When To Chat: Reconcile Time Zone Differences | Hacker News Reader

When To Chat: Reconcile Time Zone Differences

whentochat.co

143 pointsnwillson85 comments

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This very simple tool helps:

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html

It rocks with Daylight Saving time transitions too (UK one coming up soon)

I really like https://everytimezone.com

It's what I've been using for years.

It's not perfect. For example March 29 is a 23 hour day in the UK but we don't see that reflected in the app.

Big fan. Great and simple tool.

It's good to check, because different places switch to and from daylight savings time on different dates, so you're not always the same number of hours apart during the transition!

I've missed meetings before because of that: "I was there, where were you?" "I was there too! Where were YOU?"

> I've missed meetings before because of that

The simple failsafe for catching this early is calendar invitations.

It used to be the same for USA and Europe, but one day George W. Bush decided to move US's changeover dates a month earlier in Spring, and a month later in the Fall, messing a lot of things up. Thanks, Dubya!

And just for fun the EU bigwigs had some sort of vote recently that resulted in saying each member country is free to choose whether to keep or abandon DST. What the hell boneheaded move is that?! Why even have a vote, it seems like they thought that would gain them popularity with the public.

> And just for fun the EU bigwigs had some sort of vote recently that resulted in saying each member country is free to choose whether to keep or abandon DST.

No, they decided to abandon DST everywhere. What each member has to decide is whether they'd stay in Summer Time or Winter Time permanently.

It was passed by Congress. Bush just signed the bill into law.

I got away with blaming missing the meeting on Bush, that one time. ;)

I’ve used this for years!

Plus you can use it for 4+ cities/timezones!

I tried some major cities around the world and it’s hit or miss. E.g. Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul and Sidney are all missing.

Edit: Okay, the locations are fetched from Google Map’s auto complete service, with only the top five results, so when I enter say Beijing I get unhelpful results like some Beijing Pie House in Alhambra, CA. Probably want to limit to cities if possible, no one is entering local street/establishment names here.

> Sidney

If you're thinking of the city in Australia, it's Sydney. Probably explains why when you search for Sidney it comes up with small towns in USA.

I think I only made the typo when I typed the comment here but I can’t check now since the service has exceeded quota.

Why would it use Google Maps instead of the usual time zone database cities?

That's the whole point of the site. If I'm trying to figure out what time it is for my co-worker in Canberra Australia, I don't want to have to Google what time zone they are in (Australian Eastern Daylight Time). Just put the city in and it does the math for you.

I mean, other sites[0] that I've used seem to have a list of major cities (not Google Maps autocomplete)

[0] https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/

I'm talking about the official "tz" database, which contains a large list of cities and geographic coordinates. So if you want to autodetect, you just need approximate lon/lat and then grab the closest tz city.

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

Weird.. It even found my hometown, which is a random town of 15k people in Germany.

That’s because it’s much less likely to have restaurants named after a random town than Beijing or Seoul.

Do you live in akuji1993kleinstadt?

I’ve used https://worldtimebuddy.com for this purpose for years.

Same here, more features and less waste of space than this submission. Even though this submission has more modern design I'd still prefer worldtimebuddy, especially because you can have more people than just two.

Yes! This is the best interface for checking time zones and I've always wondered why it's not more common.

Came here to say this. Excellent interface.

Seems to be lots of negative comments in this thread :(

I think this is a great, super simple little tool, nice work! And slack integration is the real killer feature here

Nice idea, but it's buggy! If you try more than one pair of cities (with different time differences), the table below the displayed time zone difference will not update.

Had a similar issue, I had to hit the 12/24 hour button to get the table to update.

For those on macOS, I use the app Clocker[0]. It lives in your menu bar, allows you to input your own desired cities/time zones/locations, has a bunch of different customization options, and also has a "future slider" that allows you to see what time it is in different locations at different times.

[0](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clocker/id1056643111?mt=12)

Doesn't seem to work at all for me. Seeing the error below in the console

> You have exceeded your rate-limit for this API. For more information on usage limits and the Google Maps JavaScript API services please see: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...

Any way to just input GMT/UTC timezones directly? Seems more practical that way.

I think this works well, I live in Eastern US and I'm interested in talking to somebody in Hokkaido, Japan... I just instinctively typed "New York" and "Toyko" time.

Well Japan is one timezone, and you know how US timezones work because you live in it. I wonder what would be your mental process if you see an online event with time specified in MSK+3.

Reminds me of a postmortem of I think it was Carmageddon, some game anyway. In it they mentioned that the programmers were all in Australia, and the management and the rest were in the UK, and that arrangement was just perfect because they'd all be online at the same time.

I like this one -

https://everytimezone.com

Great tool. May I suggest putting the date when you'd like to chat? Considering that in Europe the clock change comes next Sunday 29th, this could confuse some people if they'd like to chat sometime in a few days.

I wrote a similar PWA site when I was doing long distance with my now wife! https://canicall.info/

The user interface seems to assume someone isn't awake across midnight, which doesn't make much sense to me; like, if you want to try to coordinate a meeting with me, and you expect me to be functional during it, it really needs to be scheduled between 2pm and 4am, but I can't enter that time range due to how this slider works :(. (Speaking of which, it is nearing 5am, so I should probably start heading to sleep.)

I know what you mean! I'm always awake through midnight. The slider range should turn "inside-out" when you drag the end time to the left of the start time.

There is one crucial feature missing. There should be an option for “multiple” other locations. Since we are all practicing social distancing, I have scheduled a call with 5-10 of my friends over the weekend and they are spread over 5 different time zones and countries. We ultimately found one time that works for all of us using iOS world clock.

…

Before clicking I was fully expecting that you could input basically as many dates as you need to. Just two is not even sufficient to handle my cousins…

Google Calendar has a World Clock functionality built-in.

When scheduling events, it will show times in the time zones that you have added under World Clock in settings.

The world clock will display on your left sidebar.

https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064

My home and my office are not on different continents, so I'm not sure why this is handy of WFH specifically. :)

Mine sometimes are. ;)

Feature request: support for multiple cities, could be handy for scheduling group calls in distributed teams.

Nice idea! Bonus points for the 24h toggle.

Note: It doesn't work in Edge. I select places and times and nothing happens.

For those using Google Calendar, there's a feature for showing people's working hours: https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/7638168?hl=en

This is a great tool! I really like it. Do you have an option for a different color scheme though? Even just a white / black? Don't know why but this color is pretty difficult for me to look at for some reason.

Meeting planner for multiple locations: https://www.worldtimeserver.com/meeting-planner.aspx

Google 2AM in New York (reports local equivalent time) or 4PM in New York in Shanghai (specify the timezone you want conversion to using another place name).

This doesn't seem to work correctly for say London and Theran as the difference is not a round number of hours.

Otherwise looks useful.

Support for comparing with more than two parties would be nice

I thought Warsaw was the last country with a non-hourly time zone, UTC+01:24, which they wisely abandoned ages ago, in 1915. Why on Earth would Tehran use such an arbitrary time zone offset? At least they're off by a half hour, instead of 24 minutes. But what possible reason could there be to do something like that, anyway?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B01:24

>On 5 August 1915, Warsaw switched to Central European Time, and the rest of Poland quickly followed suit.

Edit: Apparently Dublin Mean Time was even weirder than Warsaw's time zone, weighing in at UTC-00:25:21.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%E2%88%9200:25:21

>UTC−00:25:21 was used in Ireland as Dublin Mean Time.

>Dublin Mean Time was introduced by the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act, 1880,[1] which also defined Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as legal time in Great Britain. This Act replaced local mean time, which had been held to be the legal time since Curtis v. March in 1858, throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

>From 3:00 am Dublin Summer Time on Sunday 1 October 1916, the Time (Ireland) Act, 1916[2] changed the time used in Ireland to be the same as that used in the UK, both during daylight saving time and at other times.

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

>John Dillon opposed the first reading of the Time (Ireland) Bill for having been introduced without consultation of the Irish Parliamentary Party; he said the different time in Ireland "reminds us that we are coming into a strange country".

You should look up Nepal if you want to be really ticked off.

How about Higgins time...

https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2018-August/026774.html

I'd link to JWZ's blog where I read about this, but he blocks HN referrals.

On one hand, that ticks me off so much I want to clean their clock, but on the other hand, at least they have a round number of seconds. I'm having a hard time in the face of all this tock about temporal diversity.

Wow, I had exactly this idea when I moved to the Netherlands!

My friends and distant family members would call at weird times without checking if it's early morning or night here.

Also worth noting is that in windows 10 you can add two additional clocks to the main one.

Very helpful when you are usually focused on just a few timezones in particular.

Indeed, macOS supports something similar. The notification center has a World Clock widget. I've got friends in Illinois, India and Australia, and it's incredibly useful to have a couple of clocks right there.

Would it be more space efficient to just add more hands to the same clock face?

Can you even get Windows 10 to show an analog clock?

More importantly, that doesn't show you AM/PM, or the differences in days, both of which are important.

(And there are edge cases where just another hour hand wouldn't be enough)

When I was at Sun, somebody hacked up a version of Michael Power's classic NeWS "Glass Clock" tool (that shaped the window so that it only showed the hands and the 12 tick marks, so its face was transparent and mouse clicks passed through it), so it ran setuid root in order to call stime() to set the operating system's time, which it let you easily do by simply dragging the hands around the face, just like a real clock! ("Temporal Direct Manipulation"!)

This is the original version, without that hack:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/utilities/...

    %    Glass is an implementation of a NeWS clock that I wrote to
    % experiment with shaped canvases. The clock is shaped like the
    % the hands and tick marks thereby allowing you to "see through'
    % the face to whatever lies behind. Because of the bug concerning
    % stroking a canvas path the face must redraw every time it is
    % updated (gross).

As it turns out, it REALLY SUCKS to have a clock that made it so easy to accidentally change the time on your workstation! The way the glass clock could float unobtrusively above your other windows, it was really easy to accidentally hit the hour or minute hand with the mouse and move it without noticing, then you'd miss meetings because your entire workstation would have the wrong time! Unless you were running it over the network on a different server, then you'd change the time for everybody else using that server, so they would miss their meetings too!

I've always liked the design of this one.

https://everytimezone.com/

Nice tool.

I personally use https://spacetime.am (no affiliation, just like it).

My company seems to block this website so now I'll never know when to chat.

Love it!

Had been needing this forever... I used to use time.is, but this is _decent_ :)

As I keep saying, we'll all move to UTC in 1-3 decades.

I sure hope so. Or call it Universal Galactic Time or something if people like it better. If you need someone on the other side of the world, you still need to understand that they are 12 hours opposite or similar. We could then get rid of daylight savings time too and just have one universal time. I don't think it is that hard to start either. We just need legislation that says anytime a time is posted somewhere it must also show the UTC time. Always show both on your mobile phone too and it will become automatic. Over time people will associate the UTC "numbers" with their normal daily routine and 10 years later we can get rid of the timezones. This is similar with how we re-number highways.

I don't like it when people make these sort of link-dropping comments, so this is a bit hypocritical of me, but take a look at https://qntm.org/abolish

How is that going to help anything? This is an issue with human circadian rhythms, not with conventions of keeping time.

Probably doesn't help with figuring out when to meet, but would maybe help with communicating the time by removing any chance of ambiguity. Or if you're asking e.g. "Does 10.30am work for you?" etc. But really, it's not hard to state the timezone along with the time if there's any chance of confusion.

It helps with agreeing to do something together online at a certain time. Including announcing online events.

Nothing else. But that's enough.

"Let's set the meeting at 16:00 [UTC is implied]."

"Sorry Bob, we in Sydney will be asleep at that time."

You probably meant that as a counterargument, but to me it shows how simple UTC makes things.

I edited my comment and it turned to nonsense. What if the Sydneysiders aren't in the call?

I'm in Central European Time right now. If I want to set a meeting with New Yorkers, I have to know what time the NYers wake up in my time zone (14:00 here is 9:00 New York - although this might change in 2 days as we'll both be in Summer Time).

If I use UTC, I still have to know what time (in UTC) the New Yorkers wake up...

Yeah. We have no disagreements about that.

> If I use UTC, I still have to know what time (in UTC) the New Yorkers wake up...

This is also true under the current system.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

This website doesn't work at all in chrome

Great little tool. I love the retro design too.

Tried in Safari and Chrome. Doesn't work.

Didn't work for Barcelona

Nice tool!

Better guy that wrote it!

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