News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone by ucarion on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @01:48PM (#41998120)
This is really neat!

Separately, I'm a little skeptical of the tzdb's endeavor of even thinking about pre-Unix-epoch stuff. The bug-to-utility ratio of that stuff doesn't seem to be there. `zic` is where most of the ugly gnarliness of tzdb lies, and I sometimes feel that it would have been better if `zic` weren't an artifact others could depend on.

Re:Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone by derefr on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @07:19PM (#42001641)
There are plenty of people alive today with negative birth timestamps, with many services wanting to calculate the proper local day and time each year to send them annoying pseudo-personalized birthday messages.

Or, for something a bit more agreeable: genealogy (esp. the bioinformatics queries in genetic genealogy) needs a good, high-resolution timeline to normalize events onto. Actually, the non-genetic kind of geneaology, solves a lot of vagueries in lineage as constraint-based puzzles over (local!) dates, with razor-thin margins that would be messed up without correct timezone-based calendar conversion — constraints like "two people couldn't have been related as mother and child, if the mother died at least two days before the child was born."