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Comment by denster | Hacker News Reader

I think dates, times, UTC offsets, and locales/cultures is a topic we frequently think of as "that's easy" [1] when in practice it's painstakingly hard to get right.

As an example, we've spent the past few days on our eng team refining our spreadsheet functions for date/time handling, and it's like the 5th time we've iterated on this (after supporting everything Excel / Google Sheets do).

Funny part is, I'm sure we'll iterate on it even more -- it's hard to get this topic both right & make it easy to use / approachable.

Btw, does anyone have good reading materials on this topic? (date/time/locale handling)

[1] I'm biased as a founder at https://mintdata.com, but thankfully our engineers set me straight on the subtleties :D

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>Btw, does anyone have good reading materials on this topic?

I had a slide deck somewhere from when I was at a broker trader and leap seconds mattered (they (can) happen around 10am in East Asian markets on Jun 30).

The moral of the story is: time measurements are fractally wrong, it doesn't matter what format/time system you pick, there will be a use case that breaks it badly. Local time + timezone, epoch, UTC, ATI, doesn't matter it will break somehow.

Your MintData software looks great. I would love a reasonably MS Access type app like this priced at a level I could recommend to or use on behalf of family members.

I hopefully and naively clicked pricing ;)

Some honest feedback would be to rename Personal. Personal account usually mean individuels, but no home user or hobbyist is going to pay $95/month unless they are making money from it.

Any developer who thinks dates, times, UTC offsets and locales/cultures is "easy" is grossly incompetent (unless, of course, they've never worked with human-facing software before, in which case their naiveté can be forgiven).

I think you underestimate newbie developers. The nightmare that is dates and times is something that you learn from experience, not at university.

Yes, I should say "experienced developer".

“Human facing”? Any software worth it’s salt needs to deal with this stuff. Unless it’s a toy program. I quite enjoy Timezone stuff, perversely. Might be Stockholm?

If you're writing firmware for an embedded device without a clock then you'll never have to deal with this. If your software only ever has to interact with other software then you wouldn't ever use time zones unless you really have to. Only humans demand time zones.

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