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Comment by nfw2 | Hacker News Reader

My personal pet peeve is when people write the Standard Time acronym when scheduling cross-timezone meetings, despite the fact that it is Daylight Saving Time. (Eg. "I'll call you tomorrow at 4pm PST.")

In the past, I've gotten paranoid that they may live somewhere that doesn't observe Daylight Savings, but I also don't want to seem like a pedant by bringing up their mistake.

I'm curious if this change will make this sort of thing more or less common.

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I've never known anyone who wasn't a programmer who even knew the difference between say, PST and PDT. Like, if they didn't schedule it through a computer with up to date timezone code, I would confirm verbally.

I've gotten into the habit of naming the location like "4pm Chicago time". It's a lot less confusing in general because most people here aren't very solid on what the time zones are on the other side of the Atlantic (going both ways), even disregarding any DST-type changes.

Would it be any easier to say UTC-8?

In Europe it is more common, but I suppose that is because centralising around UTC is much easier when you're -1/+4

Oh my God this explains so much of my confusion with timestamps. I didn't even know there was a difference.

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time

Someone with experience dealing with this needs to write it.

Needs to write what? https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program... ?

When there's an obvious reference city for at least one side of the conversation, I just use that. "Talk to you at 3pm [New York, SF, Tokyo] time." Apart from avoiding any possible confusion about what PST/PDT means, this is also less likely to suffer from typos, and it's more likely that the recipient actually reads it and notices any mistakes. Easier for people from different countries too, if they aren't familiar with each other's timezones.

Ah, yes, precision without accuracy.

I constantly ride people about it. I don’t care about being perceived as a jerk.

> I’ve gotten paranoid that they may live somewhere that doesn’t observe Daylight Savings.

Maybe I can help you with that. I’m from Arizona, which does not observe any time change, effectively meaning that we’re on MST for part of the year and PDT for the rest. I have _never_ heard of someone living in Arizona refer to our time zone as MST, MDT, PST, or PDT, but only as “Arizona time” or something to that effect.

My personal pet peeve is giving times in their local time zone when they know full well everyone is going to be in different time zones. Convert it to UTC so everyone can just worry about their offset.

I'd rather people not do that, simply because I wouldn't trust most people to do the conversion in either direction. At least if the person setting the meeting gives the time in their local time time I can be relatively confident that at least they'll be there on time.

If you attach a time zone, then at least some won't need to do a conversion in their heads.

If you just use UTC, then EVERYONE has to do some conversion in their heads.

(Unless some participants happen to live at the prime meridian, in which case using UTC as "the timezone" is equally as good.)

I doubt most of my colleagues even know what their offset is – keeping track of that with DST is just not fun. Personally I just Google e.g. "2pm PT in CT," as Google has an info box that handles time conversions and is smart enough to know when you want DST.

For people not wanting to use Google, I've written a script "dateparse"[1] that allows to do the same:

    $ TZ=America/Chicago dateparse '2pm PT'
    2pm PT: assuming PDT
    1647464400  Wed Mar 16 16:00:00 CDT 2022

(You don't need to set TZ if your local time is already CT, of course.)

[1] https://github.com/pflanze/chj-bin/blob/master/dateparse

I always reply with something like "Sure, 4 pm Pacific Time tomorrow works for me!"

Then the ball is in their court to make sure they meant the same thing.

I wish “Prevailing Time” would catch on. Eg PPT

It’s just PT: Pacific Time.

I usually write out Pacific Time out of concern that not everyone would immediately recognize PT as an acronym. Most scheduling systems use the full acronym.

What you're talking about is just "PT", but I usually just write out the word "Pacific".

I think this might be ambiguous, since "Pacific/$city" refers to a part of the world that the west of the US ("PT") is not part of.

I've decided to add "Pacific Time" to my "dateparse"[1] script, though.

    $ TZ=America/Chicago dateparse '6:30 PM Pacific time'
    6:30 PM Pacific time: assuming PDT
    1647480600  Wed Mar 16 20:30:00 CDT 2022

[1] https://github.com/pflanze/chj-bin/blob/master/dateparse

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