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Comment by bcheung | Hacker News Reader

A lot of servers are just set to UTC even if they are in a different time zone. It simplifies a lot of headaches and translation bugs.

It would be nice to get rid of time zones and daylight savings time. People are so slow to change. Who cares if the sun doesn't come up until 4 PM where you are at. Stores, schools, etc can just change what hours they are open.

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It's really annoying when I order a new VPS and it is set to whatever time zone the company's headquarters are located in. As if I give a damn about what time it is in PDT! I don't know about abolishing time zones in the real world, but at least for servers it makes total sense.

That, and the missing UTF-8 locale, are among the most annoying defaults that I routinely encounter on newly ordered servers.

Yes, I set all of my infrastructure to UTC and then keep the clock on whatever UI I'm using set to display distance from UTC in my current timezone (and current Unix timestamp in UTC). I feel like timezones are an important tool for humans, and it's so easy to customize your development machine's clock to take care of these calculations for you. It's also millions of times easier to think in terms of events that happen across a system with wide distribution if everything is set to UTC, where a lot of companies and people will have to then start counting and scribbling arithmetic to keep track of what happened when, in two or more timezones.

Getting rid of timezones is not as good an idea as you might first imagine. http://qntm.org/abolish

Haha, that article's brilliant!

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