feel the need to report times to a global audience, not only make sure to always report the timezone (even if it is the same as the us
by kroltan 3y ago
Semi-related: if you ever feel the need to report times to a global audience, not only make sure to always report the timezone (even if it is the same as the user's), but also use UTC offsets rather than timezone names.
Life is too short to remember what each timezone name means and converting to it, UTC offsets are much easier on the mental calculator.
- colanderman 3y agoAnd even if the time is UTC, please indicate this.
- dylan604 3y agojust report it in epoch seconds
- conductr 3y agothat's based on UTC, so just use UTC?
- dylan604 3y agobased on is not the same thing though is it? UTC is human readable even if it is not calculated correctly. yes, i'm saying that if you can read epoch seconds, you're not human. 1970-01-01 00:00:00 is always a give away that something is a foot
- conductr 3y ago"anchored on" then? I might be wrong but we're both talking about showing time as distance from the same starting point are we not? One's just more human readable so that's why I say why not just use that? Seconds since can be miscalculated too, especially if current time isn't known/reliable
- account42 3y agoI wish it was based on TAI though.
- queuebert 3y agoJulian Date
- dramm 3y agoOr stardate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- drivers99 3y agoOr Swatch Internet time (.beat time). No time zones, it's always UTC+1, with the day divided into 1000 beats.
- inopinatus 3y agoI will pass you the address of a struct timespec, please fill it in.
- yen223 3y agoJust make sure not to confuse it with epoch milliseconds!
- dathinab 3y agobetter: time encoded as a float of trecenti-seconds since year -8435 of the Georgian Calendar why? 'caus it hurt to even just think about implementing that anywhere
- account42 3y agoIgnoring leap seconds?
- TremendousJudge 3y agoIt's also usually extremely US-centric. Nobody outside of North America has any idea what "PDT" or "Mountain Time" means.
- donalhunt 3y agoI mostly struggle with Irish Standard Time (used for DST in Ireland) and Indian Standard Time which have the same acronym. :( Thankfully, I learnt a long time ago to use ISO 8601 and UTC for dates and times. I still revert to PST/PDT if my audience is primarily left coast based.
- macksd 3y agoAnd I can't say it's ever actually caused a problem, but something about Indian Standard Time being a half-hour offset from UTC has always bothered me so much... But now we're fully off-topic.
- mynegation 3y agoOh, hold on to something, while I tell you about Chatham Islands.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoLeft coast? That's a term I've never heard of.
- unmole 3y ago> I mostly struggle with Irish Standard Time (used for DST in Ireland) and Indian Standard Time which have the same acronym. :( Heh. After the first few instance of confusion, we switched to saying Bangalore time and Dublin time.
- jen20 3y agoNot to mention they conflict. CST can be "Central Standard Time", "China Standard Time" or "Cuba Standard Time" and so forth...
- 3y ago
- throw0101c 3y agoBasically just use the output of `date -u`.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y agoIt's locale-specific, which is not great.
- yawaramin 3y agoUse `date -u -Iseconds`, please ;-)
- drivers99 3y agodate: illegal option -- I usage: date [-jnRu] [-d dst] [-r seconds] [-t west] [-v[+|-]val[ymwdHMS]] ... [-f fmt date | [[[mm]dd]HH]MM[[cc]yy][.ss]] [+format]
- yawaramin 3y agohttps://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Options-for-date.html#index-_002dI_005btimespec_005d https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Opti...
- mynegation 3y agoLet me guess, you are on a Mac.
- perlgeek 3y agoIt's also not too complicated to add a few lines of javascript that show the datet/time in the user's local time zone (via Date.getTimezoneOffset) as well.
- bob1029 3y agoWe do this in all of our web apps. It's pretty simple and dramatically improves UX when you have customers that are doing a lot of scheduling. Showing both at the same time is peak design for me personally. UTC compares for relative sequencing, local time for "was that before or after I ate lunch".
- blibble 3y agogiven how long it took AWS to add support for Ed25519 ssh keys (literally just fix the validation regex), I wouldn't hold your breath
- andrelaszlo 3y agoAs long as you still show which tz it is! :) GCP's various products have gotten a lot better at this lately, but just a few months ago I could click around between various dashboards and explorers, some showing the time in UTC, some in your browser's tz, and some in your profile's tz (if I recall correctly). Some of them were showing the tz, and for some you had to guess. Sometimes you had multiple tzs on the same page. Sometimes the date picker for a control was in one tz and the widget it was controlling in another (leading to quite a lot of confusion). The worst offence IMO was not showing the tz at all. Especially given the overall lack of consistency.
- bawolff 3y agoHonestly this is the worst when there is no timezone marker and some times are in browser time and others arent
- bombcar 3y agoOr when logged times in the past change depending on today’s daylight savings setting.
- benced 3y agoAlso report it using IATA time zones (America/Los_Angeles) at least in addition (I'd argue instead of) those abbreviations which are completely unstandardized and not unique.
- mananaysiempre 3y agoIf the world were fair, we’d be calling these Eggert time zones, as Paul Eggert (longtime tzdata maintainer until the copyright trolls came) invented them; but it isn’t. (You probably still meant IANA the Internet org not IATA the aviation one.)
- JJMcJ 3y agoNothing worse than people who say "9 AM my time" I suppose it's OK if it's Pacific vs Mountain but even there Arizona doesn't observe Daylight, and parts of Eastern Oregon are Mountain, not Pacific. Never mind dealing with India, Australia, etc etc. OK to use local time in your statement, just say what that time is.
- yreg 3y agoAnd if it's on a forum debating an event that's about to happen soon, I find the following extremely convenient: - the keynote will start when this post is 5 hours old - the rocket launch is scheduled to when this comment is 30 hours old
- smohare 3y ago[dead]
- tedmiston 3y ago> Life is too short to remember what each timezone name means and converting to it, UTC offsets are much easier on the mental calculator. Many people also get the timezone names completely wrong. I've had multiple scheduling email exchanges where someone says X pm EST not realizing that at the time it's currently EDT and that EST ≠ EDT. And yet, for some reason, the two-letter abbreviations (e.g., ET) that are technically correct year-round, never seem to have caught on in the wild. I've given up on the abbreviations and just say "Eastern" now to avoid confusion.
- kroltan 3y agoFair enough, but please only use that with strictly USA audiences. (And remember that public information likely will not be targeted to strictly USA audiences) Names don't carry any information intrinsically, they are only a reference to the actual information, and the offset information is pretty short, so why not just provide the information directly? "X pm GMT-3" only requires the reader to know their own timezone offset, unlike "X pm Brasilia time" (which is inaccurately known as São Paulo time outside Brazil) or "X pm BRT", which requires the reader to both know what that timezone means, and their own (or, more likely, requires them to look the conversion up). (And if the difference between GMT and UTC is significant, I hope it didn't take my comment to convince you about using offsets :> )