Hacker News Reader

Comment by redwall_hp | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com