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Comment by kjehjrktlhl | Hacker News Reader

This is not smart, this is just surprising to the next person who is going to maintain your ”smart” tricks. Thank god they switched to utc, that is what everyone expect.

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Actually, back then, 18 years ago, most people expected your servers to be in Pacific or Eastern time, depends on where your company was headquartered, because none of us really had global technical workforces back then. We all pretty much worked in one office and used the local time zone, because often our servers were in the building with us or in a datacenter nearby.

Case in point, before reddit I was at eBay, and we kept all those servers in Pacific time, since the entire technical workforce was in Pacific time, as well as all of the servers.

Making blanket statements like that without considering the context of the time is usually not a good idea. ;)

> most people expected your servers to be in Pacific or Eastern time

I was there back then, working for shops people have heard of, and I honestly don't know where you're getting this idea from. Some places did things wild and wacky when they were wee small, but most of us quickly learned that such shenanigans (like fun server naming conventions) start to fall apart and maybe we should do things differently.

It only matters if the servers were running cron jobs where it mattered if they ran "not at all or 2x."

Logs with weird dates on high demand production servers... less important.

Using UTC for servers was standard when I entered the field in 2005.

I was setting them to UTC in 1995.

In the 1980s, PT and ET were common. I was working at Bell Labs then, and one of my jobs was to change the time zone (back then it was two words) on the testing machines, as needed. This is stuck in my memory since to change the timezone, you needed to edit the Unix kernel source code and recompile it!

Ah you think UTC is your ally? You merely adopted UTC. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see DST until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!

2000 for me. That was the first time I had users from outside my own time zone, so I figured it was better to just use UTC for everything and just convert depending on the user's settings. I think I just applied the thinking to the whole server.

This is the way.

I run into this a lot when working with legacy code. The first reaction most teams have is to mock it, not understand it.

Yelp servers were set to Pacific time when I started in 2009, probably a decision from 2004

Everybody's dunking on you here but yeah, circa 18 years ago I remember that setting servers to local time was still pretty common.

Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I believe it was an anecdote and not a recommendation.

It was probably the smartest option at the time, given the context. As long as it was documented properly, no one on such a small team would have been surprised. Spend more than the 30 minutes you've spent here on HN so far, and you may learn a thing or two about what is "smart", and how that is inextricably linked to the given situation.

Sounds like it was smart at the time, and then eventually outgrew the solution.

If you're like 5 people, each with a list of TODOs that doesn't fit on one screen, it's pretty smart to just do something quick and good enough, then move on, revisit it in the future.

"revisit it in the future" is exactly the reason your TODO list keeps growing rather than shrinking

Nice when the company lives long enough for that to be an issue

Yeah, as we all know the startup is the only type of software company in existence and the best way to ensure the startup's success is to act as if it won't exist next week.

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