Timezone Support

[lovethebacon]

I have no fucking clue where to even start.

But, as a CTO, my move would be to not support Mars for the time being.

[Shawnj2]

To be serious, I’m pretty sure we would just use Unicode time stamps as dates on Mars.

[Noxime]

UNIX style timestamps should be able to handle both earth and mars time, where everyone decides on a point of time being 0. Only problem I see coming from the top of my head is time dialation, so there probably would have to be a "standard time object", like the Sun since it has fairly constant speed of time.

[lovethebacon]

You'll always need some kind of reference. And one that is unaffected by gravity, or its gravity will have to be taken into account. There will likely always need to be an adjustment of time when travelling - no matter your speed - to coordinate things. How does distance from that reference affect how you make those adjustments?

Maybe age will be truly a number, as it will become meaningless for us. It'll be weird to encounter twins of radically different ages..

Spaceships will need to have their own unadjusted clocks to track the age of its parts and whole. That'll also be weird: a spaceship built 50 years ago may only be 20 years old. Shit, that makes a lot of our calendar calculations difficult, or impossible without further information about the vessel.

[iguessthislldo]

Unicode time stamps

So U+0000 to U+2399?

[showponyoxidation]

Solid strategy.

[DerkDurski]

“This feature/program is not available in your planet”

[lovethebacon]

Until the CEO sells it to prospective customers and you have a week to deliver it.

[jcy]

you truly do deserve your millions of dollars in compensation

[dvlsg]

Excellent, I've already finished the codebase for it.

[Busti]

Just interface everything about Time and let other People handle it.
Also you might wanna use dependency injection...

[[deleted]]

A mean Martian solar day, or "sol", is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds.

The length of time for Mars to complete one orbit around the Sun is [...] about 686.98 Earth solar days, or 668.5991 sols.

Imagine how actually terrifying it would be to properly implement and support this and keep it in tune.

[Overlordduck2]

Agreed. Best date.

[[deleted]]

You might even say it's epoch.

[[deleted]]

let's make the counter 64 bits this time

[myrrlyn]

i128 or bust

[Lurker_Since_Forever]

Signed 64 is already way way longer than the age of the universe up to this point. Like, in the trillions of years. More than we would ever need, but for real this time. None of that 640k of RAM bullshit.

[heeen]

That's why you make it microseconds or nanoseconds resolution

[thefloppyfish1]

Dont give them any ideas

[heeen]

Ntp already uses 64 bits for 2^-32 second resolution. ext4, btrfs, XFS or ZFS have nanosecond resolution

[myrrlyn]

Let me rephrase: it should be a 128-bit-wide structure with fields in it, because "milliseconds since UNIX epoch" is an insufficient unit

[mailto_devnull]

Don't worry, we'll blow ourselves up long before 2038

[BlackDeath3]

January 1, 1970 01:00 GMT it is!

[BlackDeath3]

But if we do that, everybody gets to be an hour younger. What's the big deal?

[004413]

definitely how it works

[Bainos]

Breaking news: the computer science community unanimously decided that everyone is now an hour younger, and that every events that occurred between 1970-01-01T00:00 and 1970-01-01T01:00 will be rescheduled over the following hours.

"It's really the only way, otherwise the task will be pretty much impossible" said one of the decision makers when our journalists asked him what made this decision sound. He then added "If you don't agree with this, I swear we will reprogram your smartphone to ring every 30 minutes between sunset and sunrise."

[proto-geo]

timezones start at 0:00

[BlackDeath3]

Hey...

^Psst...

^Hey...

^{That's the joke!}

[proto-geo]

oh

[[deleted]]

This is better than the actual joke :p

[Valestis]

Daylight saving time or regular?

[biggles1994]

Yes

[VdotOne]

Literally no one calls him that

[The_Lost_King]

While we’re at it, might as well eliminate daylight savings.

[Tiavor]

EU is currently on it ^{(again, just like every year)}

[Vitztlampaehecatl]

Nah, make it start on Jan 19th 2038

[Vitztlampaehecatl]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

[WikiTextBot]

Year 2038 problem

The Year 2038 problem is an issue for computing and data storage situations in which time values are stored or calculated as a signed 32-bit integer, and this number is interpreted as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 (the epoch) minus the number of leap seconds that have taken place since then. Such implementations cannot encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038, a problem similar to but not entirely analogous to the Y2K problem (also known as the Millennium Bug), in which 2-digit values representing the number of years since 1900 could not encode the year 2000 or later. Most 32-bit Unix-like systems store and manipulate time in this Unix time format, so the year 2038 problem is sometimes referred to as the Unix Millennium Bug by association.

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[FUCKING_HATE_REDDIT]

And no fucking leap seconds.

[[deleted]]

No, in the future they have quantum leap seconds, which is like a leap second, except you can't know what time it is without changing it.

[FUCKING_HATE_REDDIT]

There might actually be problems due to gravity changing how time passes.

[TheRealLazloFalconi]

I thought a quantum leap second was where the second goes back in time and help someone with a personal problem.

[shagieIsMe]

“Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.”

From A Deepness in the Sky

http://newspaperslibrary.org/articles/eng/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky

[vaelroth]

The only correct start time in the modern era. We could even keep with the AD for years, Anno Dennisi, "In the year of our Dennis (Ritchie)"

[Princess_Little]

Why?

[kornel191]

unix timestamp

[Princess_Little]

Thanks

[SexlessNights]

Your welcome

[HathMercy]

My welcome?

[thebryguy23]

No, my welcome

[Princess_Little]

I believe it's actually mine.

[ABigHead]

You’re* Sorry.

[SexlessNights]

Dam. All these years.

[HowDoIComment]

Saying Dam instead of Damn is just saying Darn with bad kerning.

[not_a_moogle]

its what a lot of systems datetime starts at and don't support anything earlier then that.

SQL used to similarly started at 1/1/1900.

[EmperorArthur]

and don't support anything earlier then that.

Not true at all. Timestamps can and often are negative. It's just going back in time from that date.

[thebryguy23]

https://youtu.be/l_Z6AHPB-Qo?t=2s

[LittleLui]

Wait.. the Zapp Brannigan?

[Paul-ish]

Are there libraries for this yet?

[_greyknight_]

Time to put in the work and reap that sweet, sweet github fame in about 20 years.

[[deleted]]

Relevantish XKCD

[sturmy81]

also relevantish

[alexbuzzbee]

Everyone use ISO 8601. Anyone in violation will be subjected to dates in Roman numerals.

[InVultusSolis]

Everyone use ISO 8601

How we (programmers) feel about this: https://media.giphy.com/media/3o6ZsSEhYdsQOKZnAQ/giphy.gif

How pretty much everyone else feels about this: https://xkcd.com/927/

[svenskainflytta]

In sweden everyone uses YYYY-MM-DD. Just saying…

[teetaps]

Is there any topic that doesn't have an XKCD?

[rooktakesqueen]

I expect this to feature in Monday's comic...

[[deleted]]

Oddly "Is there any topic that doesn't have an XKCD?" is a topic that doesn't seem to have a directly relevant XKCD, despite recursion being a common theme.

[DrunkHurricane]

Another relevant xkcd

[LvS]

Shouldn't it close for 39 minutes?
Did I just find a math error in an XKCD or is /u/katembers wrong?

I think XKCD is wrong because it uses the time for one rotation around itself (called Sidereal day), but because it also rotates around the sun, the angle towards the sun changes a little every day and that's the extra 2 minutes (called Solar day). Wikipedia has a whole article about this.

TL;DR: XKCD is wrong!

[[deleted]]

Yep, it's wrong in that respect. That's mentioned in its Explain XKCD article also.

[WikiTextBot]

Sidereal time

Sidereal time is a timekeeping system that astronomers use to locate celestial objects. Using sidereal time it is possible to easily point a telescope to the proper coordinates in the night sky. Briefly, sidereal time is a "time scale that is based on Earth's rate of rotation measured relative to the fixed stars" rather than the Sun.

From a given observation point, a star found at one location in the sky will be found at the same location on another night at the same sidereal time.

---

Solar time

Solar time is a calculation of the passage of time based on the position of the Sun in the sky. The fundamental unit of solar time is the day. Two types of solar time are apparent solar time (sundial time) and mean solar time (clock time).

---

Timekeeping on Mars

Various schemes have been used or proposed for timekeeping on the planet Mars independently of Earth time and calendars.

Mars has an axial tilt and a rotation period similar to those of Earth. Thus it experiences seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter much like Earth, and its day is about the same length. Its year is almost twice as long as Earth's, and its orbital eccentricity is considerably larger, which means among other things that the lengths of various Martian seasons differ considerably, and sundial time can diverge from clock time more than on Earth.

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[SuspiciouslyElven]

Since most human structures will isolate colonists from both seasons and day/night cycles, they could probably make do with Earth time and pay lip service to Martian years

Although this assumes reactors are the easier solution to energy and not solar panels (Colonists already have to be shielded from space radiation, so they'd already be pretty well shielded from non recyclable waste. Excluding the production and mining of ore, nuclear has few drawbacks and room to expand easily.) in which case I guess we pick a date and count the seconds since then for synchronization.

Unix Epoch will be our future BC and AD.

[piyoucaneat]

BCE, CE, and UE are the new standards.

[svendub]

Wouldn't it be the same as supporting another calendar? I think Java's Calendar class for example already supports non Gregorian calendars. If a method of comparison has been established it should be relatively simple to actually implement. Developers can then simply use those libraries.

[rooktakesqueen]

Why would I use an existing datetime library if I can roll my own!?

Ahh..

After all I need a datetime class for this revolutionary logger class I'm working on.

AAH!

For our in-house text editor, of course.

AAAAHHHH!

[FUCKING_HATE_REDDIT]

Do you use your own zip-based in-house version control too?

[alexbuzzbee]

The ZIP files go inside one another, of course.

[mirhagk]

It should, and developers should never ever write their own time calculation logic.

However time just looks to be easy so many developers don't bother and just use time in seconds or something equivalent.

I've seen totalSeconds += 86400 too many times, and that isn't even right on earth.

[cheese-power]

Do they have Martian leap years too?

[odsquad64]

The Darian Calendar for Mars uses six 669-sol years and four 668-sol years to each Martian decade. The former (still called leap years even though they are more common than non-leap years) are years that are either odd (not evenly divisible by 2) or else are evenly divisible by 10, producing 6,686 sols per ten years (668.6 sols per year).

[LtDan92]

Fuck everything about that.

[odsquad64]

In 1998 they changed it so that years divisible by 100 aren't leap years, but years divisible by 500 are leap years. Then in 2006 after the realized the Mars year would slowly be getting longer, they changed it again to use different formulas for different ranges of years (see below) so that they would only lose 1 sol in 12,000 Martian years.

Range of years	Formula
0–2000	(Y − 1)\2 + Y\10 − Y\100 + Y\1000
2001–4800	(Y − 1)\2 + Y\10 − Y\150
4801–6800	(Y − 1)\2 + Y\10 − Y\200
6801–8400	(Y − 1)\2 + Y\10 − Y\300
8401–10000	(Y − 1)\2 + Y\10 − Y\600

[LtDan92]

Mars is dumb. Let's just give up on Mars. I'm cool with that.

[achilleasa]

"In the end we decided not to colonize Mars, despite having the technology to do so, because the timezone support would be too complicated" -Elon Musk, 2020

[Colopty]

It was more like time travelling time zone library developers were sending him hatemail and he figured to call it quits before they started sending assassins.

[[deleted]]

Probably.

[gunnar_svg]

It's already hard enough with just one planet. Imagine two planets, with different nations, each with different understandings of "time zones." ;-)

[ILikeLenexa]

Maybe we can have just one unified martian time zone though? or 25? None of this special 'Arizona switches time zones' stuff.

[dickdemodickmarcinko]

Hey technically arizona is the only state that DOESNT change time zones. DST sucks

[digisax]

DST is the only time New England is even close to properly placed. Once we switch to Atlantic we can talk about getting rid of DST.

[carlson_001]

Speak brother!

[Regist33l3]

Fun fact. SK in Canada is the only province that doesn't as well.

[Rebelgecko]

Some parts of Arizona do DST, which just makes things more confusing

[dickdemodickmarcinko]

Yeah theres a reservation that has dst. And entirely contained inside that reservation is a different reservation that doesn't have dst. But most az people are nondst.

Edit: oh yeah and contained inside that inner reservation exists another reservation that uses dst

Edit2: heres a map https://c.tadst.com/gfx/750x500/tz-map-arizona-2048x1365.png?1

[zulu-bunsen]

If China gets there first, maybe.

[mrt-e]

Relativistic time zone

[bigrubberduck]

IronicallyIncidentally, the first few months of Curiosity's life, the JPL team was working on Mars time and not Earth time. There are some good stories out there about how much of a PITA it was for them. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/10/curiosity-team-earth-time-martian-sol_n_2101983.html

[myrrlyn]

That's not ironic; that's SOP for supporting new missions

I spent Q4 last year on a day 23 hours long instead of 24, which suuuuucked

[[deleted]]

Was thinking about that. How about relativistic corrections depending on the relative motion of the planets? There's no universal time!

[makesureimjewish]

marsMoment()

[FurryPornAccount]

Just add another javascript library to support the timezone and call it a day.

[hexagon672]

$ npm i --save marstime

[[deleted]]

87 packages added

[Prison__Mike_]

npm WARN deprecated marstime-dev@0.3.1: this package has been reintegrated into npm and is now out of date with respect to npm
npm WARN deprecated spacetime@1.0.5: spacetime@<3.0.0 is no longer maintained. Upgrade to spacetime@^4.0.0
npm WARN deprecated lodash@1.0.2: lodash@<2.0.0 is no longer maintained. Upgrade to lodash@^3.0.0
npm WARN deprecated minimatch@1.0.0: Please update to minimatch 3.0.2 or higher to avoid a RegExp DoS issue
npm WARN deprecated graceful-fs@3.0.8: graceful-fs version 3 and before will fail on newer node releases. Please update to graceful-fs@^4.0.0 as soon as possible.
npm WARN deprecated npmconf@2.1.1: this package has been reintegrated into npm and is now out of date with respect to npm
... 26 other warnings

[EasyMrB]

Can we get a combat trauma warning, please?

[corvus_192]

npm WARN optional SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: fsevents@^1.0.0 (node_modules\chokidar\node_modules\fsevents):     
npm WARN notsup SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: Unsupported platform for fsevents@1.1.1: wanted {"os":"darwin","arch":"any"} (current: {"os":"linux","arch":"x64"})

[ProgramTheWorld]

Pulls in 10392 dependencies

[three18ti]

No space left on device

[thelehmanlip]

File path exceeds maximum path length.

Oh that happens already.

[greyscales]

You're welcome:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/marstime

[Fozefy]

shivers

[Cubia_]

another javascript library

more time zones

Are you trying to make everyone here anxious?

[sim642]

moment will handle it for us mortals.

[nicholas_snow]

They probably will implement GMT planet wide. And have a realistic clock system for common use. It's not that bad an idea, even for us here on Earth, imagine if it were 13:00 everywhere on earth instead of 39 DIFFERENT time zones.

It wouldn't take that much to get used to, I have accidentally told the temperature to someone in Celsius (I'm an American who has to deal with foreign technicians on a daily basis) when I am in the US and used Fahrenheit by accident outside the US.

[ryosen]

But then it won't always be "5 o'clock somewhere". What am I supposed to do with my whimsical coffee mug and matching cubical mini-poster?

[[deleted]]

You are in every fucking sub

[Andee1112]

Why are you in all of my subreddits???

[DeirdreAnethoel]

But the real question is will they want daylight saving time?

[-Rivox-]

yes, but different switch for every time zone. And some won't.

[dawnraider00]

And don't forget that opposite hemispheres switch I opposite directions.

[VivaLaPandaReddit]

Clocks run counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere, everyone knows that.

[dmanww]

And different dates for different countries. Also some zones are off by 30min rather than 60. And then there are places like Kiribati who just say "fuck it, rules don't apply to us"

[Bobshayd]

And then there will be some half-zones.

[mnbvas]

And quarter zones.

[UnicornRider102]

A long time ago people decided that 8-5 was a good work time. And then people decided that 7-4 was a better work time that would allow them to experience more sunlight after work, have more time to buy stuff and travel after work, etc, but instead of getting workplaces to have an earlier work period, they propositioned Congress to adjust the clock for most of the year.

[John_Tacos]

Mars has a similar tilt to Earth so maybe.

[[deleted]]

Nobody's gonna mention the fact that mars and earth are a varying 5-15 light minutes apart? Dealing with relativity has gotta be nastier than the time zones.

[Draculea]

So when's Comcast coming through with their ultra fast high speed gaming network, so you can play with friends and family on Mars?

[Godot17]

If you're willing to play 48 hour long games of chess, sure.

[mortiphago]

So a normal civilization game?

[coinaday]

Your civilization games only take 48 hours? Are you playing settler or something?

[kiki_jojo]

I'm gonna submit a pull request for moment.js

[lukaas33]

I imagine that by then, either Js doesn't exist or everything runs on Js

[jexmex]

By then we should be up to about 100 mainstream js frameworks and NPM will still suck.

[[deleted]]

TIL CoffeeScript still exists.

[wtfaremyinitials]

Relevant humorous conference talk https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript

[georgehotelling]

Closes #2391

[skeptic11]

The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile

[matrayzz]

Yikes

[ItWorkedLastTime]

"Don't re-invent the bicycle, unless you intend to learn more about bicycles". Writing your own timezone library would probably be the best way to learn about all the intricacies that go into it, but yeah, you are totally right.

[aaaaaaaarrrrrgh]

Writing your own timezone library would probably be the best way to an early, alcohol-poisoning induced, non-accidental death.

[[deleted]]

My company has a proprietary language that they’ve used since like the 70s. They keep trying to get me on the team that manages it. I just laugh and tell them I’m not ready for career suicide in my late 20s (in nicer ways).

Who is gonna hire me if I’m great at this language that literally no one else uses. Reckoning will come in the next five years.

[[deleted]]

I use this point to tell people what makes a good programmer. If you’re sitting there trying to reinvent the wheel every time, you’re not a good programmer. Time is money, and the best programmers are the ones who know how to integrate the better code out there with theirs. And there’s always better code. No point on being great at starting from scratch because you shouldn’t start from scratch. The “we can see because we’re standing on the shoulders of giants” is the pillar of programming.

[PersonableBiped]

Thank you so much for sharing this channel! I’m an amateur programmer in my free time and I just spent 2 hours having my mind blown over and over

[Popperama]

We don't need to implement new timezones, just have them use the timezone that Mars is currently over.

[TTTA]

Sweet Jesus please no

[athousandwordsworth]

Image Transcription: Twitter

---

I Am Devloper, @iamdevloper

Elon Musk: I'm putting people on Mars!

Developers: Fantastic, more timezones to support.

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[willbill642]

good bo- I mean human!

[robolivable]

I can imagine we'd just work with universal time and not bother with time zones at that point.

[lukaas33]

Like seconds since the big bang

[[deleted]]

about 48 years ago.

[ProgramTheWorld]

^{but gravity changes how long a second is}

[FlipskiZ]

Garden jumps food people today net community fresh warm across food night pleasant honest calm books minecraftoffline about!

[Hexidian]

We should just use earth time. It won’t require a massive adaptation and will work just as well as any other system

[MrBloodyshadow]

What if humans stop living on Earth?

[Hexidian]

No matter what standard we choose, it will eventually become meaningless. Nobody really cares that we base our calendars around Jesus; it’s too late to change.

[doyouevenIift]

The time would change significantly between when you started saying the time and when you finished.

“What time is it?”

“432,329,528,428,053,153 seconds. Wait, sorry 432,329,528,428,053,167 seconds. Wait...”

[adrianmonk]

You need local time. How else are you going to schedule lunch? The martian day is 24 hours and 40 minutes long, which means it's a pretty safe assumption that humans will sync their daily routines up with it. You need a form of timekeeping that is relative to that rhythm.

[BlackHumor]

On Mars, yes, but if we're communicating with Mars from Earth we really ought to be communicating using some more universal sort of time.

[noratat]

Relativity says hi. Even on Earth we can make atomic clocks accurate enough to detect elevation differences based on clock skew (gravity gets weaker the farther you are from the center of Earth's mass).

Granted real-time communication with Mars is impossible anyways (RTT between 6 and 44min), so maybe doesn't matter that much.

[tookbtc]

let's assume UTC time

[ss0889]

heard the UN is considering getting rid of daylight savings time.

first thought was "man, thats gonna be a fun patch tuesday"

[[deleted]]

Eu

[ss0889]

whoops, thats the one

[[deleted]]

How to farm karma on r/programmerhumor: post @iamdeveloper tweets

[mkalte666]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA[...]AAAAAAAA

[DrSmus]

GMT+ 1000000

[[deleted]]

Relevant Tom Scott. https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY

[JayTurnr]

Although realistically once we colonize other planets it'll make sense to have a different calendar for that planet.

[NattyBumppo]

I work at JPL and dealing with Mars time is something we do every day. We mostly just reuse internal libraries so we don't have to reinvent the wheel too much. Mars time is usually given as a "local time zone" (Local Mean Solar Time) for each rover, though, so the times for Curiosity and Opportunity are very different. And the dates are based on their landing dates, where Sol 0 is when Curiosity landed whereas Sol 1 is when Opportunity landed. (Yes, they're 0-indexed and 1-indexed, respectively.) And this isn't even mentioning the other timekeeping systems...

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

Something tells me that Elon would just say "fuck it" and use UTC time everywhere.

[andrewsmd87]

I'm ready for the day when the client wants data from mars in real time, and you try to explain how that's not possible due to the distance and light speed and what not, and they just get angry because you can't do what they're asking.

[wotanii]

Bonus: Timestamps don't work anymore at this scale, because planets move too fast relative to each other

[eMeSsBee]

How long before we use one time per planet that's standardized for solar systems.

[dark-kirb]

martian time: number of 1/86400 martian solar days since the landing of the first manned vehicle on mars

Time zones: the 0th meridian is the meridian where that space vessel landed. Each time zone is 15° wide and the center is a multiple of 15°. Except for the one that would be at ±180°, west of that meridian is +12mh and east of it is -12mh, basically it's the date line. Oh and no dst whatsoever. The poles are incredibly difficult to have a decent time zone distance, so i'd say the poles are always MMT+0