Hacker News Reader

Leap years are unnecessarily complicated? No, I think they are exactly as complicated as they should be. And horseradish sauce is both tasty, and quite easy to make.

And not having timezones would be even more complicated.

As a programmer, I know that DST (and time zones and durations and relative times) are all problems to be solved in the presentation layer.

All business logic uses well-engineered, heavily tested third party libraries for time arithmetic. All data storage keeps time zones with timestamps and durations.

Anyone who argues that "I don't need to store timezones because all my dates are UTC" has a long and painfull learning curve ahead of them.

I don't think anyone should set his watch to UTC, only that people use UTC when speaking to people outside their time zone.