The strangest time zones in the world (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The strangest time zones in the world (2015)

qz.com

96 pointstosh56 comments

South Pole station uses New Zealand time since it is supplied through McMurdo. However the tourist camp nearby, less than a km away, uses Chile Time as it is supplied from Punta Arenas.

To add to that, since 2017 Punta Arenas has its own time zone apart from the rest of continental Chile. It uses summer time (UTC-3) the whole year.

Another interesting anomaly: Tahiti and Samoa are 24 hours apart. As I write this, it is 8:24 PM in both places, but it is April 2 in Tahiti and April 3 in Samoa.

Where's the anomaly? Things like this are unavoidable, since wraparound must happen somewhere.

It’s the fact that they’re the same time but different days. If we had a sensible system then there would never be the case that two places were at the same time (i.e. 8:24pm), but on different days.

I mean timezones are very much an organic human concept in the first place. They aren’t strictly “science” or “data” but reflections of the cultures, values and politics of the humans living in them.

Any time zone system, no mater how rational and logical it’s roots are, will eventually get filled with one-offs, exceptions and crazy baggage. It’s like Unicode or any other international standard. They are complex and often logically inconsistent not because the designers are fools, but because humans are wet fuzzy meat bags.

But it hasn't wrapped around. Instead of wrapping back to 0 hours difference, it "kept going" to get 24 hours difference.

Oh right I missed that, I was still waking up. Anything up to (24h-epsilon) would be fine mathematically, but a full 24h can of course be called an anomaly.

I retract the statement, but it's too late to add this as an edit now.

Samoa and American Samoa are a better example, since there's a 45-minute flight between them, and a ferry.

Samoa: UTC+13, UTC+14 in the summer

American Samoa: UTC-11 all year

The article was a few months too early to mention Pyongyang Standard Time, introduced in August 2015 to break away from imperialism by setting all clocks back half an hour.

The move has since been reverted in the spirit of national unification and both Koreas now share the same time zone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_North_Korea

> lest it result in events such as the sun rising at 9am in winter

Living at 61°N, it took me a second to get why this would be at all unusual.

We are facing a possible fragmentation of the time zones in the EU. The northern countries (including Germany) could stay on UTC+1 all year long. AFAIK France decided to stay on UTC+2 and Italy could keep changing time twice per year.

I attempted to google those decisions but they are hard to find. Does any EU reader here know what his / her country is going to do?

There is a push to reach consensus before getting rid of DST and I don't think they will get rid of DST before 2023. So nothing is decided, yet, and anything can still happen, even keeping DST in the EU.

It would be correct for France to have a different time zone than Germany, by the way. Western Spain and Eastern Poland are currently CEST despite being nearly 3 hours apart geographically.

Interestingly, that westward reach of CET is an artifact of WWII. France and the Benelux countries changed time zone in 1940 under German occupation, and Spain changed time zone as a symbol of fascist solidarity.

Before WW2, the Netherlands was on Amsterdam Time. This was originally 19 minutes and 32 seconds ahead of Greenwich, though they decided to round it to 20 minutes in 1937.

The Netherlands was relatively late to adopt standard time at all. While the telegraph offices and railways switched to Amsterdam time in the mid 19th century, towns maintained their own local time zones until 1909, which often caused problems for travellers.

I suspect that one reason for this is that Dutch church towers (and their clocks) are all the property of the local government, as a holdover from the Napoleonic occupation- so the people in charge of the clocks might have been reluctant to switch to Amsterdam time...

Yeah I remember in high school spanish class learning that the Spanish eat very late but it turns out just to be an artifact of being in the "wrong" time zone.

Ireland: It's considered more important to share a timezone with NI than with the rest of the EU. The UK is likely going to keep DST as a "see, we can make decisions europe doesn't" thing, so that means we will do the same to keep time with NI.

The idea was that all countries could choose a timezone (which may be different to the current one), e.g. Spain could choose UTC, UTC+1 or UTC+2 (or indeed split into UTC-1, UTC and UTC+1 depending where), but it wouldn't be able to change in Oct + March

However the proposal seems to have stalled

Brexit hasn't helped, as the UK would certainly not do what the rest of Europe did, and that would lead to a time difference in Ireland, which would be bad.

It is a complete mess.

We were supposed to switch time for the last time a week ago. But covid came and the decision in the EU stalled.

In France the application of the population choice stalled as well (we chose to stay on summer time).

There was brexit as well, though the official information is that it is covid's fault that we do not have the decision.

I was amazed by the fact that the EU managed to make such a decision. Now we are back to normal and I will revisit this comment in one and two years to say that nothing changed.

While I am pro EU and I think lors of good can derive from it, it is simply an organization like the UN or the Olympics where politics and personal agendas win.

In case anyone feels like it's time for their particular solution to this "problem" to shine, https://qntm.org/calendar

Wait, are there people who don't use Kathmandu in their unit tests? It's virtually impossible to mix it up with anything else as it's 15 minutes off from an even hour.

This isn't so much to make sure your code is right, but to make sure your test is correct and not passing because you made some subtle error with time zones when writing the test that causes it to pass incorrectly.

The strangest daylight-saving time related issue in the US:

"Arizona does not observe daylight-saving time. The Navajo Reservation in the northeast corner of the state does – but the Hopi Reservation, which is located inside the Navajo Reservation, doesn't."

While it's not a time zone as such, most Ethiopians use a time system where 12:00 is at dawn and dusk rather than noon and midnight. A similar system is in use on Mount Athos.

I assume most of Ethiopia is close enough to the equator that days don't change in length much throughout the year?

Indeed Ethiopia is close to the equator - just slightly to the north of the equator. We use the same convention in most of East Africa. In Swahili, which is spoken in Tanzania, Kenya, etc, you begin counting the hours from daybreak up to dusk which is around 12 and then start over from just before till dawn again. Surprisingly, in Somalia, this convention is used in the southern parts that were colonised by Italy. In the north, noon is 12p.

Which makes sense for that region, fun fact given Easter weekend and all, most Biblical recordings of time use hour 0 == dawn. There are many of these, but Acts 2:15 is a good example ->

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+2%3A14-47&...

>A similar system is in use on Mount Athos.

Liturgically, both Catholics and Orthodox (and I believe various other more traditional Christian denominations) refer to dawn as the first hour, roughly midday as the sixth hour, etc.

The easternmost parts of Norway is another quirky area. It is the only place in the world where you have to adjust the time forward no matter if you travel west (into Finland, +1 hour) or east (into Russia, +2 hours).

If I got to name that, I would call it a "time valley".

My favourite is the Afghanistan and China border - 3.5 hour time difference! Imagine trying to do business between towns either side of the border.

The inaccessibility[1] of the border does help to alleviate the issue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan–China_border

That border is fairly meaningless, no official crossings or roads.

However China-Tajikistan and China-Pakistan have 3 hour differences and regular cross border trade.

One of my favorite videos on time zone complexities: https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY

My favorite time zone is Lord Howe Island time zone. Afaik, it’s the only one with a dst offset other than 1 hour (it is 30 minutes).

India and Sri Lanka are both at UTC+5:30.

Read my comment again. I’m talking about the DST offset, not the UTC offset. India and Sri Lanka do not observe DST.

Nepal is on UTC+05:45.

Read my comment again. I’m talking about the DST offset, not the UTC offset. Nepal doesn’t observe DST.

Ah! I misread your comment entirely.

(As an aside 'dst' not being capitalized was the cause)

To my down voters, read my comment more carefully. I’m talking specifically about the DST offset, not the UTC offset. The DST offset is the amount the clocks are changed in observance of Daylight Saving Time. Most TZs that do this change the clock 1 hour.

I misread your post like the others, getting the pitchforks out early. Thanks for the follow up comment.

Great information, thanks.

If you have capitalized DST it may have helped (not me, though)

Let this be a lesson to developers of MVPs.

No matter what, use Unix timestamps for times and then account for time accordingly using libraries that have done this heavy lifting for you.

It's easy to just use local timestamps out of the gate, or any other shortcut that doesn't account for the fact that timezones across the world are weird and changing, and the whole daylight savings thing.

The amount of technical debt you can get into when your app gets popular around the world can be soul crushing, and it's certainly not an good user experience when local time isn't available to them in your app.

If you are writing a calandar app that has an event that occurs every morning at 0900 in New York, you need to store that at 0900 America/New_York, not at 1400 GMT, or the unix time of 1400 GMT and adding 86,400 seconds.

If you're writing a calendar app, then you should probably store the triple of `local time`, `time zone name`, `version of time zone database used to look up time zone name`

https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a...

and

http://www.creativedeletion.com/2015/03/19/persisting_future...

Seriously folks. Don’t start out using local time. Start with UTC. Always. If you don’t do dates and times properly in the first place your system will always do them somehow wrong.

This article is from 2015 which explains why it doesn't include the strangest time zone difference of all, one where timezone depends not one's physical location, but their religion:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-moves-cl...

Reading through that it seemed that the difference was not religious but political (both Palestine and Israel have citizens with a variety of faiths).

Both Israel and Palestine are UTC+3 so the problem stemmed from when daylight saving time was enacted for one territory and not the other at the same time (and exacerbated by those from Israel maintaining Israel time while in Palestine during the time difference). I wonder if the two areas have now synced when they change the time, since I can’t find any follow ups.

For several years now we have been celebrating New Years Eve using Newfoundland time. It means we can have our champagne at 9:30 and get to bed at a reasonable hour. Hey, we're old...

On the map they've got Quintana Roo in the wrong timezone. It's in -0500, not -0600.

It is an old article and old map from before Quintana Roo changed its timezone.

Coincidentally that China have the number 8? Their lucky number

Is it that hard to put the world map in full rather than cutting the "edges"?

I do know that NZ is at the end of the world/beginning of heaven but a bit more respect please!

UK always seemed strange to me. Then again, with their split from the EU it's just one of many "we do it our way" things in a line of many.

Assuming you don't include summer time as 'strange', what is strange about the UK?

> with their split from the EU it's just one of many "we do it our way" things in a line of many

UK time management - Greenwich Mean Time - started a long time before we joined the EU.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Mean_Time

Portugal, Greece, Finland, Romania, etc., are also EU, so nothing particularly weird with UK's time.

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