Hacker News Reader

Comment by arielcostas | Hacker News Reader

> It is the only sensible system in our ecosystem. It certainly beats Outlook which still wrongly insists that my timezone is GMT just because I live in the UK and still confuses everyone (it isn't during the summer; we use BST over the summer, not GMT).

I went to both Outlook and Teams to check and I have the option to select both "(UTC) Universal Coordinated Time" and "(UTC+0) Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London", with the later adapting to changes in the summer; but I do agree it's clunkier than the Olson database, combining multiple regions in a single option while splitting regions with the same timezone rules into different ones.

View on HN

> ...I have the option to select..."(UTC+0) Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London"

This is factually wrong already. In summer, London is not UTC+0. They mean "UTC+0 ignoring DST", but that is not useful. If they're going to be specific by specifying a UTC offset, what's the point if it doesn't include DST? How is that useful as an identifier when it's ambiguous? With their history of getting it wrong, this just introduces doubt about its correctness.

Further, if you ask Outlook to show you two timezones at once and do not override labels, it will label BST "UTC+0" (it isn't; it's UTC+1!) while also calling eg. India "UTC+5:30", implying a time difference of 5.5 hours when it is actually 4.5 hours. This isn't just a case of "ah - they actually mean ..."; it's most definitely wrong!

The problem is that it has a very US-centric view of what DST is. You can mostly ignore it in the US when calculating time zones because the entire country changes DST at the same time. This is not the case internationally.

> In summer, London is not UTC+0. They mean "UTC+0 ignoring DST", but that is not useful

This is how 99% of people interpret it

It's not ambiguous as you imply.

Summer time is not the default time

I don't know enough about the India case to know how/why it's wrong though

Tell that to Ireland where we observe Irish Standard Time during the summer (and GMT during the winter).

Tell what? Nobody cares, because everybody knows what is being said

Your TZ doesn't change between summer and winter. What changes is the shift

I literally didn't see anybody getting confused with this in any country (yes, including Ireland) with summer time.

But some people think they're too smart when they nitpick about minor issues

> Your TZ doesn't change between summer and winter. What changes is the shift

My TZ is GMT in winter and BST in summer. I am not in GMT in summer. GMT continues to exist in summer, doesn't shift but my clock doesn't follow it.

The UTC "shift" changes indeed. When I am DST-shifted, calling me "UTC" is absolutely wrong.

The practical issue is that people still use "UTC" and "GMT" interchangeably, which is roughly correct anyway since they remain the same in practice. But then during summer when someone says GMT I don't know if they actually mean BST (they mean my local time) or UTC (they mean the global point of reference). That ambiguity only arises because Outlook (and you, apparently) conflate GMT and BST. It's far more of a problem for those actually living in a UTC-adjacent time zone (do you?), especially because being only one hour off, usually both options seem equally likely in context.

> This is factually wrong already. In summer, London is not UTC+0.

Yeah, the "regular" time is UTC+0, with it changing in the summer. I'm aware it's a really poor implementation, but it is there as a separate option from "UTC" itself preserving the same offset (0) all year.

> The problem is that it has a very US-centric view of what DST is. You can mostly ignore it in the US when calculating time zones because the entire country changes DST at the same time. This is not the case internationally.

Probably the reason they, for some reason, split the setting for "Amsterdam, Bern, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna" and "Brussels, Copenhaguen, Madrid, Paris" even though they all follow the same timezone and change simultaneously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com