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Comment by jen20 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always phrased the question as “What is the time in the UK” (as a British person living in the USA). It’s unclear to me whether my form of asking the question is because it’s the best way to get a “good” answer from Siri, though I don’t think it would ever occur to me to ask what the time is in London versus the last city I lived in (Bath) in the first place, since they’re always the same.

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Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK, so there's no point asking "What's the time in London" and "What's the time in Preston" because you know the answer is the same, but since America has 3 or 4 timezones (I'm not sure, I know it's at least three), American people intuitively specify the city, since "What's the time in the USA" is not valid

> Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK

And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies. I don't really know how it works in the UK because I'm French, so let's take France instead. "What time is it in France?" usually means "in metropolitan France", but now let's say you're in northern Brazil, close to the border of French Guyane. When you say "what time is it in France", do you mean "metropolitan France across the ocean", or do you mean "the closest French department a hundred miles away"?

>> And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies.

I think the UK only consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The UK has some control over aspects of the dependencies but they are not actually part of the UK.

Yeah, the crown dependencies are distinct sovereign states.

France is indeed the best/worst example as it is the current country spanning the most timezones (13).

Le soleil ne se couche jamais sur la République.

What’s funny is that if I ask Siri what time it is in London, it gives me the same time as it is here in Waterloo (1hr east of London Ontario).

On the other hand, if I ask what time it is in Preston, Siri gives me the time in the UK, despite the fact that I’m only 15km away from Preston Ontario!

Now if I ask what time it is in Cambridge, it gives me the local time instead of Cambridge England. Preston Ontario is actually part of Cambridge Ontario.

So what it seems to be doing is picking the nearest place that’s well known, rather than the most well known place with that name. Preston Ontario isn’t really known at all unless you’re from this area. Cambridge Ontario is a little bit more well known, though still a far cry from Cambridge England (likely due to the university).

Ha, what's funny about that is I picked Preston as a random town in the UK that I thought probably doesn't have a name-twin somewhere else!

There's also Preston, Maryland in the US - finding UK town names which are not repeated elsewhere is hard!

It also makes driving around New England most confusing, since towns which _should not_ be in the same direction often are...

I just spent longer than reasonable zooming into random parts of Canada, it's quite funny seeing places like Morpeth south of London. And also satisfying to see Kent and Essex are neighbours in Canada, too. There were some surprising ones too, like Uttoxeter having a name-twin

It's fairly established that picking a capital / large city is the correct way to specify a time zone, that usually gives you what you want. The alternatives have various problems:

* Pick a country: Some counties have multiple time zones.

* Abbreviations like EST, CET: Not right in summer.

* Words like "Eastern Time": assumes the country from context.

* Offsets like UTC-5: Doesn't follow summer time.

* Click on a map: India will ban your app because one pixel in Kashmir gave Pakistan time.

I'd suggest that the correct way to specify a time zone is the name from the IANA time zone database, which uses area (currently a continent or ocean) and location, avoiding most of these problems. Thus:

- America/New_York

- Europe/London

- Indian/Mauritius

- Pacific/Chatham

> * Words like "Eastern Time": assumes the country from context.

This is a big bug bear of mine that seems to come up a LOT from Americans online. Eastern fucking what? Australia? Anglia?

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