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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the best way to see it is not to pretend their are weird timezones.

It is not because most of the world do summer time and that when they do they have a 1h transitions that we should take it for granted.

This article do not mention the Chatham Standard Time Zone from Chatham Islands archipelago in NZ which is 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand Daylight Time, nor the Central Western Standard Time (Australia/Eucla). Also wikipedia mention there is a "train timezone" for the Indian Pacific train. I wonder if other trains have a dedicated timezone?

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> I wonder if other trains have a dedicated timezone?

They used to, railway time is how our timezone system came to be.

> Also wikipedia mention there is a "train timezone" for the Indian Pacific train.

The only search hits I found for this claim are your comment. I find no such mention at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Pacific . What are you referring to?

The great thing about Australia/Eucla is that it’s not officially gazetted, and yet there are road signs informing travellers about it. I love that people just do it and everyone goes along

I mention Asia/Kathmandu instead of Pacific/Chatham or Australia/Eucla mostly because it's not one of those "exotic birds / kangaroos outnumber humans 5:1" kinds of places.

> It is not because most of the world do summer time

Eh? Most of the world don't do summer time.

Yes for some reason I read the following sentence backwards thinking that 410 timezones were observing DST while 185 did not.

> Hmm. 410 timezones just don’t DST at all. 185 have a 3600-second, i.e. 1-hour, difference.

My point stands that there is no normality, just governments taking different decisions and being entitled to it and what the majority does is not relevant.

Is that also true by population?

Sure. The only country from the top ten by population that observes the DST is the US. From the top fifteen countries, it's US and Egypt.

I think the statement is true by any reasonable metric - population, land area, GDP size.

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