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Comment by p0w3n3d | Hacker News Reader

I think that time handling is the most hard thing in the world of programming.

Explanation: you can learn heap sort or FFT or whatever algorithm there is and implement it. But writing your own calendar from scratch, that will do for example chron job on 3 am in the day of DST transition, that works in every TZ, is a work for many people and many months if not years...

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Time handling is exceptionally easy. Time zone handling is hard. It doesn't help that the timezone database isn't actually designed to make this any easier.

Meanwhile I edited my comment but we're still agreeing. And adding them for example to embedded systems is additional pain. Example: tram or train electronic boards / screens

I don’t know. I’ve written that seemed like obvious simple code that got tripped up with the 25 hour day on DST transition. That’s when I learned to stick to UTC.

Debian’s vixie-cron had a bug [0] where if the system TZ was changed without restarting crond, it would continue to run jobs based on the old TZ. It checked for DST transitions, but not TZ.

In fairness, it’s not something that should happen much at all, if ever.

[0]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1019716

Assuming the unstated requirement that you want your cron job to only run once per day, scheduling for 3 am is not a software problem. It's a lack of understanding by the person problem. By definition times around the time change can occur twice or not at all. Also, in the US 3am would never be a problem as the time changes at 2 am.

Also, naming things, cache coherency, and off by one errors are the two hardest problems in computer science.

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