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Comment by orenlindsey | Hacker News Reader

A possible solution could be to geolocate the user's IP address (I know, they could use a VPN or something but for 99% of users it would work) or simply ask for location permissions and then have a database of time offsets mapped into geographical space. But you would still have an unwieldy database of polygons that has to be updated every time a country changes their time.

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Falsehood #32: "If you have a UTC timestamp and the GPS coordinates, you can always determine the local time: Palestine and Israel have different time zones. So in the West Bank, the time zone depends on if you're Palestinian or an Israeli settler. If you don't know which person you're computing the time zone for, the local time is ambiguous (via haxney),"

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2234121/can-2-timezone-b... has "There has been recent discussion on the TZ mailing list about the area of China known as Xinjiang, which has a mixed population of Han Chinese and of Uyghurs. It seems that the Han use the standard Chinese time zone (Asia/Beijing), but the Uyghurs often use a local time zone. This is now encapsulated in the Olson database, with the name Asia/Urumqi for the Uyghur time zone."

> 99% of users it would work

When I had T-Mobile Home Internet, my IP address would geolocate me to random parts of the country regularly. It was rare that it landed in my time zone let alone my state. It got really confusing for store websites because they'd try to locate me based on IP and serve me stores in Wisconsin while I live on the east coast.

Yes, I routinely get located in a different province; there are approximately zero consequences to a geolocation provider for getting it wrong. Worst are the sites that I grant my actual location and then use some IP-based fantasy anyway.

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