[plibither8]

> India has half-hour timezones

If that's messy, consider Nepal's timezone that's on the 45-minute mark (UTC+5:45).

[poink]

Last startup I worked for hired a Nepal-based QA person. There was a bunch of calendaring and daily/weekly charts in the apps, and she found bugs in _everything_.

I make sure to test with Nepal time whenever I'm testing date/time stuff now.

[iso8859-1]

Even better, use Monrovia in the 70s. They had an offset of 44m30s.[0]

    >>> datetime(1972,1,1,tzinfo=ZoneInfo('Africa/Monrovia')).isoformat()
    '1972-01-01T00:00:00-00:44:30'

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Liberia#History

[lb1lf]

And, of course, there's the (hopefully apocryphal) story of the French initially referring to GMT as 'Paris time minus nine minutes and twenty-one seconds'.

[midasuni]

When I built a live clock for some new CasparCG based graphics for a major TV program out of singapore some years back, a colleague reviewing it in London tried to trick it with a Nepal offset — apparently they’d run into an issue with the Viz system they used in 2015 when there were a lot of lives from Nepal.

Obviously it worked fine, as did Chatham Island.

[foolswisdom]

And don't forget about https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/falsehoods-programmers-believe...

[hprotagonist]

or one island of new zealand (chatham), which is +12:45

[slyall]

The Chatham Islands are an Island group, two of which are inhabited (Chatham Island and Pitt Island).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_Islands

Right now is it on +13:45 due to Daylight Saving

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_Standard_Time_Zone

[angrygoat]

or along the highway near the Western Australia/South Australia border, which informally uses +8:45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B08:45

[Izkata]

RealLifeLore just had a video about time zones in that area of the world, there's an area between New Zealand and Hawaii where you can go north/south and jump an entire day.

[scheme271]

Nepal is UTC+5:45. I think that's the largest population on a 15/45 minute offset.

[PartiallyTyped]

Why is humanity like this?

[hn72774]

It's mostly political.

There isn't a perfect geographical width for time zones. So humans pick something to define the boundaries between time zones. And making boundaries on a map is political.

[inglor_cz]

In Europe, a huge driver for standardization of timezones into "reasonable" slots was railway traffic, including cross-border traffic.

Railways are extremely sensitive to exact time and, indeed, the very concept of unified time across the entire region or country only started developing when railways expanded across Europe. Prior to that, individual towns were happy with their own local solar time, but once railway connections were introduced, time irregularities would cause chaos at best and carnage at worst. That led to introduction of unified railway time which developed to timezones as we know them.

Railways aren't as prominent nowadays as they were 100-150 years ago, and countries like Nepal and India don't have extensive, frequently used cross-border railways anyway; any cross-border traffic is sporadic and mostly freight. So there is one fewer reason to cooperate with your neighbors when it comes to time-related issues. Trucks can take weird timezone changes just fine.

[bandrami]

In this case it was so the Sun would be roughly due south at noon in Delhi

[svilen_dobrev]

because humanity never understood time properly.. so all these facades making it look "simpler" while actualy a lot more complicated.

long time ago there was a special `$ man date` -like page in linux which went into long explaining many "amazing" things about calendar stuff, like whoever feudal in 1553 deciding that certain week was bad and striked it out of his and his country's calendar, or another one that liked certain month and decided to repeat it...

but cannot find it anymore.