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Comment by BurritoAlPastor | Hacker News Reader

The graphic would seem to indicate that the UK and Portugal observe a time zone of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC±0). This is nonsense, of course; UTC is not a time zone. I believe the UK observes GMT (UTC±0) and Portugal uses Western European Time (UTC±0).

It's also worth looking up the story of why Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated UTC and not CUT, if you haven't heard it. Time zones are great.

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> I believe the UK observes GMT (UTC±0)

That's correct, with BST in the Summer. It can get confusing when working with people from different countries who aren't aware of BST and who schedule meetings explicitly in GMT, thinking that it automatically includes daylight saving.

In my experience, it gets more confusing for English people who schedule meetings in GMT in the summer and then are an hour late.

Ah that old trick

It's also a problem for software engineers in the UK, for whom 6 months of the year utc and local time are the same, resulting in people not knowing the difference. In the rest of the world it's bleedin obvious.

A downside to inventing time I guess ;)

Yup, on occassion you think you've set up a server correctly but it's actually on local time, only to find everything breaks come the end of March.

The two times a year when you find out which new tests were written to use local time instead of UTC.

A downside to believing that you invented the concept of measuring time.

Also in software dev and yes it's a pain, I've had to point out multiple times that UTC != GMT.

BST is all year, just it is the same as GMT for (roughly) half the year

British Standard Time existed all year (~50 years ago) but British Summer Time is defined as "the period beginning at one o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in March and ending at one o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in October."

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2002/262/article/2/made

This is actually the standardised, Europe-wide definition of summer time, which is followed by all EU nations. Prior to 2002, the UK had various different start and end dates over the years.

The "S" stands for "Summer", and I strongly recommend reading things like https://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-pr... and http://creativedeletion.com/2015/01/28/falsehoods-programmer... before confidently making statements on this subject.

number 35. contradicts what you said

Not to mention when people say PST when that is explicitly the _wrong_ time zone half the year.

It's PDT in summer.

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