Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Time zones and calendars turn out to be far stranger and more political than most software developers expect, from half-hour and 45‑minute offsets (like Australia/Lord_Howe or Eucla) to regions that unofficially follow entirely different local time systems (as in parts of Ethiopia and Kenya) or tie clock changes to religious events. Commenters dig into how the IANA tz database encodes this complexity, why rules change with little notice, and how leap seconds, DST, and historical quirks regularly break assumptions in code. Several argue over whether we should abolish DST or time zones entirely in favor of universal UTC, while others counter that any globally usable system must still reflect local daylight and social rhythms.

Overall reception of the article

  • Many commenters praised the writing style as clear, technical, and humorous without being gimmicky.
  • Some appreciated that it was long and detailed without mentioning AI.
  • A minority found the tone grating or disliked the style.
  • Several readers noted irony that a deep post on time doesn’t visibly show its own publication date; the author later said dates exist in metadata but aren’t rendered.

Weird and nonstandard time zones / practices

  • Beyond Lord Howe, commenters listed many “weird” zones: Chatham Islands (+45 min), Australian Central Western (Eucla, +8:45, informal +9:45), Kathmandu (+5:45), Dublin historical offsets, Moscow’s +02:30:17 in 1900, and UTC+14 Pacific islands.
  • Some zones are unofficial but widely used (e.g., Eucla, local “reservation” zones in the US).
  • Ethiopia and parts of East Africa use a 12‑hour clock anchored to dawn and dusk; locals effectively offset official time by six hours and use a different calendar with 13 months.
  • Historical oddities: Sandringham time, double DST in wartime UK, old Riyadh rules tied to sunset, Palestinian and Israeli DST rules creating overlapping “current times” in the same place, and Antarctica/Troll with “winter DST.”

DST prevalence and controversy

  • Disagreement over whether “most of the world” uses DST; several point out that by both geography and population, most do not.
  • Arguments for DST: more evening light when people are awake, energy savings in eras dominated by lighting, alignment with work and school patterns.
  • Arguments against: health and safety impacts of clock changes, complexity for software and scheduling, and minimal modern energy benefit.
  • Some regions have moved to permanent “summer time” (e.g., Turkey), while others have abolished DST entirely (e.g., Brazil, parts of the US).

Leap seconds and precision time

  • Many consider leap seconds “trivia” for most programmers because systems smear them and hide details.
  • Others report real-world impact: time-series systems, distributed industrial data, financial markets, and satellite data can be sensitive to sub‑second errors.
  • There are known leap-second bugs; international bodies are moving toward abolishing leap seconds, decoupling UTC from Earth rotation.
  • Libraries and languages that tried to model leap seconds precisely ended up with substantial complexity and unintuitive behavior.

Implementing time zones in software

  • tzdb is praised for its depth and historical scholarship, but its complexity is daunting.
  • The format encodes past changes and rule-based future transitions; DST rules are expressed in local time to avoid messy UTC-relative edge cases.
  • Real systems hit numerous edge cases: ZIP‑to‑timezone mapping in the US, reservations and counties with different rules than surrounding states, inconsistent or last-minute DST announcements (e.g., Palestine), and legacy devices with frozen tzdata.
  • Cron, recurring events, and cross-zone scheduling show how subtle bugs appear when zones change definition or DST shifts.

Should we abolish time zones?

  • A recurring thread argues for a single global time (UTC everywhere), with local cultures just choosing different working hours.
  • Supporters say this would remove timezone math, DST issues, and ambiguities when events span multiple regions.
  • Opponents argue:
    • People reason about local solar time and “day” as a sleep–wake cycle; shifting the date boundary into the middle of the waking day would be confusing.
    • You still need to know when people are awake/working; time zones encode that implicitly.
    • Global time would make local narratives, holidays, and legal “effective dates” harder to reason about.
  • Some suggest that even if the idea is intellectually neat, political and cultural inertia make it unrealistic.

Historical and cultural calendar quirks

  • Commenters discuss Roman, Japanese, Hebrew, Islamic, Ethiopian, French Revolutionary, Shire (Tolkien), and ROC calendars, and systems where days start at sunset or noon or have variable-length hours.
  • Many note that “normal” timekeeping is historically contingent; almost every culture has had its own peculiar system that’s awkward to encode in standard software.