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Comment by trombonechamp | Hacker News Reader

For a related example, type "11:00 EST to UTC" into Google and DuckDuckGo. Google says 15:00 because it interprets "EST" colloquially as "the current time on east coast US". DuckDuckGo says 16:00 because it interprets EST literally as "the time on east coast when it isn't daylight savings time" (compared to ET or EDT). It isn't clear which behavior is more desirable.

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I certainly prefer DDG here. There is no ambiguity in "11:00 EST to UTC". EST is always UTC - 5, EDT is always UTC - 4, and ET could mean either depending on the time of the year. Google isn't making an arbitrary decision to deal with ambiguity it's ignoring the specificity in the query and reinterpreting it (as ET rather than EST)

I'd argue that DuckDuckGo's behaviour is the correct one, but they should display a warning when the east cost is on EDT and someone requests conversion with EST. Maybe we will stop using daylight savings before the masses learn the difference between ET/EST/EDT.

Edge case: what would you do about Mountain Time? Check out this "fun" time zone map of Arizona where you could fly a straight line through 6 time settings in one hour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Arizona#/media/File:AZ...

The ET/EST/EDT question is reasonable because ET is heavily populated and behaves sanely (as far as I know). Other popular US time zones are... different.

Interesting edge case. Perhaps we need something other than MST for Arizona (excluding Navajo Nation) if we want a lack of ambiguity. If only politicians knew how annoying dealing with time is for software developers!

The other day I was on a livestream's chat where a Londoner wrote "it's 11pm GMT here in London!", which I noticed was wrong because it was 10pm GMT (and it was 11pm BST).

If he scheduled a call for 15:00 "GMT", he would call in at 14:00 GMT instead and wondered why the international callers aren't showing up.

So the kind of "automatic fixing of ignorance" Google does could be annoying and ruin some stuff.

I don't understand, 11:00am EST is 3pm UTC? Isn't it correct?

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