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Comment by masterspy7 | Hacker News Reader

Yea I think this author completely ignores what you can do with technology. First of all, most people, today, will already Google search 'what time is it in Australia?' so there is already a lookup step.

No imagine replacing this step with 'is now a good time to call someone in Australia?' or 'what local times of mine are good to call someone in Australia?'. You can have a tool/app/algo which accounts for the differences in daylight, cultural differences in working hours, holidays etc and just tells you what a good time is.

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Being able to reason about something as fundamental as time without assistive technologies seems pretty important to me.

I fully agree with the point you're making, but to be pedantic, clocks and timezones are themselves assistive technologies. The precursor to them was taking a look at your shadow and making an educated guess.

Can you do that now? I have friends in other countries and I don't know what time zone they're in off the top of my head.

For the most part, yes? Sure, the very first time I talk to someone in a new time zone I have to look it up, but IME with working with globally distributed teams you get used real fast to thinking "China is at -9 (+ 1 day)" or "Amsterdam is at +8".

That doesn't change without timezones, you only have to remember a slightly different fact (at which time does their workday start). No real benefit there to keeping timezones.

The biggest advantage of getting rid of timezones is when an absolute point in time is mentioned, e.g. the start of an event. It's so annoying when the start date for some global event is announced and they only include a local time in some obscure timezone.

If you're going to live-stream an event for the whole planet to see, use UTC. It's especially baffling that organisations such as SpaceX or NASA use local time instead of UTC. You'd think that anyone dealing with things in orbit would use UTC.

Cool. You already have the knowledge you need to figure out what party of the day it is in another timezone. Now when you say let's meet at 10, you don't have to figure out which 10 you are meeting at.

Timezones make reasoning about time harder, not easier

Source: every discussion I've ever had about how to deal with storing dates in databases, date comparisons, etc

I’m fairly sold on abolishing time zones, but arguing that they make a programmer’s job harder is not a compelling argument when we’re a small percentage of the population. Yeah, it’s annoying, but that’s just part of our job. What’s really important is the impact on the general population.

Programmers are not the only people who deal with timezone problems daily, and as the world becomes more connected, more and more people will have to deal with them

If Timezones are difficult for programmers to model into our systems, then they are likely difficult for everyone to model in their brains

Simplifying the model benefits everyone, not just programmers

Does it really simplify the model? It rephrases my google query if I want to call a colleague in the Philippines. That's it. It does not make it better, easier, harder. It rephrases the question, it does not abolish the question.

It replaces two questions

"what time is my colleague available" and "what time is that in my timezone"

With just the first one

UTC is less complicated than time zones.

If time zones where abolished you do t have to worry about what time zone a written time is in (is the 7 eastern or central or GMT or etc) its always 7 UTC.

Then you can take the SAME knowledge that East Coast of the US is 6 hours behind UTC, to figure out that 13:00 is the morning for them.

A tool that knows Uncle Steve is retired and thus likes to sleep until noon? That seems a bit too extreme even for LLMs...

Would calling Steve on the phone be your first move if you knew nothing about his day-to-day life or schedule?

Depends? I have some relatives who are not really into instant messages, and voice calls is really the best way to reach them.

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