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Comment by jonskeet | Hacker News Reader

> Most high calibre devs would be still wrapping their head around the problem after 15 minutes. reply

Most high calibre devs haven't stumbled into doing a lot of date/time work. That wasn't some clever decision on my part - it was working on the calendar part of Google Mobile Sync. Date and time is a rabbit hole that I just went deep on. A bit of luck rather than spectacular wide knowledge, I'm afraid.

I love that question and answer too, although I doubt that it's genuinely helped many people. Time zone and calendar stuff has a lot of amusing trivia. My favourite involves the 30th of February, which only occurred in 1712, and only in Sweden.

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> My favourite involves the 30th of February, which only occurred in 1712, and only in Sweden

Man, now I know there's something worse than being born on the 29th of February and having 1/4th the birthdays. :)

Having done some time in the trenches with calendar code, I would like the politicians and bureaucrats who define the rules to have some notion of the cost they inflict. Then perhaps we wouldn't have "let's change the DST dates this year (only) as an experiment" and we certainly wouldn't have leap seconds..

Politicians couldn't care less about the leap seconds IMO. It's the other geeks (non-programmers) who enforce its existence. In fact the leap seconds predate the modern computing era. I guess they didn't have such a big impact in 1970s. In fact I didn't learn about them until 2012 when many systems crashed after leap second.

Having said that, politicians changing DST rules with a few weeks notice (like Turkey last autumn) are nuts. The impact of such decisions is huge and worldwide (emergency patches etc.)

Politicians of some sort are in charge of whether leap seconds exist or not. afaik it is mostly a particular kind of religion (belief that human time must be in all ways bound to the heavens) that drove the political push for leap seconds. Like you I only discovered they existed when my kernels locked up..

Comprehensive date/time is a living nightmare from which you can never escape. Even basic date/time handling for, say, charting current financial data has a cavalcade of gotchas.

Not that it contributes constructively a lot to the discussion, but as a Swedish software developer working with C# and Java, your answers have been to immense help. Thanks a lot!

> Most high calibre devs haven't stumbled into doing a lot of date/time work. That wasn't some clever decision on my part

This is good evidence that humility is correlated with mastery.

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