Hacker News Reader

Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

The user interface can be akward, but you can ask them for the timezone of the event. If it's for a live event in another place, they would ideally put in the local time in the other place and the timezone there.

Or if it's a fixed time, not to be moved by DST changes anywhere, they could specify it in UTC.

It's also a good idea to calculate and save the offset when editing. Then, if the offset changes later, you can notify the user. Hey, this appointment is affected by DST change, when do you want it to be?

View on HN

There should also be a way to say "my current local time, whatever that may be", such as for events reflecting a personal daily routine for exercise, medicines, etc. This should adjust accordingly as the person changes time zone instead of staying at a fixed UTC offset.

that's "floating time" and is definitely a valid option too, although for uses with multiple devices, now they've all got to agree on which timezone the user is currently subject to if you want a consistent experience.

I can’t even get employees at the company where I work to understand and communicate EDT instead of EST. I don’t think calendaring tools are going to have much success asking people what timezone they want.

The stock calendar app on my Android phone (running LineageOS, so not sure how "stock" it really is) has a quite prominent time zone field when setting the time for an event, and I do use it quite a lot.

I've mostly given up being pedantic about the difference between PT, PDT, and PST. Most people mean "PT" when talking about the time that work meetings are scheduled, but they say "PST" basically year-round, despite it being PDT more often than PST.

It's not a pedantic difference; if you calculate the time as PST when it's PDT or vice versa you'll be an hour off. Holding a meeting an hour early or attending it an hour late can have serious consequences.

OP is calling it pedantic because most people mean PT. When someone says 9am they mean 9am regardless of the timezone, they’ll add the timezone if they’re talking with someone from a different timezone but still 99% of the time they mean 9am in their own timezone so if they’re in a region that observes dst even if they said pst they really meant pdt and you’re being pedantic by correcting them.

I agree that it's an important difference, but being insistent about it is excessive because functionally those kind of mistakes just don't happen when scheduling meetings in Outlook, which is the context where it matters.

Most of my work meetings only involve people in the same city, so there's no confusion there, and thus no scheduling problems. And 99% of the rest of my meetings are with people in Europe, and the relative difference between PST and CET is the same as the relative difference between PDT and CEST (though I do have to remind people twice a year that the two time zones change to/from DST a week or two apart).

It is a pedantic difference. While it's technically incorrect to say PST when it's currently PDT, it doesn't inhibit communication. Both parties will understand it to be that "we meeting at 9am, whenever that happens to be for our California staff" as opposed to "we are meeting at 9am PST, even though no one is currently on PST"

Even my colleague in Arizona is able to follow this despite them not joining the daylight savings time.

Technically incorrect but in a way that doesn't inhibit understanding is the definition of pedantic.

Fyi we ran into an actual real life example of this being a real problem since Arizona doesn't do daylight savings time it can cause miscommunication and people can miss meetings if you put the wrong S vs D. It's even worse when you consider some countries switch over at different times from S to D. Edit Sorry I missed the Arizona part of your comment but there are rare occasions where it can mislead people.

Yeah, I do think it's worth getting right. For the most part even those that know better but there is significant meaning there. I suspect it mostly wasn't a problem for our AZ person because the company essentially operated out of Chicago time, so in his case it was the difference between discussed times being 1 or 2 hours off.

I was just being pedantic about it being pedantic .

When someone sets up a meeting with me in a different time zone I'll google "what time is it in [timezone]?" then calculate the difference with my timezone and apply that the day of the meeting.

If they have a DST transition between when you google and the meeting, you'll be off by an hour with that technique.

One way to look at pedantry is that it's when someone emphasizes technical correctness, even when another person's actual intent is understood.

If it's the middle of July, and someone in California sets up a meeting with someone in New York, but tells them "9am PST", it would be understood to actually mean "PT" or "PDT". I suspect only certain kinds of neurodivergent people would show up for the meeting an hour off. And hopefully someone who genuinely thought PST was the intention would ask for clarification. Most people, though, who would bring it up do so just for reasons of pedantry, not because they're actually confused.

Neurodivergent people, or people who aren't in California, which is actually more than 99% of people, and who therefore have to look up the timezone offset somehow.

It's probably true that the <1% of people you hang out with most of the time can correct the error without even thinking about it because they live in California too. But that doesn't make it a pedantic error; it's an error that regularly has serious consequences, precisely because people's actual intent is misunderstood.

This is really the same kind of reasoning as "most people know how tall five feet is" or "most people know that 'wicked' is a compliment" or "most people know that 0.59¢ per minute really means 59¢ per minute". It's obnoxious, back-slapping ethnocentrism masquerading as common sense.

Most people don't know how tall five feet is, because they use the metric system, and they don't even speak English. Most people in California and New York know those things, and they're also likely to know that you don't really mean "PST" if you're talking about a date when California is on daylight time.

But most people don't know those things, and so if what you say is the opposite of what you mean, you can expect them to be confused when they look up the definition. If that's what you're shooting for, then by all means, go right ahead. But if you're trying for clear communication, you might want to get a little bit clearer about the kinds of things "most people" know and the kinds of things most people actually know.

Daylight savings time transitions cause me scheduling grief on a regular basis, not because I'm "neurodivergent" but just because I don't know what dates Belgium or California or Chile does their stupid clock changes, because I don't live there, and they all do them on separate dates.

As mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32860778, timezone confusion led Scott Aaronson to miss an important meeting just today. The problem is real. (But no word on whether the cause was a daylight-time/standard-time mixup.)

It's pedantic in the same sense that specifying 02022 rather than 2022 for the current year is.

In normal everyday usage, most of the time, people will understand by context and convention what is meant by "5:30" even without specifying AM or PM, let alone the timezone or TZDATA version associated. Yes, there are times specificity matters, and thinking about that can be goos, but the social frictions imposed may exceed any other benefits achieved, at least much of the time. At the same time, even where those ambiguities exist it's typically mentally jarring for people to be constantly reminded of this, even where they should be.

Where there's an opportunity for ambiguity, yes, nail down specifically what is meant. I read delecti's comment in that context, and note that they're describing themselves as the pedant. Which I interpret as "a stickler for accuracy and precision".

Yet if we're encouraging people to select a timezone manually (context for this particular thread) it matters, because software is (usually) happy to do exactly what you tell it to do.

Mainly, though, it just annoys me: precision sans accuracy is bloody annoying.

My experience with Google Calendar, iCal and Outlook is that they do default to the meeting creators TimeZone.

Which is often what we want!

So on that regard, I find calendar invites rather than a causal email invite to be essential.

Yes, many tz-related difficulties indeed arise from the future uncertainty and UX complexity to deal with that uncertainty. A conscious decision would be required and can't be easily delegated to someone else.

A lot of this could be solved by inferring the time zone by location of the appointment. If you know the event occurs in a specific place at a specific time, you almost certainly want it to be the standard time zone of that place. If that place uses DST, I couldn’t think of any reason to ignore it and opt for standard time regardless.

Bonus: geopolitics change country lines, and that affects time zones as well. When the time zone at the appointment location changes due to border conflicts, you can get the new time zone without having to change anything.

That works if you know the location of the appointment. But if you're going to a bar to watch a televised game with friends, the location in the appointment is probably the bar, but the timezone is wherever the game is held. If you're going to have a conference call and you have a shared calendar system, great everybody should agree; if all the participants have separate calendar systems, maybe you discuss the time to have the call and each enter it in your local time, which works fine until someone's government adjusts local time on short notice. Having separate appointments sounds fragile, but have you had a good experience with cross domain calendaring? I certainly haven't.

Never mind, if you had a fully booked schedule collaborating across timezones and someone's government adjusts local time, now you've got a mess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com